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Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) – Financial Services Annex

152 points by jamesbritt 12y ago

javert 12y ago
> proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. But... > The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt These multi-nationals are purely a product of regulaiton (in this case, more specifically, regulatory capture). Without regulation, there would be thousands of healthy medium-size banks in the US, as there apparently used to be. Overall, to characterize this as "deregulation" is completely sloppy thinking. We are never going to get a better situation when people think sloppily like this. To do so is, in practice, a moral crime. It supports maintaining the status quo through confusion.
- jamesbritt 12y ago
  Overall, to characterize this as "deregulation" is completely sloppy thinking. We are never going to get a better situation when people think sloppily like this. To do so is, in practice, a moral crime. It supports maintaining the status quo through confusion. Well put. A problem with "deregulation" is that unless all regulations are being removed it's hard to tell what the new state of regulation will be. There are some regulations that offer privileges, then other regulations that constrain those privileges. Removing only the latter and calling it "deregulation" creates the impression that things will be more open or equal while doing the opposite.
  - justsee 12y ago
    > A problem with "deregulation" is that unless all regulations are being removed it's hard to tell what the new state of regulation will be. Yes it appears to be a fatal problem, considering an area with no regulations whatsoever is simply called 'lawless'.
- justsee 12y ago
  > But... International rules that enforce a reduction in national rules (deregulation) which will empower multi-nationals is not the contradiction you appear to think it is. > These multi-nationals are purely a product of regulaiton (in this case, more specifically, regulatory capture). Well they're purely a product of regulation only in the broadest sense: without regulations (rules and laws) you wouldn't have international trade, and so there would be no multi-nationals (or civilized societies). Your more specific case ('regulatory capture') is an example of weakened regulation through infiltration / corruption so your statement appears to read: Multinationals are a purely a product of regulation (more specifically, weakened regulation). > Without regulation, there would be thousands of healthy medium-size banks in the US, as there apparently used to be. What do you mean by 'Without regulation'? If taken literally it would be impossible to define what a 'bank' is, so I assume your definition of 'Without regulation' involves regulations - which makes for a very confusing definition. You imply there is an optimal outcome (thousands of medium-sized banks) being suppressed through regulation. What regulations force all banks to move quickly to a few larger banks? Usually these sorts of market regulations are about stopping that practice: for instance in Australia there is a 'four pillars policy' which stops mergers of the four largest banks. Without this regulation there would be less competition. > Overall, to characterize this as "deregulation" is completely sloppy thinking. We are never going to get a better situation when people think sloppily like this. To do so is, in practice, a moral crime. It supports maintaining the status quo through confusion. Characterising deregulation as deregulation is sloppy thinking? Let's back up: there is an international agreement which aims to enforce further deregulation of nation states... and characterising this as deregulation is sloppy thinking?
  - javert 12y ago
    You are conflating two different and commonly-used meanings of the word "regulation." In (fairly) common parlance, "regulation" means governmental rules that violate individual sovereignty. For examples, laws like Sarbanes-Oxley. These are laws under which the government initiates force against market participants to try to force a desired outcome. Proper laws merely protect individual sovereignty. For example, you can't use force against someone, whether physically or through possessing something that violates a contract with them (which is fraud). Only the government can use force, and only in retaliation to protect sovereignty. The ethical basis for this distinction is that it is in everyone'e self-interest to be protected from the initiaion of force in general, while it is against everyone's self-interest to be vulnerable to the initiaition of force, in general. Thus, regulatory laws are wrong. P.S. If Australia only have four banks, instead of forty or four hundred, it is because of regulation (in my sense of the word).
- Terr_ 12y ago
  > Without regulation, there would be thousands of healthy medium-size banks in the US, as there apparently used to be. Because technological advancements and economic pressures are completely blameless? Make global communications networks disappear, and you'll get millions of small banks, with no changes in regulation at all...
- BrandonMarc 12y ago
  Sloppy thinking ... supporting the status quo through confusion ... yep, sounds like the media doing the job they're told to do.
- mercurial 12y ago
