Wall Street Crash of 1929

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929

Wall Street Crash of 1929

Crowd gathering on Wall Street after the 1929 crash
Date	4 September 1929–13 November 1929
Type	Stock market crash
Cause	Fears of excessive speculation by the Federal Reserve

The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, was a major stock market crash that occurred in 1929. It started in September and ended late in October, when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange collapsed.

It was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, when taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its aftereffects. The crash, which followed the London Stock Exchange's crash of September, signaled the beginning of the Great Depression.

Background

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, 1928–1930

The "Roaring Twenties", the decade following World War I that led to the crash, was a time of wealth and excess. Building on post-war optimism, rural Americans migrated to the cities in vast numbers throughout the decade with the hopes of finding a more prosperous life in the ever-growing expansion of America's industrial sector. While American cities prospered, however, the overproduction of agricultural produce created widespread financial despair among American farmers throughout the decade, which was later blamed as one of the key factors that led to the 1929 stock market crash.

Despite the dangers of speculation, it was widely believed that the stock market would continue to rise forever: on March 25, 1929, after the Federal Reserve warned of excessive speculation, a small crash occurred as investors started to sell stocks at a rapid pace, exposing the market's shaky foundation. Two days later, banker Charles E. Mitchell announced that his company, the National City Bank, would provide $25 million in credit to stop the market's slide. Mitchell's move brought a temporary halt to the financial crisis, and call money declined from 20 to 8 percent. However, the American economy showed ominous signs of trouble: steel production declined, construction was sluggish, automobile sales went down, and consumers were building up high debts because of easy credit.

Despite all the economic warning signs and the market breaks in March and May 1929, stocks resumed their advance in June and the gains continued almost unabated until early September 1929 (the Dow Jones average gained more than 20% between June and September). The market had been on a nine-year run that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average increase in value tenfold, peaking at 381.17 on September 3, 1929. Shortly before the crash, economist Irving Fisher famously proclaimed "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." The optimism and the financial gains of the great bull market were shaken after a well-publicized early September prediction from financial expert Roger Babson that "a crash is coming, and it may be terrific".^[7] The initial September decline was thus called the "Babson Break" in the press. That was the start of the Great Crash, but until the severe phase of the crash in October, many investors regarded the September "Babson Break" as a "healthy correction" and buying opportunity.

On September 20, the London Stock Exchange crashed when top British investor Clarence Hatry and many of his associates were jailed for fraud and forgery. The London crash greatly weakened the optimism of American investment in markets overseas: in the days leading up to the crash, the market was severely unstable. Periods of selling and high volumes were interspersed with brief periods of rising prices and recovery.

Crash

Overall Price Indexon Wall Street from just before the crash in 1929 to 1932 when the price bottomed out

 

Selling intensified in mid-October. On October 24, "Black Thursday", the market lost 11 percent of its value at the opening bell on very heavy trading. The huge volume meant that the report of prices on the ticker tape in brokerage offices around the nation was hours late and so investors had no idea what most stocks were actually trading for. Several leading Wall Street bankers met to find a solution to the panic and chaos on the trading floor. The meeting included Thomas W. Lamont, acting head of Morgan Bank; Albert Wiggin, head of the Chase National Bank; and Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Bank of New York. They chose Richard Whitney, vice president of the Exchange, to act on their behalf. 

With the bankers' financial resources behind him, Whitney placed a bid to purchase a large block of shares in U.S. Steel at a price well above the current market. As traders watched, Whitney then placed similar bids on other "blue chip" stocks. The tactic was similar to one that had ended the Panic of 1907, and succeeded in halting the slide. The Dow Jones Industrial Average recovered, closing with it down only 6.38 points for the day.

The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1930, six months after the crash of 1929

 

On October 28, "Black Monday," more investors facing margin calls decided to get out of the market, and the slide continued with a record loss in the Dow for the day of 38.33 points, or 12.82%.

The next day, the panic selling reached its peak with some stocks having no buyers at any price. The Dow lost an additional 30.57 points, or 11.73%, for a total drop of 23% in two days.

On October 29, William C. Durant joined with members of the Rockefeller family and other financial giants to buy large quantities of stocks to demonstrate to the public their confidence in the market, but their efforts failed to stop the large decline in prices. The massive volume of stocks traded that day made the ticker continue to run until about 7:45 p.m.

Dow Jones Industrial Average on Black Monday and Black Tuesday

Date	Change	% Change	Close
October 28, 1929	−38.33	−12.82	260.64
October 29, 1929	−30.57	−11.73	230.07

After a one-day recovery on October 30, when the Dow regained 28.40 points, or 12.34%, to close at 258.47, the market continued to fall, arriving at an interim bottom on November 13, 1929, with the Dow closing at 198.60. The market then recovered for several months, starting on November 14, with the Dow gaining 18.59 points to close at 217.28, and reaching a secondary closing peak (bear market rally) of 294.07 on April 17, 1930. The Dow then embarked on another, much longer, steady slide from April 1930 to July 8, 1932, when it closed at 41.22, its lowest level of the 20th century, concluding an 89.2% loss for the index in less than three years. 

