Referees can't catch everything but they can watch every play, and make a decision about every major event and many minor ones during the course of the game.
You can't do that with a market, and even if you could it would be a bad idea.
But that's probably a weakness of the analogy rather than a weakness of the argument you want to make using the analogy.
And I think I'll use the analogy myself in a different way. Referees don't call the plays. They are given certain limited ground rules, and within the boundaries of those rules anything goes. They don't try to protect a team or the game from bad play calling, or most other decisions a team or individual involved in the game might make. You make an imperfect and/or biased evaluation of a draft pick, a player on your roster, a coach, or a play, and your team suffers, but referees won't overrule your decision or ban it.
During this mess we had Moodys, S&P and Fitch to act as OBJECTIVE and INDEPENDENT arbiters to PROTECT the World from biased and imperfect evaluations of debt instruments.
They DIDN'T do that. They took the money and CHEATED.
Well they may have cheated. At least they failed. They didn't really function as referees, but as analysts. They didn't say "penalty, illegal investment..." and then punish the people making the investments, they gave a rating supposedly based on the risk of an investment. But analyst, referee or whatever you want to call them, they did a bad job.
We will never have a perfect job from anyone in their position, and realistically we won't even consistently have the best possible job, but do you think there is a way that we can consistently and durably get much better results? |
