This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 21st, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Treasury Department's recent report on financial regulation details how many entities are subject to the regulations of four or even five federal agencies.

Cato's stay of Brook Knight details the nightmare this poses for institutions just looking to

engage in cost-effective compliance. Well Treasury recently released this

report that it has said is one of a series of four that it's going to put out looking

at the US financial system.

This report focuses on the banking system and credit unions and it says a few things that we knew but that are kind of nice to see in

print and nice to see the federal government recognizing. So for example we've always known that the financial sector is heavily regulated and that unlike, you know, our system has more overlapping regulators than most other financial systems in the world.

So there's a really nice chart in this new report that came out that shows all of the different

regulators in the financial sector and shows sort of the web of lines of

oversight between these regulators and financial entities.

And from this chart we can see that an entity can be subject to up to five or six federal

regulators. And I'm not talking about regulations, I'm talking about regulators. And each of these regulators

issues its own regulations. And these regulations sometimes

conflict. They can sometimes be difficult for an entity to understand how it can can comply with all of the different regulations at the same time.

And one of the things the report is looking for is a way to simplify this process.

So what does that mean for relatively large firms and relatively small firms that would like

to engage in some practice but might have difficulty complying with four or five regulators with

conflicting regulations.

I mean what that means right now is that products don't come to market because people are having too much trouble complying with all of these regulations and all of these different regulators.

In terms of what this report is likely to mean for those businesses going forward, it's kind of a mixed bag.

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