By Rich Miller
Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s proposal to impose limits on commercial banks may win him support on Main Street and shake up Wall Street without doing much to make the financial system safer overall.
The plan, which is still lacking in details and must be approved by Congress, aims to make the banks more secure by forcing them to minimize the trading they do on their own account and give up their stakes in hedge funds and private equity firms. “It’s the right direction,” said Henry Kaufman, president of Henry Kaufman & Co. in New York and a former vice chairman of Salomon Inc.
The danger is that such risky activities could simply migrate to big non-bank financial institutions, leaving the system as a whole no better off. Banks also might try to make up for the loss of profits from proprietary trading by lending more to risky borrowers such as real estate developers, threatening the federal safety net, said Martin Baily, a former White House economist now with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
“Beware of unintended consequences,” said Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation, a group that promotes entrepreneurship, and a former Clinton administration budget official. “This could have perverse effects on risk-taking.”
The proposals highlight the difficulties the administration has faced in dealing with institutions that have grown so big and risky that their failure could rock the financial system. Until that’s resolved, the U.S. will be forced to use taxpayer money to rescue failed firms or risk the same sort of global financial panic that occurred in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse in September 2008.
Stocks Fall
U.S. stocks tumbled yesterday as the White House proposal hit bank shares. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 1.9 percent, the most since Oct. 30. JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. slumped more than 4 percent in New York trading.
The president’s proposals “would require a shrinkage of the profit-making activity of some of these institutions,” David Nason, a former Treasury assistant secretary who is now a managing director of Promontory Financial Group in Washington, told Bloomberg Television. “If implemented it would be a significant change.”
Goldman Sachs generated at least 76 percent of 2009 revenue from trading and principal investments and gets the “great majority” of transactions from customers, according to Chief Financial Officer David Viniar. About 10 percent of the New York-based firm’s revenue comes from “walled-off proprietary business that has nothing to do with clients,” he said on a conference call yesterday.
JPMorgan Investments
New York-based JPMorgan derived $9.8 billion of revenue from principal investments in 2009, or 9.8 percent of the firmwide total, according to its financial statements. The prior year, the bank lost $10.7 billion on principal investments.
Obama, who unveiled the proposals yesterday at the White House, also called for legislation to limit how big financial institutions can get by putting a ceiling on the share of the market they’re allowed to hold.
“The American people will not be served by a financial system that comprises just a few massive firms,” the president said, with former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, a advocate of such steps, at his side.
The proposal was reminiscent of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 act that separated commercial and investment banking and was repealed in 1999. The Depression-era law was stricter than the president’s proposal, which would allow commercial banks to continue some investment-banking activities like underwriting stock offerings, merger-and-acquisition advice and asset management.
‘Every Single Dime’
The plan to rein in banks was Obama’s second this month. On Jan. 14 he proposed to tax the biggest financial firms in order to get back “every single dime” of taxpayer money used in bailouts. Obama’s latest broadside came just hours after Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, reported record earnings that beat analysts’ estimates.
Some financial experts see a political motive. “The Democrats are trying to come up with a theme that appeals to the public,” ahead of November congressional elections, said Gary Dewaal, group general counsel in New York for Paris-based Newedge Group, which calls itself the world’s largest futures broker. “It’s almost as if there’s a specific effort: Let’s come up with a new proposal every week to keep the excesses of Wall Street on the front page and we’ll make it clear to everyone that the Democrats are against the excesses of Wall Street.”
Massachusetts Election
Democrats were thrown into disarray this week after Republican Scott Brown’s come-from-behind victory in the Jan. 19 Massachusetts special election robbed it of its 60-vote super- majority in the Senate.
If anything, the too-big-to-fail problem has gotten worse since the crisis, said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist with the International Monetary Fund who’s now with the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics. The six biggest financial institutions now hold assets equivalent to 62 percent of the economy, up from 58 percent before the crisis and 20 percent in 1994, he said.
The Obama economic team, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and National Economic Council director Lawrence H. Summers, initially backed a two-pronged approach for tackling the issue. It proposed increased capital requirements and tougher regulation of big firms. It also called for establishment of a so-called resolution authority that would allow the government to shut down failing institutions without triggering financial turmoil.
Blanket Restriction
Conspicuous by its absence was any blanket restriction on banks’ activities and limits on their size -- an approach favored by Volcker, who heads the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Administration officials said the White House put forward the proposals after seeing banks’ profits surge over the past year through proprietary trading, a year after being rescued by the government.
“Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail,” Obama said.
Even if the president’s proposals are adopted by Congress, U.S. taxpayers could end up on the hook for a non-bank financial institution, said Jeremy Stein, a Harvard University professor and a former adviser to Summers at the NEC. That’s what happened in the last crisis, when the government was forced rescue Bear Stearns Cos. and insurance giant American International Group Inc. Neither company would have been affected by the ban on proprietary trading.
Earlier Proposals
Administration officials said that yesterday’s announcement should be viewed in conjunction with their earlier proposals, including tougher oversight of non-financial firms and the authority to wind up systemically important institutions if needed.
There are doubts whether the U.S. could shut down a big international institution in an orderly way even if it got such authority, Litan said. That’s because regulators overseas lack similar powers, raising questions about how much the U.S. could do on its own.
Even some supporters of the president’s approach believe that Obama in the end will have to go further and shrink the size of existing firms. “Goldman Sachs has to break itself into at least four or five parts,” said Johnson, who called Obama’s announcement “the best news so far” on the financial regulatory front.
House Plan
It’s not clear how the president’s proposal will fare in Congress. The House already passed a regulatory overhaul that gives regulators the ability to impose restrictions on banks. The new Obama plan makes it more explicit, requiring regulators to ban commercial banks from proprietary trading or from owning hedge and private equity funds.
Some Democratic lawmakers didn’t jump to endorse the plan. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said “I look forward to studying the president’s proposal and will give it careful consideration.”
House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, cautioned that parts of the proposal would need to be implemented over three to five years to avoid flooding the market with hedge fund and other assets that banks spin off.
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