The good news is that in October 2012, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed changes to the CARD Act to rectify this unintended consequence of the law.

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What I also said at the time was we are then going to make sure, number one, that we pay down whatever additional deficit had been added as a consequence of the Recovery Act and other steps that we had to take last year.

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Not everyone is slacking: America reacted to its own corporate-governance scandals by implementing tighter regulation, in the form of the Sarbanes-Oxley act and, perhaps as a consequence, has seen a slowdown in foreign listings on the New York Stock Exchange.

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An unintended consequence of the Netflix challenge though is more knowledge on how we think and act together, as well as more recommendation engines.

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