(James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

A proposal to give banks, hedge funds and private equity firms “affordable” credit default swap-based insurance against market panics will be very effective: it will effectively encourage even more risk taking and turn the next crisis into one about government credit.

Global central bankers assembled at the Jackson Hole conference last week heard the proposal, by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Ricardo Caballero and Pablo Kurlat. Their idea is that most of the damage in panics is due to a combination of investors overestimating the damage during a market seizure and policy-makers being too slow to pull the trigger on bailouts.

The solution, therefore, is to send the banks into the next panic ready armed with a Fed-backed get out of jail free card which the authorities can activate at a moment’s notice.

This is akin to looking at a bunch of toddlers riding motorcycles and deciding that what will really improve the situation is putting them all in crash helmets.

The proposal emphasizes “Knightian uncertainty,” which it says impairs markets during panics, as investors price in the worst about those risks which they cannot measure.  Remove this uncertainty, and hey Presto, you’ve cheapened the cost of the whole bubble business.

“The main antidote to fear is prime, government-backed insurance against what investors fear,” according to Caballero and Kurlat.

“The silver lining of this diagnosis is that providing such insurance is inexpensive for the government, as once the panic subsides the real losses are much smaller than those initially feared by investors.”

There are a few assumptions there, so let’s take them one by one.

First, we don’t know that markets were wrong to assume last year that bank losses would be catastrophic. Banks are performing better, but only within a context of having either an explicit or implicit government guarantee. We do not know how well their underlying assets will ultimately perform, or even if the assumptions made in the stress test will prove true. We only know that in making those assumptions and standing behind them, the government has removed risk for private investors.

Second, we do not know that the level of these losses will be affordable for governments to bear. Look at Iceland for a prime example of what can happen. The U.S. has taken on very real and very scary public liabilities in order to end the crisis. There is no guarantee that these are affordable or that U.S. creditors will keep faith.

THE FUTURE IS MORAL HAZARD

Caballero and Kurlat also say that the cause of panics is fundamentally unknowable, a surprise. While its hard to say now where the next one will come from, there are plenty of people out there who were patiently explaining where this one was going to be centered: real estate. People who ignored this advice did so for many reasons, but one thing in common many shared was that they were getting rich out of the bubble or hoped to.

This brings us to the main reason not to create these crisis swaps; they will only encourage people to take on more risk. If we effectively assume that all panics are essentially false alarms we will encourage an unwarranted confidence in risk managers and investors. Add in prospect of profits and bonuses and you have a prescription for ever expanding leverage, bubbles and crises.

The authors say that policy makers react too slowly, and compare their plan to placing defibrillators in public places to save the lives of heart attack victims. But unlike human beings, all of whom we want to save, sometimes its better if banks are allowed to die, much less hedge funds. Shareholders and bondholders, unlike life, are not sacred.

The proposal also argues that leverage in the system was not excessive, at least when compared to the last recession in 2001. But of course by 2001 the amount of leverage had already began to expand, helped along the way by deregulation. Try running the numbers compared to 1985 or 1965 and you will reach a different conclusion.

None of this is to say that financial innovation is a bad thing, or that leverage is to be altogether eliminated. But there is in markets a growing hope that we are all awakening from a bad dream. That’s a delusion.

Financial panics are not nightmares to be ignored, but like chest pains, warnings to be heeded.

“In the end, the conventional common sense response to financial crisis - better regulation, rein in leverage, increase transparency, etc., is not such a bad one,” Harvard economist Ken Rogoff wrote in response to the proposal.

I couldn’t agree more. Let’s get the kiddies off the bikes, and the sooner the better.

( At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.)

– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

A look at credit insurance prices for U.S. banks shows that market thinks the government’s mouth is writing checks its body can’t or won’t cash.

Despite a blistering rally in bank shares and Herculean efforts by the U.S. to build confidence in its financial sector, the price of insuring some leading banks’ debt against default has increased markedly in recent weeks.

That tells us that bond investors have serious doubts about the popular perception that the United States won’t allow systemically important institutions to fail, or in saving them in some form won’t make bond holders take substantial losses.

Since the KBW index of bank shares began a 65 percent rally on March 6 the cost of insuring Citigroup for five years via a credit default swap has risen to an annual payment of 627 basis points from 470, meaning it costs 6.27 cents to insure every dollar. Wells Fargo 5-year CDS stand at 292.5 basis points, as against 240 on March 3 and 120 at the end of December, while Bank of America’s ended last week at 355, exactly where it was on March 6 but 50 above its March 3 level.

The people buying this insurance fear if a big bank fails over the coming five years, or needs further buttressing with public money, the bill will be too large for the U.S. to bear, either politically or otherwise. That implies that there could be burden sharing by creditors, either through some sort of divvying up of the remaining assets or through forced or government orchestrated conversions of debt into equity.

OPTIONS

The options for the U.S. aren’t particularly attractive. As pointed out by Tyler Cowen in the New York Times here for the U.S. to simply fess up and say it stands behind all bank debt is to take on a gargantuan liability and to effectively neuter bond holders as a force for market and company discipline.

If the U.S. were to allow someone big to go down and make bond holders suffer too, there is a legitimate fear that creditors to the banking system would stage a disorderly wildcat strike which could bring down many healthy institutions.

It is very similar to the situation last year when the U.S. took Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into government conservatorship and did everything short of explicitly guaranteeing the two mortgage lenders’ debt. But that wasn’t enough for the markets, specifically the Chinese, who lightened up on Fannie and Freddie bonds, making mortgage rates higher than they otherwise would have been and hampering monetary policy. Ultimately the U.S. was forced to use the Federal Reserve to buy up Fannie and Freddie debt directly as a means of keeping mortgage finance flowing.

BURDEN SHARING

Remember too that these are 5-year credit default insurance contracts, so the same cast of characters might not even be in charge when the bills come due. The range of outcomes is pretty wide and so it’s no surprise people want insurance.

It is possible too that the CDS market is distorted or deluded; after all these might be the same people who are paying good money to insure against U.S. sovereign default, an event that might happen but would surely leave very few counterparties with the ability to make good claims.

To be sure, this doesn’t create funding problems for banks at this stage. They are able to sell bonds backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp’s rather hopefully named Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. If those CDS spreads don’t come down it isn’t going away any time soon. It has already been extended into 2012 and I’d expect more in due course.

So, the U.S. is likely to continue to make soothing noises to bank creditors while saying nothing too specific or legally enforceable, all the while hoping that something, anything, turns up. That might work.

COSTS

However, the current fudge imposes its own costs. Banking is a long-term business built on trust. The very existence of concerns among creditors will breed them among clients and will tend to undercut a bank’s ability to get new business and hold on to the old. Lack of trust is a vicious cycle.

So should the U.S. force creditors to pay their share if a major bank needs rescuing? My heart says people should bear responsibility for their decisions and pay the costs. But even the most puritanical capitalist should be extremely worried about what holding this particular group of vested interests responsible for their mistakes might mean for the rest of us.

Remember too that the rather successful Swedish bank bailout made creditors whole, but hit equity holders and management. I’d settle for that.

– At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. –