Modern history’s greatest regulatory failure
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By Roger Altman / Financial Times Sept 17 2008
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ft.com
Financial market conditions have now descended to the lowest point since the banking shutdown of 1932. In one 96-hour period, we saw three nearly unimaginable events. Lehman Brothers, America’s fourth-largest securities firm, filed for bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch, the best-known firm, was forced overnight to sell itself to Bank of America. And market pressures forced the Federal Reserve into a huge $85bn takeover of AIG, our largest insurer, to avert its bankruptcy.
All of this occurred only two weeks after the massive federal rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and three months after the collapse of Bear Stearns. Market participants around the world have been shocked senseless by these serial failures. Their confidence has evaporated, replaced by an unprecedented level of fear. That is why lending is frozen and worldwide markets are plunging.
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This will come to be seen as the greatest regulatory failure in modern history. The degree of leverage that these institutions took on is indefensible. The average large securities firm was leveraged 27 to one in mid-2007. They were not regulated by any prudential supervisor. In effect, they regulated themselves. The lack of transparency was stunning. Many big lenders did not disclose off-balance-sheet risks. In some cases, they did not understand these risks themselves. More fundamentally, we allowed a second, huge financial system to develop outside the normal banking network. It consisted of investment banks, mortgage finance companies and the like. It was unregulated, not transparent and way too leveraged. But with nine separate and mostly ineffective financial regulators, these risks were ignored. That is, until this second system crashed.
We will be climbing out of this financial hole for a long time. Three or four years may pass before normal lending functions are resumed. In the interim, our economy will not have access to all of the credit it needs and may underperform, at great cost to our society. All of this could have been prevented.
The writer is chairman and chief executive of Evercore Partners and was deputy US Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton. He was a co-head of investment banking and a board member at Lehman Brothers in the 1980s |
