Recently the blogosphere was awash in pointing out right-wing pundits who did not believe there was a housing bubble. I find that completely uninteresting and uninformative – but if that floats your ideological boat then happy sailing to you. Here is something I find more interesting – the author of the leading Money and Banking textbook claiming that “too big to fail” doctrine is not as big a problem as folks like me tend to argue it is, and that FDICIA regulation in 1991 improved bank regulation and supervision make it much less likely that we will have a bank crisis.
This essay was written in 2006:
This review essay examines whether too-big-to-fail is as serious a problem as Gary
Stern and Ron Feldman contend. This essay argues that Stern and Feldman overstate
the importance of the too-big-to-fail problem and do not give enough credit to the
FDICIA legislation of 1991 for improving bank regulation and supervision. However,
this criticism of the Stern and Feldman book does not detract from many of its messages.
The policy recommendations in their book have merit even if the too-big-to-fail
problem is currently not that serious because these policies make it less likely that a
banking crisis will occur even if driven by other factors.
It is not freely available, but here is the reference: Mishkin, Frederic. “How Big a Problem is Too Big to Fail?
A Review of Gary Stern and Ron Feldman’s Too Big to Fail: The Hazards of Bank Bailouts” Journal of Economic Literature Vol. XLIV (December 2006), pp. 988–1004. Granted, he was only talking about commercial banks. Where is the cool blog list of people making similar claims?
