Luigi Zingales is a brilliant guy. I find his advocacy in the FT of a return to Glass-Steagall less than brilliant.
Zingales identifies four reasons for supporting G-S. Three are wildly implausible, the fourth hardly persuasive enough to justify a return to 30s-era regulatory structures.
The first reason is that it makes sense to restrict commercial banks’ participation in “very risky activities.” There are at least two problems with this, when evaluated in the context of the financial crisis.
First, the investments and activities that put commercial banks at risk during each of the last two crises-mortgages and MBS in Financial Crisis I and sovereign debt in Financial Crisis II (the one currently ongoing, particularly in Europe)-were blessed by regulators as low risk activities. They almost surely would have passed muster under Glass-Steagall. There were other major banking crises under Glass-Steagall. It is painfully clear that G-S is not sufficient to prevent banks from taking on risk in sufficient amounts to put individual banks and the banking system at risk.
Second, and I realize I am an apostate on this, although moral hazard is a concern associated with deposit insurance, funding and liquidity risk is as dangerous and arguably more dangerous. Runs are more likely, the less sticky the funding. Concentrating riskier activities in institutions like stand-alone investment banks that rely on wholesale markets rather than stickier insured deposits for funding increases the risk of destabilizing runs and makes the system more fragile. It therefore seems extremely dangerous to allow the institutions with the riskiest funding hold the riskiest assets, and preclude the institutions with the safest funding not hold such risky assets. Look for other means-such as risk-based deposit insurance premiums or capital requirements-to control the moral hazard problem.
Zingales’s second reason is that Glass-Steagall was simple. Well, yes, the original bill was (as compared to Frank-n-Dodd or the Volcker Rule portion thereof) but there did grow up a thicket of regulations and interpretations and decisions around it. This is inherent in any law that attempts to draw lines between activities: such laws generate efforts to engineer products that cross the lines in substance but seem to comply to the letter. This generates a process of litigation, interpretation, regulatory challenge, etc.
And does anybody believe that if Glass-Steagall were to be brought back, it would be the same today as in the 1930s? Glass-Steagall was simple in part because it was the product of simpler times Financial markets are much more complicated today, and splitting the baby would be far harder. Any attempt to do so would almost certainly result in a Son of Glass-Steagall that is far more complex, and far longer, than the nearly 80 year old original.
I have to say that Zingales’s third reason is cracked:
The third reason why I came to support Glass-Steagall was because I realised it was not simply a coincidence that we witnessed a prospering of securities markets and the blossoming of new ones (options and futures markets) while Glass-Steagall was in place, but since its repeal have seen a demise of public equity markets and an explosion of opaque over-the-counter ones.
I realize this is a newspaper oped, with tight space limits, but Luigi provides no serious evidence to support his realization that coincidence equals causation. With respect to the demise of public equity markets, trading volumes have skyrocketed, and although there has been an increase in “dark markets”, such things existed in the glory days of G-S, just under a different name (“third markets”, for instance), and there are good economic reasons why this is so. Moreover, some problems associated with equity markets are attributable to other regulations, notably Sarbanes-Oxley.
With respect to OTC instruments, Zingales’s characterization of cause and effect is muddled and ahistorical. OTC derivatives began to grow rapidly in the 1980s, while G-S was still in force, but their growth was constrained by regulation. However, it was legal uncertainty under the CEA that was the main problem, not Glass-Steagall. This was addressed by the CFMA of 2000, rather than the Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLB-wouldn’t it have been funny if there had been a fourth co-sponsor with a name starting with “T”?) of 1999, which repealed G-S. Commercial banks and investment banks both did OTC derivatives before GLB, and would likely continue to do them under Son of Glass-Steagall. What’s more, they are constrained-over-constrained, IMO-by Frank-n-Dodd.
Zingales continues in a rather bizarre vein:
To function properly markets need a large number of independent traders. The separation between commercial and investment banking deprived investment banks of access to cheap funds (in the form of deposits), forcing them to limit their size and the size of their bets. These limitations increased the number of market participants, making markets more liquid. With the repeal of Glass-Steagall, investment banks exploded in size and so did their market power. As a result, the new financial instruments (such as credit default swaps) developed in an opaque over-the-counter market populated by a few powerful dealers, rather than in a well regulated and transparent public market.
But the IBs that got into trouble (Bear, Lehman, Merrill, Morgan Stanley) never had access to deposits post-GLB. Not before, not after. So the cause-effect link between the repeal of G-S and the explosion in size of IBs that Zingales posits (resulting from the the access to deposit funding for IBs inside CBs) never happened.
No one knows the exact cause (global imbalances, Fed looseness), but the financial system was flooded with funding liquidity in the 2000s. That is what permitted the IBs to lever up and risk up, not a sudden access to insured deposits.
And by objective measures, markets were more liquid-substantially so-post-G-S. Spreads were smaller. Volumes were bigger. The number of participants was larger: hedge funds proliferated, for instance. Really, I don’t think anybody noticed the markets getting less liquid post-G-S. If anything, the concern was that there was too much liquidity, too much trading.