  My understanding that part of what caused the housing bubble crisis in the US was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act by Bill Clinton. Besides, I suppose that governments, if they took their responsibility, could break up large, "too big to fail", banks, in the same way that Bell was. I'm not sure why you think that an industry with so many instances of irresponsibility and dishonesty is fit to essentially govern itself more through deregulation.
  - beedogs 12y ago
    GLB was signed by Clinton, but it was sent to his desk with a veto-proof majority. Destroying the American banking system was a bipartisan effort in stupidity.
    - mercurial 12y ago
      Noted. I'm not interested in casting blame, all the more since as a foreigner, I can't really tell the difference between Republican and Democrat economic policies.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Secret agreements are automatically suspect but this seems like more of the same rather than a change in direction. This is partly a result of the move to multi-lateral trade talks (bad idea but when WTO rounds take a decade it's not unexpected), and partly inertia - there is little common agreement on how to prevent the next crash, so without a better idea we seem to follow the inverse of Einsteins quip - "the definition of insanity is repeating the last mistakes but hoping for a different outcome Minor thought : this leak is still a pretty big deal. But it feels like wikileaks is the wrong place for this - like the main media organisations should have already got their investigatory acts together and made wiki leaks irrelevant. Just wondering ...
- rosser 12y ago
  ...like the main media organisations should have already got their investigatory acts together and made wiki leaks irrelevant. On the whole, the "main media organizations" are an entrenched part of the system they'd need to be reporting on in order to do that job. That's a pretty major "biting the hand that feeds them" sort of impediment.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    There's also not a market for things that are hard to explain like multilateral trade agreements. It's much easier to shout, "It was Bush's fault!" or "But what about Benghazi?"
    - JumpCrisscross 12y ago
      > There's also not a market for things that are hard to explain like multilateral trade agreements. Financial institutions, macro-oriented asset managers and companies with multinational supply chains and long-term assets are each affected by these dynamics. Gaining intelligence on the nature and implications of trade negotiations is huge business. I spent a good amount of time, as a trader, trying to anticipate how sundry domestic political variables constrained international actors, thereby predicting the odds of various trade structures arising from a forum (or of a forum even materialising in the first place).
cb3 12y ago
Who are the people negotiating and agreeing to these 'agreements'(this, ACTA, etc) and what could their justification for keeping them secret possibly be?
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  Elected government officials from democratic countries and non-elected from non-democratic countries together. This is decided by politicians or bureaucrats representing government. I believe advisors from universities, think tanks and businesses are invited to speak. Why they keep it secret, I don't know.
  - gorhill 12y ago
    > Elected government officials from democratic countries Such secrecy is incompatible with democracy, why refer to some of the countries participating in this as "democratic"?
    - leorocky 12y ago
      The term "democracy" is kind of a fuzzy and abused word but if we limit its definition to include only the governments run by civilians voted in by fair enough, regularly occurring elections you could do worse. Democracies can have secrets, and in fact must if they want to achieve their interests. I am not sure why this would surprise anyone.
      - bediger4000 12y ago
        WHy do you say "must have secrets"? What part of "democracy" (or even "representative democracy", a republic perhaps) axiomatically requires secrets of any sort? Trade agreement negotiations almost axiomatically do not require secrets. If they're "negotiations" then everything ends up coming out in the wash, eh?
        tzs 12y ago
        Without secrecy concerning the details during negotiation, it would be very very hard to make trade agreements. Negotiation involves a lot of give and take. If that was all public, then as soon as our negotiators conceded on, say, some term that was going to help our automobile industry in order to gain some term that will help our garment industry, there would be a huge outcry from the automobile industry, and soon the negotiators would come under intense pressure to get that pro-automobile industry term back. Secrecy, at least concerning the details, during negotiation gives the negotiators a better opportunity to work out a deal that best serves the interests of the country as a whole. Note that I'm only talking about secrecy during negotiation. The result of the negotiations should be made public well before Congress votes on it, to give the country time to decide on whether to accept or not.
w_t_payne 12y ago
Apart from the secrecy yadda yadda yadda ... is there anything in the content that might be of concern?
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  Plenty. It's very clearly intended to restrict the exact kinds of regulations that national governments would put into effect to clamp down on too big to fail institutions. The kind that required humungous bailouts and are STILL taking outsized risks because the regulatory framework is still insufficient to prevent them from causing yet more systemic crises.

