Reagan-appointed judge: Deregulation advocates made a fundamental mistake

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Richard Posner, a well-respected federal judge, said Thursday on Current TV that he no longer believed the financial industry should not be regulated.

“I was an advocate of the deregulation movement and I made — along with other, a lot of smarter people — made a fundamental mistake, which is that deregulation works fine in industries which do not pervade the economy in their consequences,” he said. “The financial industry undergirds the entire economy and if it is made riskier by deregulation and collapses and widespread bankrupties the entire economy freezes because it runs on credit.”

Posner, who was appointed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Ronald Reagan, is associated with the conservative Chicago School of economics.

In light of the 2008 financial crisis, however, Posner doesn’t think every industry should be deregulated. He said it was wrong to assume that government intervention always failed and that the free market always corrected itself.

Posner has recently acknowledged being an outlier in the Republican Party. In July, he told NPR that he has “become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.”

Watch video, courtesy of Current TV, below: