Minds are changing on Too Big to Fail. A month ago, it was just something in the air. Now, it looks like we're headed for a real legislative confrontation. And man, is the finance sector freaking.
Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the "Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act," or the "Brown-Vitter TBTF Act" for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.
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Here the S&P is saying: "You might think, just because we're a ratings agency that's supposed to always think safety and security are good things, that we think increased safety and security for these banks is a good idea. However . . ."
Translated into English, what they mean is: If this bill passes, these banks would no longer be Too Big To Fail. So we'd probably have to downgrade them.
Well – duh!
Not only is this an explicit admission that Dodd-Frank didn't fix the Too-Big-To-Fail issue (Wall Street has long insisted that Dodd-Frank was more than sufficient to deal with the "moral hazard" problem), it's a crazy thing to say out loud. S&P writes about having to factor out the implicit government backing of big banks as though that would be a bad thing. But if implicit government support is the only thing keeping the ratings of these companies even as high as they are now, that means they really should be rated lower, in a true free market.
And Standard and Poor's is, what – against admitting that?
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.
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