Rolfe Winkler
Option ARMageddon
Who are Bernanke’s top 25?
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How many too-big-to-fail financials might be subject to additional oversight under Obama’s regulatory reform bill? According to Ben Bernanke: roughly 25.
“On order of magnitude, a very rough guess would be 25 (firms). I would like to point out that virtually all those firms are organized as bank holding companies, or financial holding companies, which means the Federal Reserve already has umbrella supervision , so I would not envision the Fed’s oversight extending to any significant number of additional firms.”
Conveniently, the Fed publishes a list of the top BHCs. Here are the top 50. And you’ll never guess who just missed the cut at #26…
CIT.
Not on the list is GE Capital, which is certainly too-big-to-fail. And there are more than a few insurance companies that wouldn’t be allowed to go under. By assets, the biggest insurers–besides MetLife, which is on the BHC list–are Prudential ($380 billion assets), Hartford ($290 billion), and Berkshire Hathaway ($282 billion).
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RW;
Barry Ritholz has a link to a set of 3 e-mail “conversations” between John Talbot & Simon Johnson (@salon) you might find interesting.
What if the fed concentrated its efforts on the middle of the bell curve. Who should give a crap about the tails when good policy in the middle takes care of the tails (and the majority of the people.)