Break Up the Big Banks

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It is rare nowadays that I agree with George Will on much of anything.  The man has become almost as nutty as today's Republican Party for which he typically acts as an apologist.  But in a column today in the Washington Post he talks about an issue where in my view he is directly on point:  it is time to break up the big banks who have been given a "too big to fail" status and all kinds of special privileges but have not been held to any increased accountability or responsibility.  Dealing with some of these banks on behalf of clients regularly the picture that emerges is one of arrogance, incompetence, and an utter unwillingness to work with even meritorious customers - despite receiving huge bailout sums themselves that were intended to flow down to borrowers and customers.  Here are highlights from Will's column:

If in four weeks a president-elect Mitt Romney is seeking a Treasury secretary, he should look here, to Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Candidate Romney can enhance his chance of having this choice to make by embracing a simple proposition from Fisher: Systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs), meaning too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks, are “too dangerous to permit.”

The problems posed by “supersized and hypercomplex banks” may, Fisher says, require anti-obesity policies equivalent to “irreversible lap-band or gastric bypass surgery.” The land of TBTFs is “a perverse financial Lake Wobegon” where all crises are “exceptional,” justifying “unique” solutions that are the same — meaning bailouts. This incurs “the wrath of ordinary citizens and smaller entities that resent this favorable treatment, and we plant the seeds of social unrest.” 

Endorsing the axiom (attributed to Napoleon) that one should “never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence,” Fisher says that TBTF banks “are sprawling and complex — so vast that their own management teams may not fully understand their own risk exposures, providing fertile ground for unintended ‘incompetence.’ ” 

Fisher’s rejoinder to those who impute “economies of scale” to such banks is that there also are “diseconomies of scale.” Fisher, among many others, believes the component parts of the biggest banks would be “worth more broken up than as a whole.”

“For all its bluster, Dodd-Frank leaves TBTF entrenched. . . . In fact, the financial crisis increased concentration because some TBTF institutions acquired the assets of other troubled TBTF institutions. The TBTF survivors of the financial crisis look a lot like they did in 2008. They maintain corporate cultures based on the short-term incentives of fees and bonuses derived from increased oligopoly power.”

Capitalism — which is, as Milton Friedman tirelessly insisted, a profit and loss system — is subverted by TBTF, which socializes losses while leaving profits private. And which enhances the profits of those whose losses it socializes. TBTF is a double moral disaster: It creates moral hazard by encouraging risky behavior, and it delegitimizes capitalism by validating public cynicism about its risk-reward ratios.

It is inexplicable politics and regrettable policy that Romney has, so far, flinched from a forthright endorsement of breaking up the biggest banks.