Beginning on March 15, 1933, and continuing through the rest of the 1930s, the Dow began to slowly regain the ground it had lost. The largest percentage increases of the Dow Jones occurred during the early and mid-1930s. In late 1937, there was a sharp dip in the stock market, but prices held well above the 1932 lows. The Dow Jones did not return to the peak closing of September 3, 1929, until November 23, 1954.

Aftermath

In 1932, the Pecora Commission was established by the U.S. Senate to study the causes of the crash. The following year, the U.S. Congress passed the Glass–Steagall Act mandating a separation between commercial banks, which take deposits and extend loans, and investment banks, which underwrite, issue, and distribute stocks, bonds, and other securities.

After the experience of the 1929 crash, stock markets around the world instituted measures to suspend trading in the event of rapid declines, claiming that the measures would prevent such panic sales. However, the one-day crash of Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22.6%, as well as Black Monday of March 16, 2020 (-12.9%), were worse in percentage terms than any single day of the 1929 crash (although the combined 25% decline of October 28–29, 1929 was larger than that of October 19, 1987, and remains the worst two-day decline ever).

World War II

The American mobilization for World War II at the end of 1941 moved approximately ten million people out of the civilian labor force and into the war. World War II had a dramatic effect on many parts of the economy, and may have hastened the end of the Great Depression in the United States. Government-financed capital spending accounted for only 5 percent of the annual U.S. investment in industrial capital in 1940; by 1943, the government accounted for 67 percent of U.S. capital investment.

Analysis

The crash followed a speculative boom that had taken hold in the late 1920s. During the latter half of the 1920s, steel production, building construction, retail turnover, automobiles registered, and even railway receipts advanced from record to record. The combined net profits of 536 manufacturing and trading companies showed an increase, in the first six months of 1929, of 36.6% over 1928, itself a record half-year. Iron and steel led the way with doubled gains. Such figures set up a crescendo of stock-exchange speculation that led hundreds of thousands of Americans to invest heavily in the stock market. A significant number of them were borrowing money to buy more stocks. By August 1929, brokers were routinely lending small investors more than two-thirds of the face value of the stocks they were buying. Over $8.5 billion was out on loan, more than the entire amount of currency circulating in the U.S. at the time.

The rising share prices encouraged more people to invest, hoping the share prices would rise further. Speculation thus fueled further rises and created an economic bubble. Because of margin buying, investors stood to lose large sums of money if the market turned down—or even failed to advance quickly enough. The average price to earnings ratio of S&P Composite stocks was 32.6 in September 1929, clearly above historical norms. According to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, this exuberance also resulted in a large number of people placing their savings and money in leverage investment products like Goldman Sachs' "Blue Ridge trust" and "Shenandoah trust". These too crashed in 1929, resulting in losses to banks of $475 billion 2010 dollars ($556.91 billion in 2019).

Sir George Paish

Good harvests had built up a mass of 250 million bushels of wheat to be "carried over" when 1929 opened. By May there was also a winter-wheat crop of 560 million bushels ready for harvest in the Mississippi Valley. This oversupply caused a drop in wheat prices so heavy that the net incomes of the farming population from wheat were threatened with extinction. Stock markets are always sensitive to the future state of commodity markets, and the slump in Wall Street predicted for May by Sir George Paish arrived on time. In June 1929, the position was saved by a severe drought in the Dakotas and the Canadian West, plus unfavorable seed times in Argentina and eastern Australia. The oversupply was now wanted to fill the gaps in the 1929 world wheat production. From 97¢ per bushel in May, the price of wheat rose to $1.49 in July. When it was seen that at this figure American farmers would get more for their crop than for that of 1928, stocks went up again.

In August, the wheat price fell when France and Italy were bragging of a magnificent harvest, and the situation in Australia improved. That sent a shiver through Wall Street and stock prices quickly dropped, but word of cheap stocks brought a fresh rush of "stags", amateur speculators and investors. Congress voted for a $100 million relief package for the farmers, hoping to stabilize wheat prices. By October though, the price had fallen to $1.31 per bushel.

Other important economic barometers were also slowing or even falling by mid-1929, including car sales, house sales, and steel production. The falling commodity and industrial production may have dented even American self-confidence, and the stock market peaked on September 3 at 381.17 just after Labor Day, then started to falter after Roger Babson issued his prescient "market crash" forecast. By the end of September, the market was down 10% from the peak (the "Babson Break"). Selling intensified in early and mid October, with sharp down days punctuated by a few up days. Panic selling on huge volume started the week of October 21 and intensified and culminated on October 24, the 28th, and especially the 29th ("Black Tuesday").

The president of the Chase National Bank, Albert H. Wiggin, said at the time:

We are reaping the natural fruit of the orgy of speculation in which millions of people have indulged. It was inevitable, because of the tremendous increase in the number of stockholders in recent years, that the number of sellers would be greater than ever when the boom ended and selling took the place of buying."

Effects

United States

Crowd at New York's American Union Bank during a bank run early in the Great Depression

 

Together, the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression formed the largest financial crisis of the 20th century. The panic of October 1929 has come to serve as a symbol of the economic contraction that gripped the world during the next decade. The falls in share prices on October 24 and 29, 1929 were practically instantaneous in all financial markets, except Japan.

The Wall Street Crash had a major impact on the U.S. and world economy, and it has been the source of intense academic historical, economic, and political debate from its aftermath until the present day. Some people believed that abuses by utility holding companies contributed to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed. Many people blamed the crash on commercial banks that were too eager to put deposits at risk on the stock market.

