Saturday, June 6, 2015

"Too Big To Fail?" Nope. Too Much Risk.

Remember the 2008 financial meltdown? It seems the problem was and is not bigness, it's riskiness.

On The Washington Monthly's "Political Animal" blog,  Nancy LeTourneau nicely summarizes some great analysis by Michael Grunwald.  Here's the link:
 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_06/the_story_weve_told_ourselves055943.php

The whole thing is well worth reading, but I'll share the last paragraph here.

"Grunwald points out that overall, Dodd-Frank is working by raising the capital requirements for big banks in order to protect against the risks. And then he goes on to talk about ways that the current regulations could be strengthened. But ultimately, vigilance is what will be required.
Risk has a way of migrating to the path of least resistance…What’s safe to predict is that risk won’t go away. The goal should be to monitor and manage it, not to eradicate it. Financial reformers often make grand pronouncements about how this or that reform will eliminate the risk of meltdowns and bailouts, but those risks will remain as long as human beings are susceptible to manias like the one that inflated the credit bubble before the crisis and panics like the one that nearly shredded the system during the crisis—in other words, as long as human beings are human."
Vigilance.  The same thing that's required to ensure that we remain a democracy.