Streetwise Professor

Apologies for the posting hiatus. I was cleaning out my mother’s house in preparation for her forthcoming move, a task that vies with the Labors of Hercules. I intended to post, but I was just too damn tired at the end of each day.

I’ll ease back into things by giving a heads up on my latest piece in The Hill, in which I argue that reviving Glass-Steagall’s separation of commercial and investment banking is a solution in search of a problem. One thing that I find telling is that the problem the original was intended to address in the 1930s was totally different than the one that is intended to address today. Further, the circumstances in the 1930s were wildly different from present conditions.

In the 1930s, the separation was intended to prevent banks from fobbing off bad commercial and sovereign loans to unwitting investors through securities underwriting. This problem in fact did not exist: extensive empirical evidence has shown that debt securities underwritten by universal banks (like J.P. Morgan) were of higher quality and performed better ex post than debt underwritten by stand alone investment banks. Further, the  most acute problem of the US banking system was not too big to fail, but too small to succeed. The banking crisis of the 1930s was directly attributable to the fragmented nature of the US banking system, and the proliferation of thousands of small, poorly diversified, thinly capitalized banks. The bigger national banks, and in particular the universal ones, were not the problem in 1932-33. Further, as Friedman-Schwartz showed long ago, a blundering Fed implemented policies that were fatal to such a rickety system.

In contrast, today’s issue is TBTF. But, as I note in The Hill piece, and have written here on occasion, Glass-Steagall separation would not have prevented the financial crisis. The institutions that failed were either standalone investment banks, GSE’s, insurance companies involved in non-traditional insurance activities, or S&Ls. Universal banks that were shaky (Citi, Wachovia) were undermined by traditional lending activities. Wachovia, for instance, was heavily exposed to mortgage lending through its acquisition of a big S&L (Golden West Financial). There was no vector of contagion between the investment banking activities and the stability of any large universal bank.

As I say in The Hill, whenever the same prescription is given for wildly different diseases, it’s almost certainly a nostrum, rather than a cure.

Which puts me at odds with Donald Trump, for he is prescribing this nostrum. Perhaps in an effort to bring more clicks to my oped, the Monday after it appeared Trump endorsed a Glass-Steagall revival. This was vintage Trump. You can see his classic MO. He has a vague idea about a problem–TBTF. Not having thought deeply about it, he seizes upon a policy served up by one of his advisors (in this case, Gary Cohn, ex-Goldman–which would benefit from a GS revival), and throws it out there without much consideration.

The main bright spot in the Trump presidency has been his regulatory rollback, in part because this is one area in which he has some unilateral authority. Although I agree generally with this policy, I am under no illusions that it rests on deep intellectual foundations. His support of Son of Glass-Steagall shows this, and illustrates that no one (including Putin!) should expect an intellectually consistent (or even coherent) policy approach. His is, and will be, an instinctual presidency. Sometimes his instincts will be good. Sometimes they will be bad. Sometimes his instincts will be completely contradictory–and the call for a return to a very old school regulation in the midst of a largely deregulatory presidency shows that quite clearly.