In 1930, 1,352 banks held more than $853 million in deposits; in 1931, one year later, 2,294 banks went down with nearly $1.7 billion in deposits. Many businesses failed (28,285 failures and a daily rate of 133 in 1931).

The 1929 crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a halt. As tentatively expressed by economic historian Charles P. Kindleberger, in 1929, there was no lender of last resort effectively present, which, if it had existed and been properly exercised, would have been key in shortening the business slowdown that normally follows financial crises. The crash instigated widespread and long-lasting consequences for the United States. Historians still debate whether the 1929 crash sparked the Great Depression or if it merely coincided with the bursting of a loose credit-inspired economic bubble. Only 16% of American households were invested in the stock market within the United States during the period leading up to this depression, suggesting that the crash carried somewhat less of a weight in causing it.

Unemployed men march in Toronto

However, the psychological effects of the crash reverberated across the nation as businesses became aware of the difficulties in securing capital market investments for new projects and expansions. Business uncertainty naturally affects job security for employees, and as the American worker (the consumer) faced uncertainty with regards to income, naturally the propensity to consume declined. The decline in stock prices caused bankruptcies and severe macroeconomic difficulties, including contraction of credit, business closures, firing of workers, bank failures, decline of the money supply, and other economically depressing events.

The resultant rise of mass unemployment is seen as a result of the crash, although the crash is by no means the sole event that contributed to the depression. The Wall Street Crash is usually seen as having the greatest impact on the events that followed and therefore is widely regarded as signaling the downward economic slide that initiated the Great Depression. True or not, the consequences were dire for almost everybody. Most academic experts agree on one aspect of the crash: It wiped out billions of dollars of wealth in one day, and this immediately depressed consumer buying.

The failure set off a worldwide run on US gold deposits (i.e. the dollar), and forced the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates into the slump. Some 4,000 banks and other lenders ultimately failed. Also, the uptick rule, which allowed short selling only when the last tick in a stock's price was positive, was implemented after the 1929 market crash to prevent short sellers from driving the price of a stock down in a bear raid.

Europe

The stock market crash of October 1929 led directly to the Great Depression in Europe. When stocks plummeted on the New York Stock Exchange, the world noticed immediately. Although financial leaders in the United Kingdom, as in the United States, vastly underestimated the extent of the crisis that ensued, it soon became clear that the world's economies were more interconnected than ever. The effects of the disruption to the global system of financing, trade, and production and the subsequent meltdown of the American economy were soon felt throughout Europe.

In 1930 and 1931, in particular, unemployed workers went on strike, demonstrated in public, and otherwise took direct action to call public attention to their plight. Within the UK, protests often focused on the so-called Means Test, which the government had instituted in 1931 to limit the amount of unemployment payments made to individuals and families. For working people, the Means Test seemed an intrusive and insensitive way to deal with the chronic and relentless deprivation caused by the economic crisis. The strikes were met forcefully, with police breaking up protests, arresting demonstrators, and charging them with crimes related to the violation of public order.

Academic debate

There is ongoing debate among economists and historians as to what role the crash played in subsequent economic, social, and political events. The Economist argued in a 1998 article that the Depression did not start with the stock market crash, nor was it clear at the time of the crash that a depression was starting. They asked, "Can a very serious Stock Exchange collapse produce a serious setback to industry when industrial production is for the most part in a healthy and balanced condition?" They argued that there must be some setback, but there was not yet sufficient evidence to prove that it would be long or would necessarily produce a general industrial depression.

However, The Economist also cautioned that some bank failures were also to be expected and some banks may not have had any reserves left for financing commercial and industrial enterprises. It concluded that the position of the banks was the key to the situation, but what was going to happen could not have been foreseen.

Some academics view the Wall Street Crash of 1929 as part of a historical process that was a part of the new theories of boom and bust. According to economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, Nikolai Kondratiev and Charles E. Mitchell, the crash was merely a historical event in the continuing process known as economic cycles. The impact of the crash was merely to increase the speed at which the cycle proceeded to its next level.

Milton Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States, co-written with Anna Schwartz, argues that what made the "great contraction" so severe was not the downturn in the business cycle, protectionism, or the 1929 stock market crash in themselves but the collapse of the banking system during three waves of panics from 1930 to 1933.

Glass–Steagall legislation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Glass–Steagall legislation describes four provisions of the United States Banking Act of 1933 separating commercial and investment banking. The article 1933 Banking Act describes the entire law, including the legislative history of the provisions covered herein.

As for the Glass–Steagall Act of 1932, the common name comes from the names of the Congressional sponsors, Senator Carter Glass and Representative Henry B. Steagall.

The separation of commercial and investment banking prevented securities firms and investment banks from taking deposits, and commercial Federal Reserve member banks from:

• dealing in non-governmental securities for customers,
• investing in non-investment grade securities for themselves,
• underwriting or distributing non-governmental securities,
• affiliating (or sharing employees) with companies involved in such activities.

Starting in the early 1960s, federal banking regulators' interpretations of the Act permitted commercial banks, and especially commercial bank affiliates, to engage in an expanding list and volume of securities activities. Congressional efforts to "repeal the Glass–Steagall Act", referring to those four provisions (and then usually to only the two provisions that restricted affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms), culminated in the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), which repealed the two provisions restricting affiliations between banks and securities firms.

