Yes and Not Yes

The Financial Times on banks and regulatory backlash:

Wall Street crises have consequences. By 1932, John Maynard Keynes viewed financiers as “subhuman” and “of gangster mentality”. In 1933, at his inauguration, President Franklin Roosevelt told America that “the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilisation”. The next two years saw the Glass-Steagall Act, which split commercial and investment banking, and the birth of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The severity of the fallout from today’s crisis partly depends on the scale of loss borne by the public sector. So far central banks can, just about, present their activity as that of lenders of the last resort: lending to banks (and now dealers) in return for good collateral. Even the UK Treasury says nationalised Northern Rock’s assets exceed its liabilities.

But it is easy to imagine scenarios in which the public sector bears large and explicit costs. The collateral’s value could fall; central banks might feel obliged directly to prop up the prices of risky assets; bailouts of clearly insolvent banks might occur. High inflation might conceivably be tolerated to cut the real value of private debt – as Professor Niall Ferguson puts it, a re-creation of the 1970s to avoid the 1930s. Such public costs could render peripheral today’s regulatory debate. This is dominated by technical goals: making banks’ capital positions less pro-cyclical and boosting their liquidity. Faith in voluntary codes to reform bankers’ pay, such as that hinted at by Deutsche Bank’s Josef Ackermann, or credit ratings, might come to be seen as hopelessly naive.

Last week Barney Frank, chairman of the House committee on financial services, proposed a new US risk regulator. But the backlash could be more radical. Its objectives? Try these two. First, in an echo of Glass-Steagall, to prohibit some risky business lines at any institutions with implicit state guarantees. Second, to require central banks to take action to limit asset bubbles as well as conventional inflation. If the private losses “socialised” by the public sector do become drastic, so will the proposed remedies.