W Post
September 3, 2013
The lesson of Lehman: Be prepared for unexpected consequences. And we’re
not.
By _Allan Sloan_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/allan-sloan/2011/02/24/AB7MYvI_page.html)
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Okay, folks. It’s been five years since Lehman Brothers failed, setting
off a chain of unanticipated consequences that came within inches of melting
down the world’s financial system. Had the Federal Reserve, other central
banks, and the U.S. government not intervened and thrown trillions of
dollars at the crisis to keep financial markets afloat, we would be talking
about
Great Depression II.
But rather than offering the conventional wisdom about what’s happened
since Lehman filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008, which is readily
accessible in a zillion places, I’d like to offer some unconventional wisdom —
at
least, I hope it’s wisdom — based on my 40-plus years of writing about
business. My specialty is fiascoes and failures, which is why there’s a toy
vulture hanging from my office ceiling, a mid-1980s Father’s Day present from
my children.
The true lesson I take from Lehman is that a simple move that was praised
by free-market types at the time — letting Lehman fail — set off
unanticipated consequences that brought the financial world to its knees
within days.
It was an object lesson about how things that seem simple on the surface
can come back to bite you in unanticipated places in unanticipated ways.
Lehman failed six months after the Fed and the Treasury bailed out Bear
Stearns — actually, they bailed out Bear Stearns’s creditors and
counterparties; its shareholders were largely wiped out. There was grumbling
at the
time that the government should have let the market take down Bear and instill
discipline by inflicting heavy pain on Bear’s creditors.
But when Lehman went under, two horrible, unanticipated things happened.
One was that a big money-market fund, the Reserve Fund, had to take losses
because it owned Lehman paper. Reserve’s “breaking the buck” ignited a run
on all money-market funds, forcing the government to guarantee all accounts
in order to quell the panic.
Second, some hedge funds that used Lehman’s London office as their “prime
broker” found their assets frozen as a result of its bankruptcy. That
triggered a mad scramble in the United States as hedgies pulled their accounts
out of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, neither of which had full access to
the array of Fed lending programs that commercial banks did. Both firms
would have gone under — inflicting catastrophic pain on the financial system
by setting off a worldwide cascade of failures — had the Fed not made
Goldman and Morgan Stanley bank holding companies and given them access to
unlimited cash to meet customer withdrawals. The run promptly stopped.
These two Lehman side effects, which too many people have forgotten, typify
the problems of dealing with financial crises. You don’t know where the
problem will come from, so you need to have all sorts of resources available.
We’ve forced giant, too-big-to-be-allowed-to-fail financial institutions to
beef up their capital relative to their assets, which is a good thing.
However, we’ve gravely weakened the ability of the Federal Reserve by taking
away key powers that it had used to stabilize things. That’s bad. Really
bad. This problem, combined with the unhappy fact that much of the rest of the
federal government is dysfunctional, will cost us dearly when the next
financial crisis hits. And there always is a next one.
We should have broken up and simplified giant financial institutions that
hold federally insured deposits and limited their ability to get themselves
(and U.S. taxpayers) into trouble. Instead, we got the hideously complex
Dodd-Frank legislation, passed three years ago, which requires all sorts of
ultra-complex rule-making. The process is going so slowly — surprise! —
that President Obama claims to be frustrated and disappointed.
The absolute classic is the Volcker Rule, which says that banks can’t trade
for their own accounts, but can trade to make markets for their customers
who want to trade. Hello? Differentiating between those two activities is
so complicated — I would argue, impossible — that the proposed Volcker Rule
regulations are hundreds of pages long. To me, this means that in
practical terms they’re useless.
We could have adopted what I call the Hoenig rule, proposed by former
Kansas City Fed chief (and current Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. vice chair)
Tom Hoenig, and barred federally insured financial institutions from trading
at all. That poses problems, yet at least is workable. But Hoenig’s name
carries almost no cachet in Washington.
Similarly, we have “living wills” for several dozen giant institutions
such as Goldman Sachs, AIG and JPMorgan Chase, known collectively as SIFIs.
The acronym, which stands for systemically important financial institutions,
is pronounced SIF-eeze, which evokes images of a communicable financial
disease. But SIFIs’ wills are hundreds — and in some cases thousands — of
pages long. Good luck on regulators’ reviewing those. Good luck, too, if
several SIFIs run into trouble at the same time. If that happens, it’s likely
that the whole financial system will be in trouble. That means it will be
difficult, if not impossible, for acquirers to raise the money needed to
purchase assets from stricken SIFIs.
One proposed magic bullet gaining currency these days is to solve the
system’s problems by bringing back the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which
separated boring, bread-and-butter commercial banking from the more go-go
investment banking. I sympathize with this proposal more than you can
imagine. In fact, in March 1995, at my previous job as Wall Street editor of
Newsweek, my first column opposed Glass-Steagall repeal. And I wrote it on my
own time, before I was even on Newsweek’s payroll.
My problem with repeal wasn’t (and isn’t) that it would violate a
supposedly sacred separation between commercial banking and investment
banking.
That distinction was already blurred. I just thought it was a terrible idea to
allow already complex giant financial companies to get bigger and more
complex — and less and less manageable.
That proved to be the case. The 1998 repeal allowed Citigroup to merge with
Travelers, a giant insurance company. It proved such a mess that the
companies have since separated. So the repeal was for nothing.
Institutions, you see, can be too big and too complicated for even superior
managers to run effectively. That’s the lesson we should take from Chase’
s London Whale fiasco, in which a strategy supposedly designed to protect
the bank from various risks ended up inflicting a 10-digit loss. The good
news is that stockholders bore the whole $6 billion or so loss, because the
company was soundly capitalized. The bad news was that even a chief
executive as good and as obsessive as Chase’s Jamie Dimon didn’t know what was
happening until it was too late.
In addition to not helping solve the fundamental problem of “too big to
fail,” reimposing Glass-Steagall would inflict regulatory whiplash. In 2008,
as the world melted down, regulators begged Chase to buy Bear Stearns,
leaned on Bank of America to complete its then-pending purchase of Merrill
Lynch
and begged Wells Fargo to buy Wachovia, which had major brokerage
operations. All those deals, done at the behest of regulators, would be
reversed.
If that happens, can you imagine any big institution helping the government
by buying some failing institution the next time around?
Meanwhile, hyper-partisanship is weakening the Fed and the government as a
whole, reducing our ability to respond to any new crisis. I’m appalled at
the Obama administration’s undermining the Fed by not promptly announcing a
proposed successor to Ben Bernanke; the controversy hurt the Fed on
multiple levels. Then again, I can’t believe that the Republicans are heading
us
back into another debt-ceiling drama, but it sure looks that way.
You hear talk these days that big institutions’ higher capital levels,
their living wills, and closer scrutiny by better-equipped regulators mean
that
the days of 2008-type post-Lehman financial panics have come to an end. Don
’t you believe it. “This time it’s different” are the four most
dangerous words in finance. I’ve heard them after every big financial mess
since
the late 1960s — and a few years later, there’s another mess. These words
haven’t proved right yet. And they won’t be right this time, either.
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