Euro busybodies see credit crunch opportunity
Today’s MEP vote to regulate the markets shows how Brussels will shamelessly hijack any event
The market turmoil is, for Euro-federalists, a providential accident. The EU has reacted to last week's evenements with - you guessed it - proposals for more regulation. Control those hedge funds! Limit those bonuses! No more casino capitalism! MEPs this morning voted by 562-86 votes to regulate "all relevant financial market participants, including hedge funds and private equity".
The commissioner in charge, Ireland's Charlie McCreevy, is the closest thing to a free marketeer in the EU. He sees no need for new laws. But he is in the minority and my guess is that the interventionist MEPs will get their way. In the current climate, it is a brave politician who will risk being painted as the speculators' friend. After all, you don't have to be on the left to be nauseated by the sight of financiers paying themselves colossal
bonuses even as their banks collapse.
I'm reminded of the atmosphere that prevailed in Brussels after 9/11. The integrationists presented a series of proposals to harmonise justice and home affairs that had been kicking around for years. Until then, they had never had a majority. But the moment their proposals were repackaged as 'anti-terror measures', no one wanted to be seen opposing them.
As Graham Watson, a British Lib Dem put it then: "Osama bin Laden has done more for the cause of European integration than anyone since Jacques Delors". Stand by now for waves of financial regulation - of precisely the kind that the City of London has been resisting since the 1990s - in the name of 'ensuring market stability'.
Yet this crisis was caused by state intervention: governments defied the market in order to keep interest rates too low for too long. As recently as this year, the US Congress was telling Fannie and Freddie to take on more liabilities. Too much government was the problem; it won't be the solution. 
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