Courtesy of The Obama plan is exactly backwards in its approach to systemic risk. It will increase systemic risk.
As pointed out by one of the leaders of econophysics, Eugene Stanley (here), one of the prime results in the exploding field of network theory is that densely connected networks are chaotic and unstable compared to sparsely connected networks.
This only makes sense. If every part of a network affects every other part of a network it becomes very easy for large perturbations to propagate through the network, and rebound, and so on.
The Obama-Summers-Geithner solution to our problem of systemic risk is evidence of an intellectual obtuseness that is breathtaking.
The Fed created or permitted by neglect of its duties the systemic risk that caused this crash, and the Great Depression before it. Mish got this right.
The obvious solution given that systemic risk is a characteristic of the structure of the financial system is to change the structure of the system to reduce systemic risk. Break up investment banks and commercial banks. Eliminate financial institutions that are big enough to create systemic risk all by themselves (no more “too big to fail”). Make it impossible for the system to become densely connected by limiting leverage. The plan does increase capital requirements but not enough. And it leaves the trading of CDSs, the densely-linked network of derivatives that largely caused the supposed near melt-down of the system last fall, lightly regulated and less than transparent.
You can’t leave the TBTF institutions in place, or they will capture the regulators again. Or perhaps it’s better to say they’re not letting them go at this time.
Glass-Steagall and the other laws that the neocons undid over the past thirty years worked. They kept the system stable for sixty years.
Let’s bring them back.
Here is Simon Johnson’s take:
Too Big To Fail, Politically
What is the essence of the problem with our financial system – what brought us into deep crisis, what scared us most in September/October of last year, and what was the
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