By that time, many commentators argued Glass–Steagall was already "dead". Most notably, Citibank's 1998 affiliation with Salomon Smith Barney, one of the largest US securities firms, was permitted under the Federal Reserve Board's then existing interpretation of the Glass–Steagall Act. In November 1999, President Bill Clinton publicly declared "the Glass–Steagall law is no longer appropriate".

Some commentators have stated that the GLBA's repeal of the affiliation restrictions of the Glass–Steagall Act was an important cause of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Nobel Prize in Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz argued that the effect of the repeal was "indirect": "[w]hen repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top". Economists at the Federal Reserve, such as Chairman Ben Bernanke, have argued that the activities linked to the financial crisis were not prohibited (or, in most cases, even regulated) by the Glass–Steagall Act.

Sponsors

Sen. Carter Glass (D–Va.) and Rep. Henry B. Steagall (D–Ala.-3), the co-sponsors of the Glass–Steagall Act.

The sponsors of both the Banking Act of 1933 and the Glass–Steagall Act of 1932 were southern Democrats: Senator Carter Glass of Virginia (who in 1932 had been in the House, Secretary of the Treasury, or in the Senate, for the preceding 30 years), and Representative Henry B. Steagall of Alabama (who had been in the House for the preceding 17 years).

Legislative history

Between 1930 and 1932 Senator Carter Glass (D-VA) introduced several versions of a bill (known in each version as the Glass bill) to regulate or prohibit the combination of commercial and investment banking and to establish other reforms (except deposit insurance) similar to the final provisions of the 1933 Banking Act. On June 16, 1933, President Roosevelt signed the bill into law. Glass originally introduced his banking reform bill in January 1932. It received extensive critiques and comments from bankers, economists, and the Federal Reserve Board. It passed the Senate in February 1932, but the House adjourned before coming to a decision. The Senate passed a version of the Glass bill that would have required commercial banks to eliminate their securities affiliates.

The final Glass–Steagall provisions contained in the 1933 Banking Act reduced from five years to one year the period in which commercial banks were required to eliminate such affiliations. Although the deposit insurance provisions of the 1933 Banking Act were very controversial, and drew veto threats from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President Roosevelt supported the Glass–Steagall provisions separating commercial and investment banking, and Representative Steagall included those provisions in his House bill that differed from Senator Glass's Senate bill primarily in its deposit insurance provisions. Steagall insisted on protecting small banks while Glass felt that small banks were the weakness to U.S. banking.

Many accounts of the Act identify the Pecora Investigation as important in leading to the Act, particularly its Glass–Steagall provisions, becoming law. While supporters of the Glass–Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking cite the Pecora Investigation as supporting that separation, Glass–Steagall critics have argued that the evidence from the Pecora Investigation did not support the separation of commercial and investment banking.

This source states that Senator Glass proposed many versions of his bill to Congress known as the Glass Bills in the two years prior to the Glass–Steagall Act being passed. It also includes how the deposit insurance provisions of the bill were very controversial at the time, which almost led to the rejection of the bill once again.

The previous Glass Bills before the final revision all had similar goals and brought up the same objectives which were to separate commercial from investment banking, bring more banking activities under Federal Reserve supervision and to allow branch banking. In May 1933 Steagall's addition of allowing state chartered banks to receive federal deposit insurance and shortening the time in which banks needed to eliminate securities affiliates to one year was known as the driving force of what helped the Glass–Steagall act to be signed into law.

Separating commercial and investment banking

The Glass–Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking was in four sections of the 1933 Banking Act (sections 16, 20, 21, and 32). The Banking Act of 1935 clarified the 1933 legislation and resolved inconsistencies in it. Together, they prevented commercial Federal Reserve member banks from:

• dealing in non-governmental securities for customers
• investing in non-investment grade securities for themselves
• underwriting or distributing non-governmental securities
• affiliating (or sharing employees) with companies involved in such activities

Conversely, Glass–Steagall prevented securities firms and investment banks from taking deposits.

The law gave banks one year after the law was passed on June 16, 1933 to decide whether they would be a commercial bank or an investment bank. Only 10 percent of a commercial bank's income could stem from securities. One exception to this rule was that commercial banks could underwrite government-issued bonds.

There were several "loopholes" that regulators and financial firms were able to exploit during the lifetime of Glass–Steagall restrictions. Aside from the Section 21 prohibition on securities firms taking deposits, neither savings and loans nor state-chartered banks that did not belong to the Federal Reserve System were restricted by Glass–Steagall. Glass–Steagall also did not prevent securities firms from owning such institutions. S&Ls and securities firms took advantage of these loopholes starting in the 1960s to create products and affiliated companies that chipped away at commercial banks' deposit and lending businesses.

