A VICTORY AGAINST THE SHADOWS / THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Victory Against the Shadows

Paul Krugman

April 11, 2015 11:21 am

There are two big lessons from GE’s announcement that it is planning to get out of the finance business. First, the much maligned Dodd-Frank financial reform is doing some real good. Second, Republicans have been talking nonsense on the subject. OK, maybe point #2 isn’t really news, but it’s important to understand just what kind of nonsense they’ve been talking.

 

GE Capital was a quintessential example of the rise of shadow banking. In most important respects it acted like a bank; it created systemic risks very much like a bank; but it was effectively unregulated, and had to be bailed out through ad hoc arrangements that understandably had many people furious about putting taxpayers on the hook for private irresponsibility.

 

Most economists, I think, believe that the rise of shadow banking had less to do with real advantages of such nonbank banks than it did with regulatory arbitrage — that is, institutions like GE Capital were all about exploiting the lack of adequate oversight. And the general view is that the 2008 crisis came about largely because regulatory evasion had reached the point where an old-fashioned wave of bank runs, albeit wearing somewhat different clothes, was once again possible.

 

So Dodd-Frank tries to fix the bad incentives by subjecting systemically important financial institutions — SIFIs — to greater oversight, higher capital and liquidity requirements, etc..

 

And sure enough, what GE is in effect saying is that if we have to compete on a level playing field, if we can’t play the moral hazard game, it’s not worth being in this business. That’s a clear demonstration that reform is having a real effect.

 

Now, the more or less official GOP line is that the crisis had nothing to do with runaway banks — it was all about Barney Frank somehow forcing poor innocent bankers to make loans to Those People.

 

And the line on the right also asserts that the SIFI designation is actually an invitation to behave badly, that institutions so designated know that they are too big to fail and can start living high on the moral hazard hog.

 

But as Mike Konczal notes, GE — following in the footsteps of others, notably MetLife — is clearly desperate to get out from under the SIFI designation. It sure looks as if being named a SIFI is indeed what it’s supposed to be, a burden rather than a bonus.

 

A good day for the reformers.