Indeed:

"For decades, the U.S. government deregulated banks with near abandon in belief that capitalism does best with no regulation of human greed to strangle its aggressive expansion. Alan Greenspan and many others preached that capitalism is self regulating. In fact, the government and capitalist proponents were right in stating that capitalism is inherently self-correcting. What they didn’t say was that it only corrects after the problem occurs. That’s the difference between correction and regulation. Regulation is created to avoid the problem in the first place. (Granted, it can go too far and stifle capitalism.) Had bankers been watched more closely so that the free-wheeling loans of the 90′s and the first decade of 2000 had not been allowed, we would not be in this mess. (But then the 90′s and the first decade of 2000 would not have been as wildly profitable either.)

"Capitalism corrects with a heavy hand. If greed spreads broadly enough due to no regulation, capitalism corrects via total economic collapse. (Here we are!) In short, we have regulation to avert the greed before it occurs so as to avoid the painful correction that must, otherwise, happen after. We put a governor on the economic engine in order to prevent it from blowing itself up or to keep people from running the engine too fast and too hot.

"The problem with the so-called “economic recovery” has been that the governments of this world all rushed in to avoid the correction. The profligacy of bankers was fostered by deregulation. When the capitalist systems finally did kick in to correct the bad judgements of those bankers, the major capitalists, more than anyone, were ready to abandon their principles in order to avoid their punishment!

"Many Republicans, it turns out, want the benefits of unbridled capitalism without its painful corrections. (I single out Republicans in this instance, even though I am an equal-opportunity critic, only because they have been the loudest advocates of deregulation; but Democrats also participated in deregulation.) Republicans who loudly preached deregulation now fight the natural capitalist correction by doing all they can to socialize the cost of failure; i.e., to spread the cost across all of society!"

( http://thegreatrecession.info/blog/2011/10/saving-capitalists-from-capitalism-sustainable-economics/ )

--Knave Dave