Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Senator Sherrod Brown, Chairman of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, will take testimony at 2 p.m. today on market subsidies enjoyed by implied future government bailouts of the too-big-to-fail status of Wall Street’s bloated and serially malfeasant banks. The hearing is set to coincide with a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
An early peek at written testimony by three separate professors set to testify guarantees a belated July 4 fireworks display — one that is not likely to enjoy a welcome reception within the Wall Street corridors of power. Expect the phone lines of lobbyists and congressional campaign managers to be lighting up all over the nation’s capitol this afternoon.
Professor Edward J. Kane
Edward J. Kane, Professor of Finance at Boston College will get things off to a rousing start by telling the Subcommittee that any suggestion that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation ended the implied government guarantees “is a dangerous pipe dream.”
A powerful argument made by Kane (see full text of testimony linked below) is that these too-big-to-fail banks enjoy not just a market subsidy on their debt but on their equity as well. Kane writes:
“Being TBTF [too-big-to-fail] lowers both the cost of debt and the cost of equity. This is because TBTF guarantees lower the risk that flows through to the holders of both kinds of contracts. The lower discount rate on TBTF equity means that, period by period, a TBTF institution’s incremental reduction in interest payments on outstanding bonds, deposits, and repos is only part of the subsidy its stockholders enjoy. The other part is the increase in its stock price that comes from having investors discount all of the firm’s current and future cash flows at an artificially low risk-adjusted cost of equity. This intangible benefit generates capital gains for stockholders and shows up in the ratio of TBTF firms’ stock price to book value. Other things equal (including the threat of closure), a TBTF firm’s price-to-book ratio increases with firm size…”
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