Global Policy Forum

Shrinking the Banks Down to Size

Print
Adding to the ongoing debate about the implementation of the "Volcker Rule," the part of the Dodd-Frank Act that aims to curtail banks making risky trades for their own profit (an activity known as proprietary trading or "prop trading"), columnist Kevin Drum comments on the issue of liquidity. As many commentators have pointed out, the rule will reduce liquidity in certain markets, because banks will no longer be able to provide as much of it. According to Drum, instead of the economic doom the big banks promise, this will lead to a much welcome "organic" reduction of bank size and advantage the economy as a whole.


By Kevin Drum

February 14, 2012


I liked Felix Salmon's response to an Andrew Ross Sorkin column about whether the Volcker Rule — which is intended to prevent commercial banks from making speculative trades on their own account — will hurt the economy: [1]

    If and when prop trading leaves the big banks, those banks will make less money. That’s by design....Insofar as trading takes place outside regulated banks, at hedge funds or small broker-dealers without access to the Fed discount window, some of the profits will simply move there, to small-enough-to-fail institutions.

    In other words, there is a list of institutions which will be harmed by the Volcker Rule. Here it is: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley. These institutions should get smaller. These institutions should be less profitable. There’s no reason to believe that when that happens, the economy as a whole will suffer.

    ....There’s also the question of whether the Volcker Rule will hurt liquidity, and whether that would be entirely a bad thing....Sorkin worries that it will become “impossible, or at least, impossibly expensive” for banks to warehouse merchandise in the form of securities available for sale. He doesn’t, on the other hand, explain why that’s a bad thing. Why should commercial banks be America’s largest market-makers, with enough clout within Sifma and other industry forums that they can set the broad anti-Volcker agenda? There’s no good ex ante reason why that should be the case, and indeed commercial banks have only truly dominated the market-making world in the past few years, since Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converted after Lehman went bust in 2008.

As Felix says, there are two questions here. First, would a strong implementation of the Volcker Rule hurt big banks? Almost certainly yes. Second, would a strong implementation of the Volcker Rule hurt either the broader financial industry or the economy in general? Almost certainly not. Liquidity is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and arguments that big banks doing lots of prop trading provide the financial markets with the liquidity they need are almost certainly bogus. U.S. financial markets are big enough and active enough that they'll be awash in liquidity regardless of who's providing it.

I was never a huge fan of the proposition that we had to break up the big banks. It always struck me as the worst of two worlds: [2] there would be huge practical problems trying to do it, and it wouldn't really address the core problems of leverage and lousy mortgage regulation that were at the heart of the financial collapse. At the same time, bank size is a problem, and finding ways to reduce bank size organically has always seemed like something well worth pursuing. A strong implementation of the Volcker Rule would at least move us in the right direction.

[1] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/14/whats-bad-for-jp-morgan-isnt-bad-for-america/

[2] http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/04/hitting-bankers-where-they-hurt

To read Andrew Sorkin’ article, click here.

 

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.