Banks are wards of state

I realize my previous statement was not entirely clear about the banks. The banks are transmission mechanisms of debt into the system. They have proved riddled with self-regulation issues. When it came to setting optimal monetary levels in the market, the unregulated banks exploded like mosquitos too full of blood.

Unregulated finance, my ass.

Touching the debt supply, and thereby setting monetary levels, proves to be something that should be violently regulated from the core and the public institutions. Banks cannot have equity structures that reward their executives or you read non-sense from white dough boy below on the screen.

It follows that leverage is something that must be TIGHTLY regulated in the shadow banking system. Investment banks should see the amount of risk they can individually dump into the system regulated. They were polluters. With securitization markets shut down, they are not going anywhere either. They cannot dump their waste assets on investors any longer. Thank God for that.

Comments

Sacha Labourey said…
This is really interesting.

Increasing/Decreasing M0 is pretty much the only way governments have to control M3. As the ratio between M0 and M3 increases and gets harder to control (complex financial vehicles), toying with M0 to impact M3 is like trying to poke at a bull's eye with a 100 meters stick, it is totally imprecise.

IF countries were responsible not only for M0 but ALSO for managing the key leverages (=> which would also force them to understand new financial vehicles in the first place), maybe this would lead to a much safer capitalism where the "too big to fail, too big to save" mantra doesn't happen anymore.
adt43wt342 said…
Really what this says is that the system has grown entities that are beyond reach of the governments balance sheets. Too big to save is obviously relative to your governments capacity to re-imburse said debt through taxation (or monetary increase). What is scary is when a bank has a balance sheet with numbers so large that the countries hosting them do not have enough capital to really mount any kind of serious rescue, some french banks are > France GDP) or UBS/CH.

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