Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm always fascinated when lawyers say they don't want to actually disclose things they happen to know about. It might be legal, client privileges being the mask, but that's a debate for another day.
I'm interested, Mr. Cockfield, about this sense of harmonizing regulations with the U.S., if you will, to make it easier...as you talked about that one example. And I give credit to the government side, who trumpeted that our regulations in the banking sector saved us from what happened in the U.S. It seems to me, if we want to harmonize with the United States, from that perspective, maybe they should have gone the other way and harmonized with us.
Here's my point. We were selling—not us, personally, and not you either, Mr. Cockfield, but folks were selling a pig in a poke for the last three years. Whether they call it derivatives or asset-backed paper, you name it, it would be fascinating to know how much of that money actually found its way to offshore banks. I would suggest a fair amount.
If we lose the oversight ability, in the sense that we give it up to someone else whose history, quite frankly, albeit short.... I wasn't around in the thirties, so I'm not really sure what happened then—I can read about it--but I lived through the last 10 years and saw the devastation, not just to the U.S. market, U.S. consumers, and U.S. workers, but right across the world. We got off a little bit lighter than some other places. The one thing I see, not as an expert—I'm not an accountant, nor am I a tax lawyer—that was absolutely true about all those jurisdictions, including the U.K., and I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, was that they went to deregulated or self-regulated markets where they said, “Trust us.”
My old granny used to say, if you've got 5¢—or in her case five pence—and you don't know the guy who's asking for the five pence, do you trust him or do you keep your own five pence in your pocket? So if we look at recent history, where folks who self-regulated almost wrecked the financial world—almost, they came within a hair's breadth—why should we trust them?