Hernando de Soto has made a career out researching the unclear legal systems that stifle growth in developing countries.
He claims that the ongoing financial crisis has occurred for much the same reason: we’ve allowed people with in interest in muddying the waters to make our financial facts murkier:
During the second half of the 19th century … creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible—so that all players in the world's widening markets could, in the words of France's free-banking champion Charles Coquelin, "pick up the thousands of filaments that businesses are creating between themselves."
The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account … Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts."
Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded.
It’s an interesting thesis, but I’m not sure how to measure it or test it. But, de Soto is no crank, so it is worth adding to your mental toolkit.
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