Reply #17: Josh Rosner: Dodd Frank is a Farce on Too Big to Fail (long)

[Pale Blue Dot]

Note: Josh Rosner, managing director of Graham Fisher & Co., submitted this written testimony for a March 30 panel for the House Oversight Committee that was cancelled. His testimony has been entered into the Congressional Record and will be available on the House Oversight Committee website in the near future. The text appears below..

Has Dodd-Frank Ended Too Big to Fail?

Almost three years have passed since the United States financial system shook, began to seize up, and threatened to bring the global economy crashing down. The seismic event followed a long period of neglect in bank supervision led by lobbyist-influenced legislators, “a chicken in every pot” administrations, and neutered bank examiners.

While the current cultural mythology suggests the underlying causes of the crisis were unobservable and unforeseeable, the reality is quite different. Structural changes in the mortgage finance system and the risks they posed were visible as early as 2001. Even as late as 2007 warnings of the misapplications of ratings in securitized assets such as collateralized debt obligations and the risks these errors posed to investors, to markets, and to the greater economy were either unseen or ignored by regulators who believed financial innovation meant that risk was “less concentrated in the banking system” and “made the economy less vulnerable to shocks that start in the financial system.” Borrowers, these regulators argued, had “a greater variety of credit sources and (had become) less vulnerable to the disruption of any one credit channel.”

In the wake of the crisis, and before either the Congressional Oversight Panel or the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission delivered their final reports on the causes of the crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act. The act claimed to end the era of “too-big-to-fail” institutions and sought to address the fundamental structural weaknesses and conflicts within the financial system. To falsely declare an end to Too Big to Fail without actually accomplishing that end is more damaging to the credibility of U.S. markets than a failure to act at all. The historic understanding that our markets were the most free to fair competition, most well regulated and transparent, has been the underlying basis of our ability to attract foreign capital. It is this view that, in turn, had supported our markets as the deepest, broadest, and most liquid.

In fact, Dodd-Frank reinforces the market perception that a small and elite group of large firms are different from the rest. While the act sought to reduce the risks that too-big-to-fail (TBTF) institutions pose to the financial system and the broader global economy, it is unclear whether any such meaningful reduction has actually occurred. Moreover, although not fully implemented, Dodd-Frank has not reduced the number of systemically risky firms or placed meaningful new limits on their size, interconnectedness, or leverage. In fact, since the crisis began the largest financial firms have become even larger. In 1995 the assets controlled by JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley represented 17 percent of GDP; as of January 2011 these firms controlled assets equal to 64 percent of our nation’s GDP. Today, the five largest banks, which controlled slightly more than 10 percent of deposits in the early 1990s, control over 45 percent.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/03/josh-rosner-dodd-frank-is-a-farce-on-too-big-to-fail.html