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What should Washington be doing? We need to do something about firms that are too big to fail. These firms have become loss transmitters and accelerators to the rest of the system. We need to distribute the risk, not concentrate it in a few very large players. There are a number of ways to do that...
Like what? One approach is to lay on a heavy cost of being big. Too-big-to-fail banks should have a capital cost that will make it a disadvantage to compete in the riskiest parts of the financial-services market. I also like President Obama's recent proposal, the so-called Volcker Rule, which would limit proprietary trading and investing. Combining these two regulatory changes ought to encourage big banks to figure out new business strategies, and that would involve selling off some of their riskier businesses...
...people are saying that proprietary trading didn't cause the financial crisis. So why focus on that? Proprietary investing certainly played a big role in the financial crisis. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, UBS and Citigroup all had large amounts of mortgage bonds or real estate investments that they had parked on or off their balance sheets - but were responsible for. They were chasing the same higher yields that all their investing clients were. Those investments comprised the greatest part of those firms' write-offs. Those weren't client-driven trades. They decided to take them themselves. The idea...
Wall Street also seems unhappy about a fee for being big. Financial executives don't like the idea of having to pay a too-big-to-fail tax, but nonetheless I think they get it. Banks pay for deposit insurance - this just extends the idea to the rest of the bank's liabilities, which get covered by implicit too-big-to-fail guarantees. What a lot of firms don't like is the idea of having to pay a financial-crisis-responsibility fee for the next decade, as Obama has proposed to recoup TARP loans to AIG, the auto industry...
...look for big gains for Ford, much less General Motors or Chrysler, despite their attempts to woo buyers with special incentive programs. This has all the makings of an Asian-only battle, and Toyota can only stand by and watch as its buyers defect to its Japanese and Korean rivals, with Honda at the head of the pack...