Saturday, July 06, 2013

Fed Officials Outline a New Plan to Rein in "Too Big to Fail"

Five years after the Global Financial Crisis, our government and our banks have failed to fully address the systemic causes of instability present in the banking system. Specifically, the size of certain banks, and their tacit knowledge of the consequences if they go under, creates a dilemma and moral hazard for the US Government. Banks are still too big to fail. Rating agencies still get paid by the banks they rate. Senator Franken(D-MN) proposed that banks no longer pay the agencies that rate them in a bill in 2010. Since that time, that portion of the bill has been reduced to a study on the conflict of interest present when a bank pays it's rater. I sincerely hope that the greybeards in the financial sector start proposing legislation that will correct these deficiencies, before people without a background in finance start doing it for them and badly. Hand waving it away and telling people that the banks have it covered will not pass anymore. The only question is if reform will come from people on Wall Street who know the system, or Senators from main street who do not. I would rather the street work with our Congress to fix itself.

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