Imagine an Anaconda that's swallowed some enormous deer that it now needs to digest. It goes off into the weeds and lies low for a while.
Over the last two years Congress has done more in the way of economic regulation than it had in decades. In many cases, we have no idea how these new laws will work in practice. We know there will be unintended consequences, we just don't know what they'll be.
This is the case for Congress to step back and do very little in the way of new economic regulation while the government and the economy digests the changes of the last 2 years. Repeal stuff that we know or learn doesn't work, when politically possible, but certainly the new House GOP majority needs to keep saying no to new regulations of business.
Dave Hoffman makes this point quite well at Conglomerate. Money quote:
I'd advise permitting the status quo to ferment for a little while, and see what bubbles up. We just had a “do something” congress”. I am myself still trying to figure out what the 111th Congress did to innovation and entrepreneurship. Will health care portability enable more small business risk-taking, or will regulatory costs bury main street? Does Dodd-Frank’s anti-systemic risk and derivative trading apparatus meaningfully increase liquidity and/or transparency, or does it simply drive bad actors into tighter tangles & more shadowy corners. It seems obviously true to me – as my former colleague Jonathan Lipson observes here - that very little of Dodd-Frank was empirically tested before its adoption. Similarly, although health care economics & behavior is a deep and richly mined field, HCR itself is already creating unanticipated effects as the market & consumers react to the unfolding of the State’s new & multi-tentacled regulatory arms. I believe, moreover, that early reactions to previous reform efforts (like SOX) appeared to be wildly overstated on both sides of the academic aisle. It strikes me what business really need over the next two years is certainty. This (nothing more but nothing less) are the rules of the game you will play under. Good or bad, we're sticking with it for a while to see what happens. Take regulatory change off of the table: grapple with your own competitive demons.
