You Know It: Regulators Bone Up on Bankings’ Inner Workings

“Full faith and trust.” This is our definition of the federal government’s backing. The greatest economic miracle in history, America, has over the decades conjured up such passionate faith that the perceived risk of US government bond default traditionally was marked at zero.

Of course, we can look back over the last two years and realize that the federal government had plenty of slack in its hold of the economic reins of this country. Arguably greater than all other failings, every president until Obama (because of circumstance) deserves acute blame for this.

However, the greatest and most beneficial result of the credit crisis has been the abrupt reversal of the gaping holes in the government’s understanding of the nation’s financial risks. When a few years ago The Wall Street Journal, in a prescient editorial, called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nothing more than an ad hoc hedge funds, the shock of it all was not that it was true. No, everyone in the financial community knew it to be so. The shock was that the regulators, and regulators alone, didn’t.

Now they do. In fact, they know much more than that. The migration to the Bank Holding Act has led nearly every financial services company in the nation – certainly the major institutions – to lift its skirt for regulators. That includes Goldman Sachs, American Express, and Morgan Stanley. How else could Paul Volcker pitch an end to prop trading recently?

The Federal Reserve stores all this information in a Fort Knox-like internal computer system, and I couldn’t be more satisfied that most every Fed official has access to the reams of data there – after countless-factor verifications, of course.

Call this the “No More Secrets” Era of banking. To say that such a diametric change in the balance of information was necessary just might be the most profound understatements of all. The New Yorker, in a thought-provoking profile of Tim Geithner in the March 15 issue, said that “[Geithner’s] problem may be not economic illiteracy but its opposite: Americans understand all too well what has happened. Financial crises have a way of revealing aspects of our economic system that otherwise remain obscured, such as the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and Washington, the hidden subsidies that financial firms sometimes receive from the Fed and other government agencies, and the fact that the vast profits that firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman generate depend in part on an implicit guarantee from the taxpayer.” Revealing to regulators, too. This revelation has even changed the perception of federal action. When Volcker takes aim at prop trading, he is doing so from a knowledge base of far greater depth than at any time in financial history in America. I’m down with that.