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.

Is Obama Blowing His Presidency?

While I concede that Barack Obama has inherited one of the worse messes in the history of the country as he begins his presidency, I am increasingly worried that he is missing the chance to show commanding leadership and push for the systemic changes needed to not only turn the economy around but also to usher in the "change" he promised throughout his campaign. Be it his timidity on pushing forward on gay rights issues to leaving - in my view - far too much of turning Wall Street around in the hands of the very people who helped create the current economic crisis, Obama just simply is not acting as the dynamic leader that I and so many others had hoped for - or what the country so desperately needs. On the economic front, if his administration blows the window of opportunity to stabilize the banking system, he will be behind the eight ball for everything else he seeks to undertaken. Sadly, his minions overseeing Wall Street do not seem to grasp this fact or the fact that regular citizens are just plain over Wall Street's apparently limitless greed and "let them eat cake" mentality. Frank Rich looks at the financial crisis in a New York Times column today which Obama and all of his staff ought to be required to read. Here are some highlights:

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Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”

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Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

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It [AIG] has, in essence, been laundering its $170 billion in taxpayers’ money by paying off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street to Société Générale and Deutsche Bank abroad.

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But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle. They know that the corporate bosses who may yet lay them off have sometimes been as obscenely overcompensated for failure as Wall Street’s bonus babies. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, chief executives at businesses as diverse as Texas Instruments and the home builder Hovnanian Enterprises have received millions in bonuses even as their companies’ shares have lost more than half their value.

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[R]hetoric won’t tamp down the anger out there, and neither will calculated displays of presidential “outrage.” We must have governance to match the message. To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent and hold every player accountable. His administration must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck.

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We must be told why taxpayers have so little control of the bailed-out financial institutions that we now own some or most of. And where are the M.R.I.’s from those “stress tests” the Treasury Department is giving those banks?

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As the nation’s anger rose last week, the president took responsibility for what’s happening on his watch — more than he needed to, given the disaster he inherited. But in the credit mess, action must match words. To fall short would be to deliver us into the catastrophic hands of a Republican opposition whose only known economic program is to reject job-creating stimulus spending and root for Obama and, by extension, the country to fail.