Word: risk
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...Some of the answers are technical. Regulatory oversight, almost everyone agrees, needs to be beefed up. There's also an emerging consensus on the need for banks to hold more capital and for their appetite for risk to be curtailed. But bigger issues are at stake too, ones that are more political and philosophical in nature: Should any bank be too big to fail? What should be done with financial activities that seem purely speculative and of questionable social use? How can the short-term, get-rich-quick mentality that drove so much market activity before the crash - and inflated...
...Reining in the Banks At the World Economic Forum in Davos last January, some participants advocated radical measures to rein in banks, including regulating their operations so heavily that they would turn into low-risk utilities. No, said Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, that wouldn't solve the problem. What's needed, he argued, "are air bags, cushions and shock absorbers." Trichet has now detailed what he means. On Sept. 6, a group of central-bank governors and regulators from 27 countries that is chaired by Trichet published specific proposals that he said would...
...their profitability. JPMorgan this month estimated that, if key measures like increased capital requirements are implemented, the average return on equity of investment banks would drop by one-third. "It's out of the question to systematically increase layers of capital in the banks if there's no supplementary risk," says Ariane Obolensky, managing director of the French Banking Federation. But the tide is against such critics. As Stark of the ECB put it in a speech this month, "the simple statement that 'if banks are too big to fail, they are probably too big to exist' is a reasonable...
...people out for more than a century, often for religious reasons, causing riots in England in the 1850s, a huge uprising in Brazil in 1904 and a polio-vaccine boycott in Nigeria in 2001. Such rebellions against vaccination typically lead to disease outbreaks that put unimmunized kids at elevated risk, and, unless someone does something to stop it, endless New Yorker stories...
First, the fragility, a.k.a. risk. A year ago, officials at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve didn't think letting Lehman go bankrupt would be a disaster. Those same officials have since argued that the law gave them no choice. But it's also clear that the authorities--then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, in particular--didn't want to intervene. The Fed and Treasury had taken a lot of flak for their earlier bailouts of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was time to let the market work...