While permitting affiliations between securities firms and companies other than Federal Reserve member banks, Glass–Steagall distinguished between what a Federal Reserve member bank could do directly and what an affiliate could do. Whereas a Federal Reserve member bank could not buy, sell, underwrite, or deal in any security except as specifically permitted by Section 16, such a bank could affiliate with a company so long as that company was not "engaged principally" in such activities. Starting in 1987, the Federal Reserve Board interpreted this to mean a member bank could affiliate with a securities firm so long as that firm was not "engaged principally" in securities activities prohibited for a bank by Section 16. By the time the GLBA repealed the Glass–Steagall affiliation restrictions, the Federal Reserve Board had interpreted this "loophole" in those restrictions to mean a banking company (Citigroup, as owner of Citibank) could acquire one of the world's largest securities firms (Salomon Smith Barney).

By defining commercial banks as banks that take in deposits and make loans and investment banks as banks that underwrite and deal with securities the Glass–Steagall act explained the separation of banks by stating that commercial banks could not deal with securities and investment banks could not own commercial banks or have close connections with them. With the exception of commercial banks being allowed to underwrite government-issued bonds, commercial banks could only have 10 percent of their income come from securities.

Decline and repeal

It was not until 1933 that the separation of commercial banking and investment banking was considered controversial. There was a belief that the separation would lead to a healthier financial system. As time passed, however, the separation became so controversial that in 1935, Senator Glass himself attempted to "repeal" the prohibition on direct bank underwriting by permitting a limited amount of bank underwriting of corporate debt.

In the 1960s the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued aggressive interpretations of Glass–Steagall to permit national banks to engage in certain securities activities. Although most of these interpretations were overturned by court decisions, by the late 1970s bank regulators began issuing Glass–Steagall interpretations that were upheld by courts and that permitted banks and their affiliates to engage in an increasing variety of securities activities. Starting in the 1960s banks and non-banks developed financial products that blurred the distinction between banking and securities products, as they increasingly competed with each other.

Separately, starting in the 1980s, Congress debated bills to repeal Glass–Steagall's affiliation provisions (Sections 20 and 32). Some believe that major U.S. financial sector firms established a favorable view of deregulation in American political circles, and in using its political influence in Congress to overturn key provisions of Glass-Steagall and to dismantle other major provisions of statutes and regulations that govern financial firms and the risks they may take. In 1999 Congress passed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, to repeal them. Eight days later, President Bill Clinton signed it into law.

Aftermath of repeal

After the financial crisis of 2007–2008, some commentators argued that the repeal of Sections 20 and 32 had played an important role in leading to the housing bubble and financial crisis. Economics Nobel prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, for instance, argued that "[w]hen repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top", and banks which had previously been managed conservatively turned to riskier investments to increase their returns. Another laureate, Paul Krugman, contended that the repealing of the act "was indeed a mistake"; however, it was not the cause of the financial crisis.

Other commentators believed that these banking changes had no effect, and the financial crisis would have happened the same way if the regulations had still been in force. Lawrence J. White, for instance, noted that "it was not [commercial banks'] investment banking activities, such as underwriting and dealing in securities, that did them in".

At the time of the repeal, most commentators believed it would be harmless. Because the Federal Reserve's interpretations of the act had already weakened restrictions previously in place, commentators did not find much significance in the repeal, especially of sections 20 and 32. Instead, the five year anniversary of its repeal was marked by numerous sources explaining that the GLBA had not significantly changed the market structure of the banking and securities industries. More significant changes had occurred during the 1990s when commercial banking firms had gained a significant role in securities markets through "Section 20 affiliates".

Post-financial crisis reform debate

Following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, legislators unsuccessfully tried to reinstate Glass–Steagall Sections 20 and 32 as part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Both in the United States and elsewhere around the world, banking reforms have been proposed that refer to Glass–Steagall principles. These proposals include issues of “ringfencing” commercial banking operations and narrow banking proposals that would sharply reduce the permitted activities of commercial banks.

Too big to fail

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail

Headquarters of AIG, an insurance company rescued by the United States government during the subprime mortgage crisis

The "too big to (let) fail" theory asserts that certain corporations, particularly financial institutions, are so large and so interconnected that their failure would be disastrous to the greater economic system, and that they therefore must be supported by government when they face potential failure. The colloquial term "too big to fail" was popularized by U.S. Congressman Stewart McKinney in a 1984 Congressional hearing, discussing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's intervention with Continental Illinois. The term had previously been used occasionally in the press.

Proponents of this theory believe that some institutions are so important that they should become recipients of beneficial financial and economic policies from governments or central banks. Some economists such as Paul Krugman hold that economies of scale in banks and in other businesses are worth preserving, so long as they are well regulated in proportion to their economic clout, and therefore that "too big to fail" status can be acceptable. The global economic system must also deal with sovereign states being too big to fail.

Opponents believe that one of the problems that arises is moral hazard whereby a company that benefits from these protective policies will seek to profit by it, deliberately taking positions (see asset allocation) that are high-risk high-return, as they are able to leverage these risks based on the policy preference they receive. The term has emerged as prominent in public discourse since the 2007–08 global financial crisis. Critics see the policy as counterproductive and that large banks or other institutions should be left to fail if their risk management is not effective. Some critics, such as Alan Greenspan, believe that such large organisations should be deliberately broken up: "If they're too big to fail, they're too big". More than fifty prominent economists, financial experts, bankers, finance industry groups, and banks themselves have called for breaking up large banks into smaller institutions.

