The bravest of them all
One of the more memorable speakers at this year’s ASIC Summer School, a conference which was generously opened to the media for the first time this year, came from the US, where they seem to put a lot more effort into their rhetorical skills.
Ethiopus Tafara, director, office of international affairs, US Securities Exchange Commission, opened a discussion over “effective and efficient regulation of cross-border capital markets transactions – US mutual recognition” by comparing the challenges faced by markets regulators in a globalised world to John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
It was a long shot, but essentially the allegory was: lawmaker comes to the Wild West to bring the rule of law, but ends up having to use the rule of the gun to remove the chief obstacle to that – in the form of a gunslinger terrorist played by Lee Marvin – or so it seemed. In fact, a man who lived by the gun did the actual killing – John Wayne. So despite it being contrary to principle, sometimes we must rely on those more able than ourselves to get a better outcome, in other words in a globalised world we must sometimes pass responsibility to corporate cops in other jurisdictions. Respect.
As another illustration, he noted that sometimes people can think in quite different ways about how to treat the same thing. “In France, cheese needs to be alive. In Americacheese is dead. In America, the important thing is that cheese is safe (and needs to be pasteurised and kept refrigerated at all times). In France the important thing is that cheese is alive, and you are safe if it is alive.” Anyway, something like that.
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Quote of the month
“We worry for a living, and these are difficult times.”
– Dr John Laker, chairman of APRA at Senates Estimates hearings