The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are moving to reduce the supplementary leverage ratio that big banks, and only those big banks, must maintain. The ratio is the amount of money those specifically-selected-by-government banks must maintain over and above their regular capital requirements against times of “market turmoil.” The reduction would make available much more money for those banks to lend into our economy.
Fed governor Michael Barr, once the Fed’s top bank regulator is opposed to the move. He’s cited by The Wall Street Journal as saying that the proposal would “significantly increase” the risk of a big bank failure.
To which I say, so what?
The failure of a “big” bank would be disruptive in the short term and potentially damaging to the particular bank’s creditors—depositors and others lending money to the bank—but in the intermediate- and long-term, such a failure would be net beneficial to our economy.
A big bank failure—without government bailout—would go a long way toward mitigating, even eliminating, the market distortions of an enterprise in our private economy—which is the economy outside of the government—being held as too big to fail and so guaranteed our taxpayers’ dollars being used to keep it alive, despite that lousy management having, over an extended period, brought the enterprise to that strait.
Reducing the supplementary leverage ratio also is a way of injecting more money into our economy without it being government tax money being injected. Our economy’s money supply would be increased, or not, based on sound business decision-making rather than on flawed political decision-making.
Fewer market distortions, less tolerance of bad performance in our market place, and reduced special treatments of particular businesses, would only make our market economy freer and more efficient and more prosperous for us all.