The failure to regulate Wall Street, and to enforce existing regulations, led directly to the Great Recession and the loss of 8 million jobs (most of them in the small business sector, as Demos point out).
In addition, leaders of funds in Russia, the Middle East, China and other parts of Asia say that the West's demand for regulations is hypocritical in light of the failure to regulate European and American banks and hedge funds.
So in the most important regulatory failure before us - the failure to regulate financial services properly - the problem wasn't that the regulation was too light, it was that it was all wrong.
The failure to regulate it means that it is unavoidable.
A factor is the failure to regulate commercial breeders (so-called puppy mills) and their retailers.
Failure to regulate the banks was responsible for the biggest crash in half a century and failure to regulate the drug and device industries is causing unfathomable damage to our health at great cost.
The moral of this story is that failure to regulate effectively isn't just bad for consumers, it's bad for business.
"There should be a Labour mea culpa about the failure to regulate, and having too much faith in the financial sector.
Osborne and Cameron rightly damn New Labour's failure to regulate the City – as well as the "bad luck" of the eurozone crisis for knocking them off course.
That misses a critical point: much of this crisis can be traced to lenders' failure to vet borrowers and the government's failure to regulate the industry.
The surge in popularity of sugary breakfast drinks and biscuits is further evidence of the government's failure to regulate food companies adequately, Jenner believes.
