The Great Debate

The United States is plagued by large corporations with outsized political power. They are “too big to fail.” So if they are about to fail, they get rescued. Many are so big that they can block the laws needed to stop them from destroying the economy or the environment.

We need to replace them with smaller companies, but U.S. antitrust law is inadequate. It exists, but has been weakened over the past decades. Consider the proposed “Volcker Rule,” which would make many banks split into two companies, one for risky investments and one for loans based on savings, as the old Glass-Steagall law required.  This would address some problems, but would not make banks small enough.  Eliminating “too big to fail” banks means making sure that each is small enough that regulators, prosecutors and elected officials won’t hesitate to let it suffer the consequences of its own decisions.

Using anti-trust law now to split up a company requires a lawsuit, and many large companies can make that costly – as Microsoft did each time it was convicted. Corporations can also use their political influence to avoid being split, as Microsoft did when last convicted.

It is clear that the larger companies get, the harder it is to enforce antitrust laws against them. Yet, a business-friendly government can vitiate the law simply by launching no antitrust cases – as the Bush administration did.

When the government wins such a suit, the court splits up the company to remedy the specific anti-competitive behavior proved. It can’t split the company into 50 parts just to ensure they are all small enough. We can’t fix the problem of too-big-to-fail companies this way.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp tried to seize and sell Cleveland thrift AmTrust last January but local politicians intervened. In the end, the bank still went bust 11 months later - a delay that may have increased losses to the U.S. regulator’s funds. As Congress debates banking reform, AmTrust provides a useful warning that the regulatory apparatus needs to be kept free from politics.

Regulators had known for some time that AmTrust was troubled. AmTrust's chief regulator turned down the bank’s request for TARP money last fall. It also hit AmTrust with a cease-and-desist order, instructing management to change lending practices and boost capital by December 31. When AmTrust missed the deadline the FDIC decided to step in.

But Ohio Congressman Steven LaTourette and Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson convinced Treasury and the White House to keep the regulators at bay. Bythe time FDIC finally seized AmTrust on Dec. 4, its tangible common equity – the capital it has to withstand loan losses – had fallen to $276 million from $943 million the year before. The cost of the bank’s failure to FDIC: $2 billion.

Amid the turmoil of the 2008 financial crisis a myriad of events unfolded that the general public knew nothing about, writes New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin in a new book titled "Too Big to Fail."

Wall Street fell from the dizzying heights of good fortune to calamity in a matter of months. To a large degree it's still to early to tell whether financiers and politicians involved made the right choices.

"At its core 'Too Big to Fail' is a chronicle of failure -- a failure that brought the world to its knees and raised questions about the very nature of capitalism," writes Sorkin in his behind-the-scenes account.

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

So it can be done after all.

Britain is poised to take tough steps to break up the large banks it rescued, setting it in stark contrast to the United States, which seems set on a policy of shoring up the unfair advantages it grants its too-big-to-fail banks while regulating around the edges.

It is quite a change for Britain, which has a sorry history of self-serving self-regulation in financial services combined with limp and outgunned official control.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling on Sunday told the BBC that Lloyds, RBS and Northern Rock would be partly broken up and assets sold to new entrants into the banking market. Large existing competitors such as HSBC are expected to be blocked from making bids for the assets.

President Barack Obama pledged on Monday "to put an end to the idea that some firms are 'too big to fail.'"  Though he outlined some worthy prescriptions, he failed to face up to the very size and power of the financial institutions that makes "too big to fail" possible.

For the big have gotten even bigger since the start of the financial crisis. At the end of 2007, the Big Four banks -- Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo -- held 32 percent of all deposits in FDIC-insured institutions. As of June 30th, it was 39 percent.

(If the image doesn't load, click here.)

In total, they had $3.8 trillion worth of deposits as of June 30th. Compare that figure to the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund, which showed a balance of just $10.4 billion on the same date.