Academic

Greenspan on "Too Big to Fail"--Skeel

By David Skeel and Bill Stuntz

            I was a minor player in a very interesting conference on systemic risk yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC yesterday. In the keynote address, Alan Greenspan suggested that he sees only three plausible responses to the emergence of financial institutions that are 'too big to fail,' and thus will be bailed out if they fail. The first is to impose higher capital requirements on bigger institutions—in effect, to require them to have more equity and less debt on their balance sheets, so that they are less likely to fail. The second is for people to start new more new banks. Since new banks won't have the baggage of the banks that are still holding lots of 'toxic' assets, they presumably would be well positioned to compete with the big current banks. Third, he suggested that lawmakers might require that investment banks be structured as partnerships rather than corporations, as they were until recently. Because the partners of a partnership are personally responsible for its debts if it fails, the folks running future banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers might take a lot fewer risks. 

Full post as published by Less than the Least on June 04, 2009 (boomark / email).