He wrote,
if banks are doing their job, the banking system is illiquid, and the rest of the economy —us— have lots of cash. In Econ 101 this is known as “maturity transformation.” Liquidity-wise, the banking system is simply the mirror image of the economy. Thus, compelling banks to become more liquid inevitably drains cash from all of us who are not banks.
This is another way of saying what I like to say, which is that the public wants to issue risky, long-term liabilities and to hold riskless, short-term assets, and financial intermediaries accommodate this by doing the opposite. This implies that for financial firms, a liquidity crisis blends into a solvency crisis. Banks must shrink their activity if there is sudden pressure on them to make their balance sheets more liquid.
In a more recent post, he writes,
what did cause the crisis? The causes were complex, but one force overwhelmed all others: regulation. Bad regulation. Mainly, the Basel I and Basel II Capital Standards.
He is referring to the Financial Crisis of 2008. Actually, I don’t believe that Basel II was all that important, because it still was mostly unimplemented by the time of the crisis. I would focus on Basel I and also on the Recourse Rule of 2001, which we might think of as Basel I(a).
More interestingly, he goes on to say,
the great untold secret of the crisis was the strength of the US commercial banking industry.
As crazy as this sounds, it may be spot on. Yes, Citigroup was in trouble, as he acknowledges. But most other commercial banks were not in bad shape. Some U.S. investment banks (aka “shadow banks”) were shakier, but the real problems were in Europe. He writes,
European banks in 2007 had aggregate tangible equity of roughly 1 trillion euros (at the time, about $1.1 trillion.) With a sensible leverage ratio of 5.0%, this equity would have supported E20 trillion in assets. But by 2000, the average European bank leverage ratio already had dwindled to 3.8% (insufficient), and then fell further — to 3.0% (wow) in 2007.* That may not sound like a big deal, but it’s more than a 20% systemic increase in leverage in just 7 years. This meant that for European banks alone, the Basel Regs goosed asset demand by at least E7 trillion ($8 trillion).** To think of it another way, European bank assets in 2007 exceeded what would have been prudent leverage (i.e. 5%) by E13 trillion ($15 trillion) — a third of European banking system assets.
I would add that many of the beneficiaries of the “AIG bailout” were European banks.
There is a lot of potential for revisionist history here.