Word: bankes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This is the case because the investment banking division can use FDIC-insured funds from the retail-banking division to indirectly finance excessive risk-taking. The retail bank’s customers will not transfer their deposits to a safer institution because they know that the FDIC will compensate them in the event of a bank failure. This moral hazard encourages further mergers between retail and investment banks, which in turn begets more institutions that are “too big to fail.” When excess risk gets a conglomerate bank into trouble, the bill goes to?...
Conglomerate banks that are too big to fail are often too big for executives to manage effectively. As Spitzer pointed out last week, most bank CEOs probably did not want to take on ruinous amounts of risk, but the scale of their operations hindered their oversight. Unsurprisingly, these financial behemoths tend to become unwieldy as they attempt to do too much at once. Consider the case of Citigroup, the product of Citibank’s historic 1998 merger with Travelers, an insurance company. The one-time “financial supermarket” was exposed as a bloated, mismanaged basket...
Finally, conglomerate banks are often large enough to stifle competition. Last month, Alan Greenspan argued that institutions deemed “too big to fail” operate under an implicit subsidy from the government, since they would likely be rescued in a future financial emergency. This allows these banks to borrow more cheaply than their competitors and gain even greater market share. Today, four conglomerate banks (JPMorgan, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America) hold 39 percent of all domestic deposits. Placing this many eggs in four baskets will harm the entire economy should one mega-bank falter...
Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, and Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, agree that governments should mandate separation between commercial and investment banks. Volcker argues that President Obama’s “regulate the giants” approach is insufficient, since the market changes faster than regulators can keep up with it. Under Volcker’s plan, commercial banks and investment banks would still be free to flourish—just as separate companies...
...administration heard the message and brainstormed ways to effectively incorporate student concerns starting in May. When the UC asked Dean Hammonds to create a feedback system modeled off an online Idea Bank at MIT, she immediately found a way to develop a similar site for Harvard. The Idea Bank was created to guide the community discussion on the next round of budget reductions. The website launched in September and allowed all members of the Harvard community to include ideas on how to make Harvard more efficient. Not only could people submit recommendations, but they could also rate the quality...