The Great Debate

Lowering risks from large, complex financial institutions

– Robert R. Bench, a former deputy Comptroller of the Currency, is a senior fellow at the Boston University School of Law Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law. The views expressed are his own. –

Financial institutions inherently are fragile.

As intermediaries, they are exposed to both exogenous and endogenous threats. The 2007-2008 financial crisis was caused by endogenous forces.  Simply, financial institutions were poorly governed, taking-on extreme liabilities and gambling them into high risk activities.  The meltdown of the financial system fed contractionary forces into the real economy, causing our “great recession,” creating negative exogenous loops back into financial institutions.

The roots of the financial crisis were poor underwriting of credit.  However, the crisis happened because that credit risk was amplified through abusive underwriting, distributing, and trading of debt-backed financial instruments.  The abuse was driven by “heads I win, tails you lose” compensation schemes.  Wall Street won, Main Street lost.

Reform of the financial system requires restoring the social utility of deposit-taking institutions while eliminating the casinos within them.  The Volcker-Obama proposals move in that direction, by limiting the degree of gambling at deposit-taking companies.  In essence, Volcker-Obama addresses the very basic question: What do we want the financial institutions to do for society?  We do not want them focused on fast profits through proprietary trading.  We do want them focused on how to finance the needs of households, commerce, and governments.

We need to separate the “financial markets industry” from the “financial services industry.”  The former complicates and confuses the latter when both are located in one financial services company.  Market trading makes for an active balance sheet and exponentially increases counterparty interconnectedness.  Unless walled-off or spun-off, regulating and supervising financial holding companies is difficult.  The financial services industry culturally  is a public utility, essential to our modern way of life, which is why we rescue it when trouble appears.  Unless we separate proprietary trading from the public utility, the high-roller financiers continue to free-ride the taxpayer.

But, even if we lower social risk by separating proprietary trading from deposit banking, we will still have very large financial institutions within and outside the deposit-taking sector.  We need large institutions because U.S. economic needs are large.  We need size so we are competitive globally. The taxpayer still will be on the hook for any systemic trouble — unless we develop a scheme to protect the taxpayer.

Fortress balance sheets at financial institutions

– Robert Bench, a former Deputy Comptroller of the Currency in the Reagan administration, is a senior fellow at the Boston University School of Law Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law. The views expressed are his own. –

Financial Institutions inherently are fragile, simply because they are intermediaries exposed to both exogenous and endogenous forces.

Externally, they are vulnerable to wars, weather, or worn-out economic conditions. Internally, they always are susceptible to excessive risk takings as well as inadequate controls over operations.

Therefore, financial institutions historically have projected strength two ways. First and most obvious have been their buildings, designed of granite, with strong doors and deep vaults, to show the institution was a “fortress” against troubled times. Less obvious, but more importantly, they maintained “fortress balance sheets” comprised of high levels of capital, high levels of liquidity, and massive “hidden” and “inner” reserves.

Accounting, tax, and regulatory policies accommodated salting away profits in good times, so they would be available to draw down during bad times, which were sure to occur. The policy bias in both the private and public sectors was to preserve stability within the “public utility” that is the financial system.

But the recent history of financial policy has been to abandon these historical building blocks in the financial fort. Tax policies no longer accommodate the build-up of loan loss reserves. The Securities and Exchange Commission set policy when they complained to a major institution that it had tucked away too much money in reserves. The SEC also permitted investment banks to operate with 50 percent less capital while the banking regulators allowed the banks themselves to decide how much capital and reserves they needed.

The mantra of “maximizing shareholder value” led to religious attempts to precisely measure risks and profits without any recognition of the history as to how financial institutions are absolutely unlike commercial firms.

from James Pethokoukis:

The myth of Lehman, part two

James Pethokoukis

Sep 15, 2009 06:07 EDT

John Taylor has maintained that it was the government's reaction to Lehman that freaked out financial markets. Now Luigi Zingales and John Cochrane make a similar pitch in the WSJ:

On Sept. 22, bank credit-default swap (CDS) spreads were at the same level as on Sept. 12. (CDS spreads are the cost of buying insurance against default.) On Sept. 19, the S&P 500 closed above its Sept. 12 level. The Libor-OIS spread—which captures the perceived riskiness of short-term interbank lending—rose only 18 points the day of Lehman's collapse, while it shot up more than 60 points from Sept. 23 to Sept. 25, after the TARP testimony. (Libor—the London Interbank Offer Rate—is the rate at which banks can borrow unsecured for three months.)

Why? In effect, these speeches amounted to "The financial system is about to collapse. We can't tell you why. We need $700 billion. We can't tell you what we're going to do with it." That's a pretty good way to start a financial crisis.