Bair Throws a Fake

My sport growing up was hockey (alas, I’m too old to play it now), and for those of you who know the sport, you’ll understand how success on a breakaway depends on the move the shooter makes on the goalie. Make one move and you might score; make two and your chances of scoring go up.

Well, Sheila Bair would make a great hockey player. She certainly knows how to throw a fake.

Yesterday, Bair published an Op-Ed in The New York Times that feigned a focus on fixing the nation’s banking system. The truth is Bair’s argument about whether or not there should be one regulator matters little to the safety and soundness of US banking. What does matter is how stringent will the regulator(s) be with bankers, and on that matter there is zero debate today.

The fact is that regulators don’t really know. They actually have little feel for how to balance too strict regulation that it cuts growth and too lenient regulation that we revisit September 2008. In her Op-Ed, Bair wrote, “The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation voiced strong concerns about the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s relatively relaxed rules for determining how much capital banks should have on hand. In a single-regulator system, it’s very likely that these rules would have been put into effect much more quickly and with fewer safeguards, and our largest banks would have faced the current crisis with much smaller buffers of capital.”

And this statement followed another that acknowledged regulators’ shortcomings: “The truth is, no regulatory structure — be it a single regulator as in Britain or the multiregulator system we have in the United States — performed well in the crisis.”

Well, if the FDIC had performed well, it would have gotten the reserve requirements right. It didn’t – none of the US regulators did – yet, there is zero debate on this matter today. There should be. It is not the enforcers of the rules that matter most to the safety and soundness of the US banking system. It is the rules themselves. We should fall for the fake obscuring the real matter of importance today.