**OT**
Seems to me you need to get your terms straight. In an unregulated market, as I've most often seen it defined, public companies are not required to disclose the kind of information they disclose in the US. Such a market is "free", but it isn't necessarily healthy, as Asia and Russia recently discovered.
In a planned economy, there essentially is no market as we understand it at all. The government declares who gets investment and who doesn't.
The US market actually lies somewhere in between. It's free, in the sense that capital can go pretty much anywhere it wants, but highly regulated, in that financial transparency, environmental regulations, antitrust law, etc. attempt to protect the public interest from individuals. Tax incentives encourage investment in public goods.
It seems to me that the Asian, and now Russian, markets got in trouble partly because they allowed free transfer of capital without putting in place the disclosure requirements that protect investors in the US. Can you imagine *any* US company accumulating a 300% debt-to-equity ratio?
Katherine |
