Take an Ax to the Biggest Banks

Do you remember the feel? The my-bank-is-going-bankrupt pit in your stomach?

Time heals all wounds, they say, and that includes stomach “pits” that not a banker in the nation avoided during the credit crisis.

Of course, it is infinitely better to see the train wreck through a rear-view mirror. It’s too windy standing over an abyss.

With that step away from financial Armageddon is a kind of wariness with it, too. So painful was the effort to save the financial system that the thought of sticking around to fix it – and not just go about our lives – seems like a return to that ignoble place. And who wants to go there?

Yet, precisely when the tough get going, the going should absolutely redress the nation’s financial system. My argument: break up the biggest banks. No longer is the US economy in peril of financial collapse. With the large banks back on solid ground, the notion of fragmenting them for the good of minimizing risk makes far more sense than when the economy was in deep peril. And fragmenting them would be quite simple to do, particularly since banks have been notoriously awful at synthesizing their banking systems. It’s not like card divisions and wholesale banking are inextricably intertwined today at the largest of banks.

Taking such an action would require a bold action on the part of the federal government, and frankly the Obama administration does not have the political capital to pull it off. (Which, I understand, makes my position theoretical.)

The only caveat to the Bell Telephone approach is wholesale banking. Can our nation’s largest corporations be served effectively without Bank of America, Citigroup, et al? I would suggest yes, as long as the splintered off wholesale banking units have a healthy balance sheet. That healthy balance sheet might be even more possible by divorcing wholesale banking from other, more risk-laden businesses within megabanks. At least the, say, BofA Wholesale Banking spinoff will have less baggage than BofA as a whole today. That must be heartening, to some degree, to the Wal-Marts of the world.

To be fair, a standalone retail banking venture has a higher cost structure than one that is a part of a bank with a $100 billion market capitalization. But that’s a necessary price to pay for less concentrated systemic risk.

You can see a fragment of the approach I am suggesting in Paul Volcker’s call to eliminate prop trading, since downgraded to hedge and private equity fund activities. I see Volcker’s point, although I see how his ban could end up hurting the banks he aims to contain. The Bell Telephone approach does not hurt banks; it merely allows the parts to focus more intently on their core activities, without an intermingling of risk on a grand scale. I like to think of it as the no-pit-in-the-stomach strategy.