152 points by jamesbritt 12y ago

> proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. But... > The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt These multi-nationals are purely a product of regulaiton (in this case, more specifically, regulatory capture). Without regulation, there would be thousands of healthy medium-size banks in the US, as there apparently used to be. Overall, to characterize this as "deregulation" is completely sloppy thinking. We are never going to get a better situation when people think sloppily like this. To do so is, in practice, a moral crime. It supports maintaining the status quo through confusion.

jamesbritt 12y ago
Overall, to characterize this as "deregulation" is completely sloppy thinking. We are never going to get a better situation when people think sloppily like this. To do so is, in practice, a moral crime. It supports maintaining the status quo through confusion. Well put. A problem with "deregulation" is that unless all regulations are being removed it's hard to tell what the new state of regulation will be. There are some regulations that offer privileges, then other regulations that constrain those privileges. Removing only the latter and calling it "deregulation" creates the impression that things will be more open or equal while doing the opposite.
- justsee 12y ago
  > A problem with "deregulation" is that unless all regulations are being removed it's hard to tell what the new state of regulation will be. Yes it appears to be a fatal problem, considering an area with no regulations whatsoever is simply called 'lawless'.
justsee 12y ago
> But... International rules that enforce a reduction in national rules (deregulation) which will empower multi-nationals is not the contradiction you appear to think it is. > These multi-nationals are purely a product of regulaiton (in this case, more specifically, regulatory capture). Well they're purely a product of regulation only in the broadest sense: without regulations (rules and laws) you wouldn't have international trade, and so there would be no multi-nationals (or civilized societies). Your more specific case ('regulatory capture') is an example of weakened regulation through infiltration / corruption so your statement appears to read: Multinationals are a purely a product of regulation (more specifically, weakened regulation). > Without regulation, there would be thousands of healthy medium-size banks in the US, as there apparently used to be. What do you mean by 'Without regulation'? If taken literally it would be impossible to define what a 'bank' is, so I assume your definition of 'Without regulation' involves regulations - which makes for a very confusing definition. You imply there is an optimal outcome (thousands of medium-sized banks) being suppressed through regulation. What regulations force all banks to move quickly to a few larger banks? Usually these sorts of market regulations are about stopping that practice: for instance in Australia there is a 'four pillars policy' which stops mergers of the four largest banks. Without this regulation there would be less competition. > Overall, to characterize this as "deregulation" is completely sloppy thinking. We are never going to get a better situation when people think sloppily like this. To do so is, in practice, a moral crime. It supports maintaining the status quo through confusion. Characterising deregulation as deregulation is sloppy thinking? Let's back up: there is an international agreement which aims to enforce further deregulation of nation states... and characterising this as deregulation is sloppy thinking?
- javert 12y ago
  You are conflating two different and commonly-used meanings of the word "regulation." In (fairly) common parlance, "regulation" means governmental rules that violate individual sovereignty. For examples, laws like Sarbanes-Oxley. These are laws under which the government initiates force against market participants to try to force a desired outcome. Proper laws merely protect individual sovereignty. For example, you can't use force against someone, whether physically or through possessing something that violates a contract with them (which is fraud). Only the government can use force, and only in retaliation to protect sovereignty. The ethical basis for this distinction is that it is in everyone'e self-interest to be protected from the initiaion of force in general, while it is against everyone's self-interest to be vulnerable to the initiaition of force, in general. Thus, regulatory laws are wrong. P.S. If Australia only have four banks, instead of forty or four hundred, it is because of regulation (in my sense of the word).
Terr_ 12y ago
> Without regulation, there would be thousands of healthy medium-size banks in the US, as there apparently used to be. Because technological advancements and economic pressures are completely blameless? Make global communications networks disappear, and you'll get millions of small banks, with no changes in regulation at all...
BrandonMarc 12y ago
Sloppy thinking ... supporting the status quo through confusion ... yep, sounds like the media doing the job they're told to do.
mercurial 12y ago
My understanding that part of what caused the housing bubble crisis in the US was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act by Bill Clinton. Besides, I suppose that governments, if they took their responsibility, could break up large, "too big to fail", banks, in the same way that Bell was. I'm not sure why you think that an industry with so many instances of irresponsibility and dishonesty is fit to essentially govern itself more through deregulation.
- beedogs 12y ago
  GLB was signed by Clinton, but it was sent to his desk with a veto-proof majority. Destroying the American banking system was a bipartisan effort in stupidity.
  - mercurial 12y ago
    Noted. I'm not interested in casting blame, all the more since as a foreigner, I can't really tell the difference between Republican and Democrat economic policies.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

