One Year Later, Is Wall Street Crisis Over?
Submitted by DeepDiveAdmin on Sep 13, 2009
On Sept. 15, 2008, the previously unshakable financial firm Lehman Brothers collapsed, setting off a wave of panic throughout Wall Street that marked some of the darkest and most troubling days of the recession. One year later, Wall Street's precarious position has seemingly stabilized, but have the financial markets taken real steps to ensure that another meltdown never happens again? Many have their doubts. The Associated Press has more:
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The recession may have settled and a recovery begun, though slow as expected; but hold on before giving congratulations out.
The administration recognized the primary root of the problem - the shadow banking industry. The sub-prime mortgage market was not nearly large enough to cause the collapse we saw. We can trace it directly to the hedge funds and shadow banks since they were using sketchy financial tools to essentially manufacture false loans using derivatives. While rather creative, it was quite destructive. They were doing this with a variety of things, not just loans. So anyone who claims is was sub-prime lending has no idea what they are talking about. Our government couldn't keep up with these new tools and didn't regulate them properly, essentially let them regulate themselves (yeah - that's quality regulation lol). Additionally, we didn't have the capital requirements, risk requirements, and an equivalent of the FDIC etc to keep these shadow banks sound. These shadow banks are responsible for over half of the worlds credit market, it made 0 sense why we weren't regulating them just like traditional lending institutions.
Anyway, while the administration has done some good stuff it needs to do a lot more. Giving the government the authority to take control of "too big too fail" institutions to prevent insolvency, and hence a crisis, is a pretty big step forward. The FDIC can already do this with traditional banks, it only made sense to extend the idea to the shadow banks.
Additionally, the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency is interesting; however, it only requires 5% of loans be held. 5% holdings is not nearly enough to prevent abusive and reckless lending; these companies will still just peddle off loans and ruin the system again by lending irresponsibly the overwhelming majority of the time for short-term profit. Furthermore, where in the world is the new improvements and regulations on the rating agencies? These rating agencies were so dumb and couldn't handle the new financial tools I alluded too, they were just rubber-stamping everything in site as being 5 star, so to speak. They played a huge role in creating this problem since investors didn't know what they were buying and trading, the rating agencies said they were just fine - but they were no where near that.
The point is, while we may be emerging from the current recession if we don't do more to regulate the shadow banks and dramatically reform the rating agencies we'll be here in 3-5 years all over again - except it will be significantly worse.
We've taken someone who has cancer , we've removed the tumor - but we haven't done the chemotherapy follow-up. Without the chemo, we'll face the problem again and possibly even worse.