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Change Your Life! |
Don't strangle markets with regulation, NYSE chief says |
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News |
April 12, 2000
SINGAPORE, APR 11 (AP) - Financial market regulations should focus on disclosure rather than trying to control market levels, New York Stock Exchange chief Richard Grasso said Tuesday.
Market regulators must make certain that "regulation is never confused with strangulation," Grasso said at a law conference in Singapore.
Grasso, the exchange's chairman and chief executive officer, was delivering a speech on global financial market trends.
"You have got to allow free markets to work. No attempt to in any way graduate either the decline or the rise of the markets can work for any period of time," Grasso said, responding to audience questions after his speech.
The economic crisis that rocked Singapore and most other East Asian countries in 1997 and 1998 was widely blamed in part on massive movements of capital among world financial markets.
The crisis prompted some in the Asian region to call for market curbs to protect small or vulnerable economies in an increasingly globalized world.
But Grasso said markets must be left to determine their own levels.
"The free market is the best arbiter of what a security is worth," he said. "I'm certainly a staunch opponent of anyone trying to set arbitrary standards to manage the market either up or down."
But while regulators should not try to control market levels, they should insist on fairness and disclosure from market players, he said.
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