The two-year anniversary of Dodd-Frank has come and gone, and Too Big To Fail is only growing.
Sure, President Obama assured us the sweeping law would reform the sleaze and mindless risk-taking of the banking business — but all it’s given us is the certainty of future bailouts.
Actually, that’s not fair: It’s also producing reams and reams of rules and regulations that force banks out of certain profitable lines of business, like proprietary trading, that had little to do with the shenanigans that led the financial crisis.
But the biggest problem is the expansion of the largest single contributor to the banking collapse: The government’s protection of the remaining big financial institutions, a k a Too Big To Fail.
The reason Too Big To Fail is so dangerous is that it provides a level of comfort to the Wall Street risk takers — enabling them to act like riverboat gamblers and simply bet more and more until the system comes crashing down, as it did four years ago. Why fear, when the taxpayer is on the hook for your losses?
Dodd-Frank was supposed to end the bank-protection racket. Everyone from the president to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (who’s due up on Capitol Hill this week to discuss the law) to its chief sponsors, then-Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, said so.
They tell us the law makes certain that the next time the big banks take too much risk, there will no taxpayer bailout: The bankers (and those who trusted them) will have to pay for their risk-taking sins in bankruptcy court, just like any other business in America.
Don’t buy it. A relatively open secret on Wall Street is that the megabanks that survived the financial crisis — JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo — are still very much protected by the federal government and the American taxpayer.
And they’re hardly bashful about pointing this out whenever their shares begin to tank — whether it’s over worries of exposure to soured European debt, as with Morgan Stanley recently — or, as with Goldman Sachs a while back, when authorities begin to probe improprieties that could bring criminal charges that no bank can survive.
Here’s why: Nowhere does Dodd-Frank completely bar the government from bailing out the banks, as it did in 2008. Yes, the law calls for “the orderly liquidation” of big banks when they get into trouble, but it never rules out a bailout.
In fact, it’s nearly impossible to orderly liquidate something the size of JP Morgan, with more than $2 trillion in assets and more than $1 trillion in federally insured customer deposits. Like the other “megas,” Morgan is just too big and convoluted to sort out, with financial products traded across the globe and customers in nearly every major country. All of which leaves open the likelihood that the American taxpayer will once more have to bail it out.
In fact, it looks like Too Big To Fail is even expanding under Dodd-Frank.
Just last week, after consultation with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Nasdaq exchange unveiled its plan to compensate investors who lost money during the botched Facebook IPO.
Buried in the fine print of the “accommodation” plan is a key clause, in which Nasdaq says its legal liabilities must be capped because: “If exchanges could be called upon to bear all costs associated with system malfunctions and the varying reactions of market participants taken in their wake, the potential would exist for a single catastrophic event to bankrupt one or multiple exchanges, with attendant consequences for investor confidence and macroeconomic stability.”
In other words, add the Nasdaq to the list of Too Big To Fail entities.
Later this week, Geithner is scheduled to appear before Congress. There’s talk among some staffers of placing him under oath so he’ll be completely forthcoming about what he knew about the latest industry scandal, the alleged manipulation of the financial benchmark known as Libor.
While they’re at it, the members of Congress might also prod the Treasury secretary as to why he’s done next to nothing to end Too Big To Fail, and has even watched the pernicious practice expand to other financial institutions outside the big banks under his watch.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.