Economic View – Leveling the Playing Field, in Soccer and Finance – NYTimes.com

Refereeing a soccer game is not much different than regulating the financial industry.  There are a lot of parallels in how you would want to set up both systems to be fair and efficient.

The first is that the regulator — in this case, the referee — is fallible. So the rules should make the regulator’s job as easy as possible.Second, regulators can’t detect every irregularity, so the emphasis has to be on getting the big stuff right. Finally, we want performance, not regulators, to determine the outcome. The best regulators are those we don’t notice.

Level Playing Fields, in Soccer and Finance