Secret agreements are automatically suspect but this seems like more of the same rather than a change in direction. This is partly a result of the move to multi-lateral trade talks (bad idea but when WTO rounds take a decade it's not unexpected), and partly inertia - there is little common agreement on how to prevent the next crash, so without a better idea we seem to follow the inverse of Einsteins quip - "the definition of insanity is repeating the last mistakes but hoping for a different outcome Minor thought : this leak is still a pretty big deal. But it feels like wikileaks is the wrong place for this - like the main media organisations should have already got their investigatory acts together and made wiki leaks irrelevant. Just wondering ...

rosser 12y ago
...like the main media organisations should have already got their investigatory acts together and made wiki leaks irrelevant. On the whole, the "main media organizations" are an entrenched part of the system they'd need to be reporting on in order to do that job. That's a pretty major "biting the hand that feeds them" sort of impediment.
- mathattack 12y ago
  There's also not a market for things that are hard to explain like multilateral trade agreements. It's much easier to shout, "It was Bush's fault!" or "But what about Benghazi?"
  - JumpCrisscross 12y ago
    > There's also not a market for things that are hard to explain like multilateral trade agreements. Financial institutions, macro-oriented asset managers and companies with multinational supply chains and long-term assets are each affected by these dynamics. Gaining intelligence on the nature and implications of trade negotiations is huge business. I spent a good amount of time, as a trader, trying to anticipate how sundry domestic political variables constrained international actors, thereby predicting the odds of various trade structures arising from a forum (or of a forum even materialising in the first place).

cb3 12y ago

Who are the people negotiating and agreeing to these 'agreements'(this, ACTA, etc) and what could their justification for keeping them secret possibly be?

wodenokoto 12y ago
Elected government officials from democratic countries and non-elected from non-democratic countries together. This is decided by politicians or bureaucrats representing government. I believe advisors from universities, think tanks and businesses are invited to speak. Why they keep it secret, I don't know.
- gorhill 12y ago
  > Elected government officials from democratic countries Such secrecy is incompatible with democracy, why refer to some of the countries participating in this as "democratic"?
  - leorocky 12y ago
    The term "democracy" is kind of a fuzzy and abused word but if we limit its definition to include only the governments run by civilians voted in by fair enough, regularly occurring elections you could do worse. Democracies can have secrets, and in fact must if they want to achieve their interests. I am not sure why this would surprise anyone.
    - bediger4000 12y ago
      WHy do you say "must have secrets"? What part of "democracy" (or even "representative democracy", a republic perhaps) axiomatically requires secrets of any sort? Trade agreement negotiations almost axiomatically do not require secrets. If they're "negotiations" then everything ends up coming out in the wash, eh?
      - tzs 12y ago
        Without secrecy concerning the details during negotiation, it would be very very hard to make trade agreements. Negotiation involves a lot of give and take. If that was all public, then as soon as our negotiators conceded on, say, some term that was going to help our automobile industry in order to gain some term that will help our garment industry, there would be a huge outcry from the automobile industry, and soon the negotiators would come under intense pressure to get that pro-automobile industry term back. Secrecy, at least concerning the details, during negotiation gives the negotiators a better opportunity to work out a deal that best serves the interests of the country as a whole. Note that I'm only talking about secrecy during negotiation. The result of the negotiations should be made public well before Congress votes on it, to give the country time to decide on whether to accept or not.

w_t_payne 12y ago

Apart from the secrecy yadda yadda yadda ... is there anything in the content that might be of concern?

crdoconnor 12y ago
Plenty. It's very clearly intended to restrict the exact kinds of regulations that national governments would put into effect to clamp down on too big to fail institutions. The kind that required humungous bailouts and are STILL taking outsized risks because the regulatory framework is still insufficient to prevent them from causing yet more systemic crises.