And insofar as CDS are concerned, it is hard to believe that G-S would have (a) prevented the creation of these instruments, or (b) resulted in them being traded by something other than big dealer institutions. Again, note that stand-alone IBs were major dealers in these instruments, and that they were first developed by a commercial bank (JP Morgan) prior to 1999. In many respects, the disintermediation of banks by capital markets, a process that started and became quite pronounced under the G-S separation led banks into other, non-lending forms of intermediation.
I would also emphasize that there are intense economies of scale in responding to expansive regulation like Dodd-Frank, meaning that regulation can contribute strongly to consolidation in finance, with its consequent effects on competition, the number of market participants, and systemic risks.
Zingales’s history, in other words, isn’t history at all.
There’s another point here. If G-S was that important, why didn’t its repeal lead to dramatic changes in market structure, with the demise of stand-alone IBs and the dominance of integrated, full-service universal banks with access to insured deposit funding? Zingales’s narrative is inherently contradictory: he focuses on the metastasization of IBs post-GLB, but if you believe his story, the repeal should have caused IBs to shrink or die or get absorbed by commercial banks or turn themselves into universal banks funded substantially by deposits. None of that happened. Indeed, there were numerous studies in the mid-2000s, notably by the Fed, the Senate Banking Committee, and the St. Louis Fed that all concluded that GLB’s G-S repeal had very limited effects on the structure of US financial markets: most of the major changes in market structure had occurred in the 1975-1998 period.
It is also worth mentioning that the universal bank model that Glass-Steagall eliminated developed in a world without deposit insurance. Indeed, Glass-Steagall created deposit insurance, which means that at least then implicit subsidies in deposit insurance couldn’t have caused the combination of investment and commercial banking. Why should we believe that deposit insurance would cause such an integration today? Especially in light of the fact that the elimination of G-S boundaries did not result in the absorption of investment banking into commercial banks. Given the role that deposit insurance plays in Zingales’s narrative, this is a major problem for it.
Zingales also claims that the financial system was more resilient under G-S, and points to the contrast between the ’87 Crash (which was not followed by a financial crisis) and the ’08 debacle (which was) as an illustration. I really don’t see any connection between G-S and how the broader financial markets fared post-Black Monday. Zingales notes that commercial banks didn’t have problems post-Crash. Well, investment banks didn’t either, for the most part. The main difference is that in ’87, most equities were held by real money investors, not financial institutions: ditto the Dot Com crash.
In contrast, in ’07-08, the mortgages that cratered were held primarily by highly leveraged financial institutions-commercial and investment banks; many of these were destined to go to real money investors, but banks and investment banks were caught with them before they could securitize them and market them to real money. Today, in Europe, sovereign debt is held mainly by leveraged financial institutions. Banks today don’t hold huge amounts of equities, and an ’87-type event, where the crash originated in the equity market would probably have a similar result today. The equity crash in ’08 was a response to the crash that was occurring in mortgages. The events are very different.
And it is quite plausible that these two events were the direct result of regulations, notably the very favorable capital treatment of mortgages and MBS (especially those transformed into AAA securities despite the quality of the underlying collateral) and sovereign debt.
Luigi’s last point is that a divided financial industry is less effective in exerting political influence because commercial banks, investment banks, and insurers have divergent interests. But again, commercial banks, investment banks, and insurers existed post-GLB. There was not a wholesale shift to universal banking in the US. Certainly this could have happened, post-GLB, but it didn’t. The greatest impetus to consolidation was the crisis itself, when IBs either blew up or were absorbed into commecial banks. Thus, again, the structural change that could have happened under G-S didn’t happen to that great an extent, meaning that the political economy didn’t change that much either.
Moreover, to the extent that the activities of financial institutions are siloed, as under G-S, they are not competing with one another in the marketplace. This also limits their need to compete with one another in obtaining favorable legislation or regulation. Each can focus its efforts on obtaining favorable laws and regulations pertaining to its silo. Commercial banks focus on favorable rules for commercial banking activities; insurers focus on favorable rules for insurance; investment banks on favorable rules for broker-dealer and securities underwriting. There is no Galbraithian “countervailing power” mechanism operating that pits investment banks against commercial banks when they are functionally separated a la G-S, because the very separation of these activities means that the firms in one segment are not competing for rents against firms in the other segment.
In brief, it appears that Luigi is aiming his argument at a world that could have arisen after the repeal of Glass-Steagall. A world in which there was a decisive move to universal banking in the US, resulting in the disappearance of stand-alone investment banks. Some certainly predicted that outcome in 1999, but it didn’t occur. There were some changes in market structure, but only modest ones. It is passing strange that Zingales attributes the growth in investment banks to a law that, under the most straightforward interpretation of his argument, should have led to their demise. Most importantly, the mechanism that Zingales posits-the availability of cheap insured deposits to fund risk taking by investment banks-didn’t work that way in practice. Risk taking was funded through the wholesale markets which were awash in money. That was the vulnerability of the system.
Zingales’s history about the evolution of equity markets, OTC derivatives markets generally, and CDS markets in particular, is also suspect.
So when reading this article, a Mark Twain quote came to mind: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”