In 2014, the International Monetary Fund and others said the problem still had not been dealt with. While the individual components of the new regulation for systemically important banks (additional capital requirements, enhanced supervision and resolution regimes) likely reduced the prevalence of TBTF, the fact that there is a definite list of systemically important banks considered TBTF has a partly offsetting impact.

Definition

Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke also defined the term in 2010: "A too-big-to-fail firm is one whose size, complexity, interconnectedness, and critical functions are such that, should the firm go unexpectedly into liquidation, the rest of the financial system and the economy would face severe adverse consequences." He continued that: "Governments provide support to too-big-to-fail firms in a crisis not out of favoritism or particular concern for the management, owners, or creditors of the firm, but because they recognize that the consequences for the broader economy of allowing a disorderly failure greatly outweigh the costs of avoiding the failure in some way. Common means of avoiding failure include facilitating a merger, providing credit, or injecting government capital, all of which protect at least some creditors who otherwise would have suffered losses. ... If the crisis has a single lesson, it is that the too-big-to-fail problem must be solved."

Bernanke cited several risks with too-big-to-fail institutions:

1. These firms generate severe moral hazard: "If creditors believe that an institution will not be allowed to fail, they will not demand as much compensation for risks as they otherwise would, thus weakening market discipline; nor will they invest as many resources in monitoring the firm's risk-taking. As a result, too-big-to-fail firms will tend to take more risk than desirable, in the expectation that they will receive assistance if their bets go bad."
2. It creates an uneven playing field between big and small firms. "This unfair competition, together with the incentive to grow that too-big-to-fail provides, increases risk and artificially raises the market share of too-big-to-fail firms, to the detriment of economic efficiency as well as financial stability."
3. The firms themselves become major risks to overall financial stability, particularly in the absence of adequate resolution tools. Bernanke wrote: "The failure of Lehman Brothers and the near-failure of several other large, complex firms significantly worsened the crisis and the recession by disrupting financial markets, impeding credit flows, inducing sharp declines in asset prices, and hurting confidence. The failures of smaller, less interconnected firms, though certainly of significant concern, have not had substantial effects on the stability of the financial system as a whole."

Background on banking regulation

Depository banks

Prior to the Great Depression, U.S. consumer bank deposits were not guaranteed by the government, increasing the risk of a bank run, in which a large number of depositors withdraw their deposits at the same time. Since banks lend most of the deposits and only retain a fraction in the proverbial vault, a bank run can render the bank insolvent. During the Depression, hundreds of banks became insolvent and depositors lost their money. As a result, the U.S. enacted the 1933 Banking Act, sometimes called the Glass–Steagall Act, which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to insure deposits up to a limit of $2,500, with successive increases to the current $250,000. In exchange for the deposit insurance provided by the federal government, depository banks are highly regulated and expected to invest excess customer deposits in lower-risk assets.

Investment banks and the shadow banking system

In contrast to depository banks, investment banks generally obtain funds from sophisticated investors and often make complex, risky investments with the funds, speculating either for their own account or on behalf of their investors. They also are "market makers" in that they serve as intermediaries between two investors that wish to take opposite sides of a financial transaction. The Glass-Steagall Act separated investment and depository banking until its repeal in 1999. Prior to 2008, the government did not explicitly guarantee the investor funds, so investment banks were not subject to the same regulations as depository banks and were allowed to take considerably more risk.

Investment banks, along with other innovations in banking and finance referred to as the shadow banking system, grew to rival the depository system by 2007. They became subject to the equivalent of a bank run in 2007 and 2008, in which investors (rather than depositors) withdrew sources of financing from the shadow system. This run became known as the subprime mortgage crisis. During 2008, the five largest U.S. investment banks either failed (Lehman Brothers), were bought out by other banks at fire-sale prices (Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch) or were at risk of failure and obtained depository banking charters to obtain additional Federal Reserve support (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley). In addition, the government provided bailout funds via the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008.

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke described in November 2013 how the Panic of 1907 was essentially a run on the non-depository financial system, with many parallels to the crisis of 2008. One of the results of the Panic of 1907 was the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.

Resolution authority

Before 1950, U.S. federal bank regulators had essentially two options for resolving an insolvent institution: 1) closure, with liquidation of assets and payouts for insured depositors; or 2) purchase and assumption, encouraging the acquisition of assets and assumption of liabilities by another firm. A third option was made available by the Federal Deposit Insurance Act of 1950: providing assistance, the power to support an institution through loans or direct federal acquisition of assets, until it could recover from its distress.

The statute limited the "assistance" option to cases where "continued operation of the bank is essential to provide adequate banking service". Regulators shunned this third option for many years, fearing that if regionally or nationally important banks were thought generally immune to liquidation, markets in their shares would be distorted. Thus, the assistance option was never employed during the period 1950–1969, and very seldom thereafter. Research into historical banking trends suggests that the consumption loss associated with National Banking Era bank runs was far more costly than the consumption loss from stock market crashes.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act was passed in 1991, giving the FDIC the responsibility to rescue an insolvent bank by the least costly method. The Act had the implicit goal of eliminating the widespread belief among depositors that a loss of depositors and bondholders will be prevented for large banks. However, the Act included an exception in cases of systemic risk, subject to the approval of two-thirds of the FDIC Board of Directors, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and the Treasury Secretary.

