Banking systems with 10% capital and normal loan underwriting have never experienced systemic problems. Individual banks will fail, but no system-wide failures.
The reason for this is very simple. This level of capital, for standard loans, limits the amount of debt which can be created, which in turn limits the speed and extent to which all asset/collateral prices can be inflated by new loans.
During the real estate boom of the 1880s in Southern California, the banks stopped lending on real estate altogether. Had they not, they would have failed. Yet this localized boom reached bubble proportions due to seller financing and investor money flooding in from the East Coast. So regional bubbles don't require banks to occur.
Your call for transactional banks which do not make loans, ie no fractional reserve banking, is indeed the deluxe ultimate in belt+suspenders safety.
There are still a few small boutique banks in Switzerland which operate in this manner. You pay them 2% annually to keep your money in their vault, and you can withdraw your money from the vault, or visit it, anytime you wish.
Of course there are additional fees for other services such as transfers or payments. But with the exception of robbery, bank embezzlement, nuclear strike, or invasion of foreign invasion of Switzerland, your money will alway be there - minus 2% each year.
Personally I would prefer the prudent standard fractional reserve banking system, with systemic failures so infrequent as to not have occured yet. The benefits are enormous. But that's a choice for society.
Contrast either of these stable banking regimes to a system where large banks like Citibank operating with 2% capital while making mortgage loans without any income verification or down-payment. Small children could have spotted the problem.
Basel II was designed to restore normal prudent banking standards, to head off this problem. But the management of our large banks, their lobbyists, and friends, were able to delay the implementation of these requirements long enough to be useless for the present day. You have to have prudence before the problems develop. Death-bed conversions are meaningless in banking. . |