Making banks safer would seem like an easy thing for Americans to agree on, especially after the wipeouts of the global financial crisis in 2007-09, followed by the failure last year of three big ones: Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank.
A wide-ranging lobbying campaign by the nation’s biggest banks and their allies seems to be succeeding in beating back a proposal put forward last year by three federal agencies (the Federal Reserve, the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.) to require shareholders of big banks to put more of their own skin in the game — so that if things go bad the banks won’t have to drastically cut lending or turn to taxpayers for a bailout.
“Candidly, my expectation is that there’s going to be a fairly significant softening of the capital proposal,” Keegan Ferguson, a director on the financial services team of Capstone, an advisory firm, told me.
The backsliding appalls a lot of economists, among them Anat Admati, a professor of finance and economics at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Admati is a co-author with Martin Hellwig, a German economist, of a 2013 book on pretty much exactly this topic, “The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It.” (An updated edition of the book just came out.)
Persons:
“, ” Keegan Ferguson, Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig
Organizations:
Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic Bank, Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, Capstone, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business
Locations:
German