Analysis

Bank size and concentration

Assets of largest U.S. banks per FY2012 Annual Reports

 

Percentage of banking assets held by largest five U.S. banks, 1997–2011

 

Bank size, complexity, and interconnectedness with other banks may inhibit the ability of the government to resolve (wind-down) the bank without significant disruption to the financial system or economy, as occurred with the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008. This risk of "too big to fail" entities increases the likelihood of a government bailout using taxpayer dollars.

The largest U.S. banks continue to grow larger while the concentration of bank assets increases. The largest six U.S. banks had assets of $9,576 billion as of year-end 2012, per their 2012 annual reports (SEC Form 10K). For scale, this was 59% of the U.S. GDP for 2012 of $16,245 billion. The top 5 U.S. banks had approximately 30% of the U.S. banking assets in 1998; this rose to 45% by 2008 and to 48% by 2010, before falling to 47% in 2011.

This concentration continued despite the subprime mortgage crisis and its aftermath. During March 2008, JP Morgan Chase acquired investment bank Bear Stearns. Bank of America acquired investment bank Merrill Lynch in September 2008. Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia in January 2009. Investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley obtained depository bank holding company charters, which gave them access to additional Federal Reserve credit lines.

Bank deposits for all U.S. banks ranged between approximately 60–70% of GDP from 1960 to 2006, then jumped during the crisis to a peak of nearly 84% in 2009 before falling to 77% by 2011.

The number of U.S. commercial and savings bank institutions reached a peak of 14,495 in 1984; this fell to 6,532 by the end of 2010. The ten largest U.S. banks held nearly 50% of U.S. deposits as of 2011.

Implicit guarantee subsidy

Since the full amount of the deposits and debts of "too big to fail" banks are effectively guaranteed by the government, large depositors and investors view investments with these banks as a safer investment than deposits with smaller banks. Therefore, large banks are able to pay lower interest rates to depositors and investors than small banks are obliged to pay.

In October 2009, Sheila Bair, at that time the Chairperson of the FDIC, commented:

"'Too big to fail' has become worse. It's become explicit when it was implicit before. It creates competitive disparities between large and small institutions, because everybody knows small institutions can fail. So it's more expensive for them to raise capital and secure funding." Research has shown that banking organizations are willing to pay an added premium for mergers that will put them over the asset sizes that are commonly viewed as the thresholds for being too big to fail.

A study conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that the difference between the cost of funds for banks with more than $100 billion in assets and the cost of funds for smaller banks widened dramatically after the formalization of the "too big to fail" policy in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2008. This shift in the large banks' cost of funds was in effect equivalent to an indirect "too big to fail" subsidy of $34 billion per year to the 18 U.S. banks with more than $100 billion in assets.

The editors of Bloomberg View estimated there was an $83 billion annual subsidy to the 10 largest United States banks, reflecting a funding advantage of 0.8 percentage points due to implicit government support, meaning the profits of such banks are largely a taxpayer-backed illusion.

Another study by Frederic Schweikhard and Zoe Tsesmelidakis estimated the amount saved by America's biggest banks from having a perceived safety net of a government bailout was $120 billion from 2007 to 2010. For America's biggest banks the estimated savings was $53 billion for Citigroup, $32 billion for Bank of America, $10 billion for JPMorgan, $8 billion for Wells Fargo, and $4 billion for AIG. The study noted that passage of the Dodd–Frank Act—which promised an end to bailouts—did nothing to raise the price of credit (i.e., lower the implicit subsidy) for the "too-big-too-fail" institutions.

One 2013 study (Acharya, Anginer, and Warburton) measured the funding cost advantage provided by implicit government support to large financial institutions. Credit spreads were lower by approximately 28 basis points (0.28%) on average over the 1990–2010 period, with a peak of more than 120 basis points in 2009. In 2010, the implicit subsidy was worth nearly $100 billion to the largest banks. The authors concluded: "Passage of Dodd–Frank did not eliminate expectations of government support."

Economist Randall S. Kroszner summarized several approaches to evaluating the funding cost differential between large and small banks. The paper discusses methodology and does not specifically answer the question of whether larger institutions have an advantage.

During November 2013, the Moody's credit rating agency reported that it would no longer assume the eight largest U.S. banks would receive government support in the event they faced bankruptcy. However, the GAO reported that politicians and regulators would still face significant pressure to bail out large banks and their creditors in the event of a financial crisis.

Moral hazard

A man at Occupy Wall Street protesting institutions deemed too big to fail

Some critics have argued that "The way things are now banks reap profits if their trades pan out, but taxpayers can be stuck picking up the tab if their big bets sink the company." Additionally, as discussed by Senator Bernie Sanders, if taxpayers are contributing to rescue these companies from bankruptcy, they "should be rewarded for assuming the risk by sharing in the gains that result from this government bailout".

In this sense, Alan Greenspan affirms that, "Failure is an integral part, a necessary part of a market system." Thereby, although the financial institutions that were bailed out were indeed important to the financial system, the fact that they took risk beyond what they would otherwise, should be enough for the Government to let them face the consequences of their actions. It would have been a lesson to motivate institutions to proceed differently next time.

Inability to prosecute

The political power of large banks and risks of economic impact from major prosecutions has led to use of the term "too big to jail" regarding the leaders of large financial institutions.

