MacroScope

I asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke during his quarterly press conference this week if the central bank had its own estimate for the implicit subsidy that banks considered too big to fail receive in the form of cheaper borrowing. Senator Elizabeth Warren had confronted him at a recent hearing with a Bloomberg estimate of $83 billion which itself was derived from an IMF study. At the time, he dismissed her concern: “That’s one study Senator, you don’t know if that’s an accurate number.”

At the press briefing, Bernanke said the Fed does not have its own figures for Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail subsidy, in part because there were too many factors that made it difficult to calculate.

However, this time around, he seemed more sympathetic to Warren’s concerns than he had at the Senate Banking Committee hearing.

I certainly never meant to say to Senator Warren – and I share her concern about too big to fail, I think it’s a major issue – I never meant to imply that the problem was solved and gone. It is not solved and gone; it’s still here, but there’s a lot of work in train.

We’re putting in the Basel capital standards. We’re putting in the orderly liquidation authority from Dodd-Frank. We’re working with our international partners. And I hope that we’ll make progress against too big to fail, because I agree with her 100 percent that it’s a real problem and needs to be addressed if at all possible.

Just how big is the benefit that too-big-to-fail banks receive from their implicit taxpayer backing? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke debated just that question with Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren during a recent hearing of the Senate Banking Committee. Warren cited a Bloomberg study based on estimates from the International Monetary Fund that found the subsidy, in the form of lower borrowing costs, amounts to some $83 billion a year.

Bernanke, who has argued Dodd-Frank financial reforms have made it easier for regulators to shut down troubled institutions, questioned the study’s validity.

“That’s one study Senator, you don’t know if that’s an accurate number.”

Massachusetts’ rookie Senator Elizabeth Warren was out making waves again at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Capitol Hill today. The former Harvard law professor contrasted the legal code affecting drug prosecutions with what she depicted as cushy settlements for large Wall Street firms that committed egregious crimes.

Take Standard Chartered. They were fined $667 million by U.S. regulators for breaching sanctions related to Iran and three other countries. Yet the bank posted a tenth straight year of record profits.

If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to jail. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

In the wake of a historic housing crisis that has just recently begun showing signs of a turnaround, foreclosure counseling services are coming under strain. The foreclosure mess may be over for big banks, which recently settled with regulators for $8.5 billion.

Not so for homeowners, who continue to face a bureaucratic morass in dealing with lenders and servicers. According to a new report from the Philadelphia Fed, the city of Philadelphia’s already weak infrastructure for dealing with the fallout from the foreclosure crisis is fraying at the edges.

The report’s conclusion:

Foreclosure counseling in Philadelphia is in high demand, but the city’s housing counseling agencies have limited resources with which to meet that need. There is a high degree of reliance on public funding for operations, which is particularly problematic in the current environment of increased concern over budget deficits and public debt. Counselors are being asked to provide services to numerous clients, and agencies have to meet multiple sets of requirements to access and to maintain funding from the primary funding sources. In recent years, these pressures have led to a reduction in the number of agencies offering such counseling in Philadelphia and may continue that trend without new sources of funding to bolster service provision.

Not everyone agrees that using high-speed machines to trade stocks in less time than it takes the average person to blink is a bad thing, but the people who do might be heartened by the letter a congressman sent the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has waged a decades-long struggle against computerized trading sent the SEC a hint: The power to curb high-frequency trading has been within its grasp all along.

In his letter, Markey described a law he co-sponsored in 1989 to increase the agency’s power to regulate computerized trading, a precursor to HFT that employed computer programs to make trading decisions without the participation of conscious humans. The law lets the SEC “limit practices which result in extraordinary levels of volatility,” according to Markey’s citation.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde sat down for an interview with Thomson Reuters Editor of Consumer News Chrystia Freeland to discuss the European debt crisis and U.S. fiscal problems.

Lagarde also outlined the Fund’s agenda for 2013 at a news conference following the release of a $4.3 billion tranche of aid to Greece, which she said is moving in the right direction with reforms.

Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever before. But top regulators tell us not to worry. They say the problem has been diminished by financial reforms that give the authorities enhanced powers to wind down large financial institutions. Moreover, supervisors say, the new rules discourage firms from getting too large in the first place by forcing them to raise more equity than they had prior to the financial meltdown of 2007-2008.

New York Fed President and former Goldman Sachs partner William Dudley said in a recent speech:

There has already been considerable progress in forcing firms to bolster their capital and liquidity resources. On the capital side, consistent with the Dodd-Frank Act, Basel III significantly raises the quantity and quality of capital required of internationally active bank holding companies. This ensures that the firm’s shareholders will bear all the firm’s losses across a much wider range of scenarios than before. This should strengthen market discipline. Meanwhile, to the extent that some of the specific activities that generate significant externalities are now subject to higher capital charges, this should cause banks to alter their business activities in ways that reduce both the likelihood and social cost of their failure.

It was kind of a big deal coming from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s influential president William Dudley. The former Goldman Sachs partner and chief economist has offered a fig leaf to those who say the problem of banks considered too-big-to-fail must be dealt with more aggressively. Some regional Fed presidents have advocated breaking up these institutions. But Dudley and other powerful figures at the central bank have maintained recent financial reforms have already laid the groundwork for resolving the issue.

At a gathering of financial executives in New York last week, Dudley said he prefers the existing approach of making it costlier for firms to become big in the first place. Still, he left open the possibility of tackling the mega-bank problem more directly:

Should society tolerate a financial system in which certain financial institutions are deemed to be too big to fail? And, if not, then what should we do about it?

Here’s a snapshot of FDR & Co. in 1933 as they signed Glass-Steagall, which separated the financial sector into safer, deposit-taking commercial banks and risk-taking investment banks – Wall Street.

And here’s a photo of Bill Clinton & Co. repealing Glass-Steagall in 1999, with the passage of the Graham-Leach-Bliley act known as the Financial Services Modernization Act. 

Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Tarullo’s call for limiting bank size is sparking debate in unexpected places. Keith Hennessey, who ran the National Economic Council under President Bush, was in Chicago late last week for a discussion with Democratic lawmaker Barney Frank. The topic of the panel, sponsored by CME Group Inc., was the housing crisis.

But the most spirited exchange took place after Hennessey said that banks are simply too big to regulate adequately. “I think Tarullo has got a good point,” he said, referring to Tarullo’s argument for the need to cap bank size. Hennessey, as Bush’s economic policy assistant in 2008, was among administration officials that worked to win Congressional approval for the bailout of insurance major AIG, as its failure threatened to plunge the nation’s financial markets, already reeling from the failure of Lehman Brothers, even deeper into crisis.

Lawmakers eventually relented. On Friday, Frank, who co-authored Wall Street reform legislation designed to prevent another bailout of a too-big-to-fail financial institutions, was not about to cede ground this time to Hennessey. “I didn’t ask what Tarullo thinks – are you for breaking up the banks, and if so, to what size, and by what method?”  “Right now I don’t see any better solution than what Tarullo has suggested – yes, a size cap on banks… The alternative is a repeat of the 2008 crisis.” After the panel, Frank said he took issue with the idea, both from a technical perspective – “How do you do it? Do you sell it? Who’s going to buy it? The other banks by definition can’t.” – and because of concern that trimming bank size will hurt the ability of U.S. financial institutions to compete internationally.