Think of the chiefs of the large banks like a character from Mickey Mouse. Yes, i know it's hard -- but try.
Think particularly of Fantasia -- and the Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence, where Mickey dresses up in the magician's cloak (much too big for him), consults the book of spells and proceeds to get the brooms to carry water backwards and forwards to clean the floor of the magicians house. Hold that image in your mind while you read the rest of this note.
As the immediacy of the crisis recedes, so more time for reflection brings increasingly complex solutions to the financial mess we find ourselves in.
Originally the proposed distinction seemed to be between 'good banks' and -- somewhat unoriginal, this -- 'bad banks'. Good banks would be what was left after all the financial pus was cleaned out of the wound and bad banks was where all the icky stuff would go. The Swedes more or less invented the structure years ago during their last banking crisis, (in comparison to the Japanese who kept everything bundled together and ended up with 'zombie' banks). Ordinarily banks want to retain and attract customers; that sort of bank would be the good banks. By contrast the purpose of the bad banks would be to get rid of their customers by gradually working out the loans, with minimal losses of value; running the two different sorts of bank requires different sets of managerial skills.
A development of the good bank/bad bank idea was to revive the structure brought about by the American Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (repealed by one W Clinton in 1999) which prohibited American banks from undertaking both commercial and investment banking. The thinking behind this was that it was the investment banks which got us into this mess so if we can them separate from the High Street retail banks, then we shan't have any more runs on banks, which so frightened the horses, and the financial regulators can contain the effects of whatever self-harm the bankers do to the bankers themselves, rather than precipitating the whole world to the brink of financial catastrophe.
Recently, however, the debate has got more complex. Some commentators have pointed out that it wasn't just the investment banks (the complex ones) that got us into trouble. it was in fact the High Street (simple) arms of the banks playing around with things that they didn't know the power of -- a bit like the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
So the argument from these supposedly more sophisticated commentators is that we shouldn't try to separate the banks into simple and complex or good and bad , because that wasn't the root of the problem.
Regardless of whether it was or was not, what the recommendations of the simple bank proponents ignores is this. The money that the investment banks play around with is mostly based on pension funds, insurance funds, corporate treasury money and municipal treasury. In other words all the really big money that matters for the long run. So regulating the paltry High Street funds tightly and letting the Sorcerer's Apprentices continue to play with the long-term wealth of the economy doesn't really seem like too sophisticated a solution, does it?.
Rather than give Mickey Mouse the book of spells to play with in any part of the banking structure and try to proof the rest of the structure against him, we ought to make sure that all the structure is as Mickey Mouse-proof as we can get it in the first place.
