The Capital Spectator

With that in mind, here are a few points in Cochrane's article that are worth debating...

Why was there a financial panic? There were two obvious precipitating events: the failure of Lehman Brothers investment bank in the context of the Bear Stearns, FannieMae, Freddie Mac and aig bailouts; and the chaotic days inWashington surrounding the passage of legislation establishing the TroubledAsset Relief Program (tarp). Why would Lehman’s failure cause a panic?

Why, after seeing Lehman go to bankruptcy court, would people stop lending to, say, Citigroup, and demandmuch higher prices for its credit default swaps (insurance against Citi failure)? Nothing technical in the Lehman bankruptcy caused a panic. The usual “systemic” bankruptcy stories did not happen:We did not see a secondary wave of creditors forced into bankruptcy by Lehman losses.Most of Lehman’s operations were up and running in days under new owners. Lehman credit default swaps (cdss) paid off. Sure, there was some mess — repos in the United Kingdomgot stuck in bankruptcy court, somemoneymarket funds “broke the buck” and had to borrow from the Fed — but those issues are easy to fix and they do not explain why Lehman’s failure would cause a widespread panic.What ismore, Lehman’s failure did not carry any news about asset values; it was obvious already that those assets were not worth much and illiquid anyway.

We are left with only one plausible explanation for why Lehman’s failure could have had such wide-ranging effect: After the Bear Stearns bailout earlier in the year, markets came to the conclusion that investment banks and bank holding companies were “too big to fail” and would be bailed out. But when the government did not bail out Lehman, and in fact said it lacked the legal authority to do so, everyone reassessed that expectation. “Maybe the government will not, or cannot, bail out Citigroup?” Suddenly, it made perfect sense to run like mad.

The critical issue, Cochrane writes, is that...

Bank deposits, subject to runs, pose an externality.We all understand that markets can fail when there are externalities. If we need to allowbank deposits,we need a guarantee or priority in bankruptcy, which leads tomoral hazard and puts taxpayer at risk. Some regulation and a forced separation of these “systemic” contracts fromarbitrary risk-taking are necessary. But this is a veryminimal level of regulation compared to the too-big-to-fail guarantee and extensive discretionary supervision and regulation now being applied to the entire financial system.

The stakes, as a result, are clear, he asserts:

We are in an ever-increasing cycle of risk-taking and too-big-to-fail bailouts, going back decades. Now we know that bank holding companies, insurance companies, and investment banks are too big to fail in the government’s eyes and their activities are not going to be fundamentally restricted in size and scope. This crisis strained the fiscal limits of the United States to make good on bailout expectations. The next one will be bigger. Where will it come from? State and local government defaults? Defined benefit pension funds? Commercial real estate? A new “Asian bubble?” Default by Greece, Italy, or Ireland? Who knows? We do know this: when the government no longer has the fiscal resources to bail out its financial institutions, the crisis will be much, much worse. Iceland can happen in the United States if we do not get this right.