Okay, that's a bit overblown, but in the event anyone (other than me) is interested in this stuff:

I was talking to a friend from the UK the other day, a reasonably liberal post-doc at university of pennsylvania, and he said the general consensus is that the US is a little too bullyish when it comes to applying its laws everywhere in the world.  It's not that they're not good laws, and it's not that it's bad to put crooks in jail, but come on, there *are* other governments out there with just as much right to govern.

Right now, the IRS and UBS are fighting over the names of alleged U.S. tax evaders.  UBS doesn't want to cough up the names because (they say) doing so would violate swiss privacy laws.  Violating those laws, as I understand it, comes with swiss criminal penalties.  The DoJ says, in response: screw you and your dumb secrecy laws; our tax evasion laws are more important.  So UBS has got to decide: break the US laws, and risk losing US business (poor dears, I know) or violating swiss laws and losing european business.  I'm not trying to paint too sympathetic a picture here; it's just an example that's in the news. 

It's positions like these that make people not want to talk to us when it comes to, oh, I dunno, climate change treaties.

I'm not saying our tax laws are less important than Switzerland's secrecy laws--although honestly, when you boil it down, it all comes down to which country's treasury needs/deservers more money -- but we should come to the table appearing a little less opinionated. We might be mistaken for les francais otherwise.

By the by, this post shouldn't be confused with the kinds of arguments used to support a downward convergence in regulation of the banking industry.  Just because having a global regulator might ease some of the pains that comes with conflicting jurisdictions doesn't mean we should have NO regulator. 

Or so says an SEC staffer, Hugh C. Beck (there is, of course, no such thing as inter-agency rivalry....):

"the Fed's culture is, of necessity, antithetical to deflating asset bubbles. To set monetary policy, the Fed continuously collects production and price data to which it applies what it considers the best of macroeconomic theory. The Fed accepts this theory as true because the information it collects is constantly changing; if applicable theory was also in constant flux the Fed's interest rate policy making would be paralyzed. As a result, the Fed's culture values the steady application of conventional thinking.

Bubble-detection has not thrived in this culture. At the end of 2004, the New York Fed conducted a study to answer the question, "Are Home Prices the Next 'Bubble'?" Applying conventional economic theory to publicly available data, the study concluded there was no bubble in home prices.

The culture of the regulator assigned to spot asset bubbles must have a decidedly outside-the-box flavor. Indeed, in culture, the regulator should seek to be the anti-Fed. In markets periodically subject to herd behavior, the regulator must be adept at developing contrarian views that are likely to be supported by non-public data. Once such data is obtained, publication of the regulator's views of the respective asset class will, at a minimum, divide the herd."

I know all this inspires such confidence in our National Economists.  Especially after those earning, oh, Nobel awards complain about their lack of understanding of the fundamentals of macroeconomics.

It's time we all educate ourselves, and remember that whenever someone says something's too hard to understand, they usually have an interest in you not understanding it.