My mom likes to talk about how Canada weathered the 2008 "Credit Crunch" a lot better they were a lot more strict about "gambling". I point out there so many regulations, subsidies, distortions et cetera the Canadian government simply doesn't have compared to the United States. But I think a more convincing way of conveying would be a side by side textual comparison of the two.
So here's how the comparison went.
Most other comparisons involve pages and line counts, however this can easily be manipulated with formatting. For example, indentations, font size, paragraphs and the like. Therefore I did a straightforward character count with the following exclusions:
-All whitespace except for the spaces between words (you know the space created with the spacebar)
-Table of contents, preambles, and any additional headers
As the first bullet is concerned this can be calculated by doing taking the raw character count and subtracting the number of lines and minus any trailing/leading blank lines. Of course this doesn't account for indentation characters. However, I C-c/C-v'd the relevant contents into LibreOffice Writer and its word count tool didn't count the indentation characters.
The laws that were compared:
For the American side there's Title XII of the United States Code, aptly named Banks and Banking (current as of 2012) Link (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2012-title12/html/USCODE-2012-title12.htm)
For the Canadian side there's the Bank Act, while passed in 1871 is nonetheless still relevant as it is updated every 5 (used to be 10) years (current as of 2014)Link (http://www.laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/B-1.01/page-1.html#h-1)
One problem this could pose is that on both sides, other regulations involving or affecting banks in general could be scattered elsewhere throughout their respective entire collection of statutes. On the other hand, I should expect that these sections in general should contain the bulk of the laws involving banks in terms of characters. Additionally I'm only going to use the English version, as Canadians publish the same laws in English and French and can assume the legislators acted in good faith to make sure that the meaning of the two are consistent. Furthermore both sides have executive departments created by these laws, which publish additional regulations primarily for the purpose of enforcing these laws (or at least that's what they're SUPPOSED to do and nothing else) these are not included.
Finally as this is the English language anyone one character can be represented as a Byte
With all of this in mind here are my results:
American banking law takes up 10.82 Megabytes
Canadian banking law takes up 1.4 Megabytes
What could this mean? American banking law is FAR MORE COMPLEX or COMPLICATED than its Canadian counterpart. Now of course this should include Dodd-Frank, and I wanted to make this comparison as brief as possible. But the point I wanted to make is that any country, especially ours, can have a stable and reliable banking system without so many statutes.
If there something else I should factor in as part of this calculation, please discuss.
A useful thing to keep in mind is the "repeal" of Glass-Stegal was prompted by the existing US banks to prevent Walmart from entering the retail banking business. In Canada, we have grocery stores that do retail banking under their own brand name.
We also never had the retail/investment banking division. The bank I use, for instance, has a full range of investment products and services available in branch and online. We even have bank selling general insurance products now.
Quote from: evensgrey on August 26, 2014, 08:48:29 AM
A useful thing to keep in mind is the "repeal" of Glass-Stegal was prompted by the existing US banks to prevent Walmart from entering the retail banking business. In Canada, we have grocery stores that do retail banking under their own brand name.
We also never had the retail/investment banking division. The bank I use, for instance, has a full range of investment products and services available in branch and online. We even have bank selling general insurance products now.
sounds convenient really--I can imagine they're much cheaper as a result. or is it otherwise?
Quote from: Ibrahim90 on August 26, 2014, 07:38:06 PM
sounds convenient really--I can imagine they're much cheaper as a result. or is it otherwise?
The insurance claims to be cheaper (for better drivers, it's car insurance), but they claim they can do that because they gather a whole lot of data on your driving habits thanks to an in-car monitoring system that gathers gobs of data on where, when, and how you drive, giving them a much better picture of your risk.