On March 6, 2013, United States Attorney General Eric Holder testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the size of large financial institutions has made it difficult for the Justice Department to bring criminal charges when they are suspected of crimes, because such charges can threaten the existence of a bank and therefore their interconnectedness may endanger the national or global economy. "Some of these institutions have become too large," Holder told the Committee. "It has an inhibiting impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate." In this he contradicted earlier written testimony from a deputy assistant attorney general, who defended the Justice Department's "vigorous enforcement against wrongdoing". Holder has financial ties to at least one law firm benefiting from de facto immunity to prosecution, and prosecution rates against crimes by large financial institutions are at 20-year lows.

Four days later, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard W. Fisher and Vice-President Harvey Rosenblum co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the failure of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to provide for adequate regulation of large financial institutions. In advance of his March 8 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Fisher proposed requiring breaking up large banks into smaller banks so that they are "too small to save", advocating the withholding from mega-banks access to both Federal Deposit Insurance and Federal Reserve discount window, and requiring disclosure of this lack of federal insurance and financial solvency support to their customers. This was the first time such a proposal had been made by a high-ranking U.S. banking official or a prominent conservative. Other conservatives including Thomas Hoenig, Ed Prescott, Glenn Hubbard, and David Vitter also advocated breaking up the largest banks, but liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias questioned their motives and the existence of a true bipartisan consensus.

In a January 29, 2013 letter to Holder, Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) had criticized this Justice Department policy citing "important questions about the Justice Department's prosecutorial philosophy". After receipt of a DoJ response letter, Brown and Grassley issued a statement saying, "The Justice Department's response is aggressively evasive. It does not answer our questions. We want to know how and why the Justice Department has determined that certain financial institutions are 'too big to jail' and that prosecuting those institutions would damage the financial system."

Kareem Serageldin pleaded guilty on November 22, 2013 for his role in inflating the value of mortgage bonds as the housing market collapsed, and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. As of April 30, 2014, Serageldin remains the "only Wall Street executive prosecuted as a result of the financial crisis" that triggered the Great Recession.

Solutions

The proposed solutions to the "too big to fail" issue are controversial. Some options include breaking up the banks, introducing regulations to reduce risk, adding higher bank taxes for larger institutions, and increasing monitoring through oversight committees.

Breaking up the largest banks

More than fifty economists, financial experts, bankers, finance industry groups, and banks themselves have called for breaking up large banks into smaller institutions. This is advocated both to limit risk to the financial system posed by the largest banks as well as to limit their political influence.

For example, economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in 2009 that: "In the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, large banks have been responsible for the bulk of the [bailout] cost to taxpayers. America has let 106 smaller banks go bankrupt this year alone. It's the mega-banks that present the mega-costs ... banks that are too big to fail are too big to exist. If they continue to exist, they must exist in what is sometimes called a "utility" model, meaning that they are heavily regulated." He also wrote about several causes of the crisis related to the size, incentives, and interconnection of the mega-banks.

Reducing risk-taking through regulation

The leverage ratio, measured as debt divided by equity, for investment bank Goldman Sachs from 2003–2012. The lower the ratio, the greater the ability of the firm to withstand losses.

 

The United States passed the Dodd–Frank Act in July 2010 to help strengthen regulation of the financial system in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis that began in 2007. Dodd–Frank requires banks to reduce their risk taking, by requiring greater financial cushions (i.e., lower leverage ratios or higher capital ratios), among other steps.

Banks are required to maintain a ratio of high-quality, easily sold assets, in the event of financial difficulty either at the bank or in the financial system. These are capital requirements. Further, since the 2008 crisis, regulators have worked with banks to reduce leverage ratios. For example, the leverage ratio for investment bank Goldman Sachs declined from a peak of 25.2 during 2007 to 11.4 in 2012, indicating a much-reduced risk profile.

The Dodd–Frank Act includes a form of the Volcker Rule, a proposal to ban proprietary trading by commercial banks. Proprietary trading refers to using customer deposits to speculate in risky assets for the benefit of the bank rather than customers. The Dodd–Frank Act as enacted into law includes several loopholes to the ban, allowing proprietary trading in certain circumstances. However, the regulations required to enforce these elements of the law were not implemented during 2013 and were under attack by bank lobbying efforts.

Another major banking regulation, the Glass–Steagall Act from 1933, was effectively repealed in 1999. The repeal allowed depository banks to enter into additional lines of business. Senators John McCain and Elizabeth Warren proposed bringing back Glass-Steagall during 2013.

Too big to fail tax

Economist Willem Buiter proposes a tax to internalize the massive costs inflicted by "too big to fail" institution. "When size creates externalities, do what you would do with any negative externality: tax it. The other way to limit size is to tax size. This can be done through capital requirements that are progressive in the size of the business (as measured by value added, the size of the balance sheet or some other metric). Such measures for preventing the New Darwinism of the survival of the fittest and the politically best connected should be distinguished from regulatory interventions based on the narrow leverage ratio aimed at regulating risk (regardless of size, except for a de minimis lower limit)."

Monitoring

On November 16, 2018, a policy research and development entity, called the Financial Stability Board, released a list of 29 banks worldwide that they considered "systemically important financial institutions"—financial organisations whose size and role meant that any failure could cause serious systemic problems. 

• Agricultural Bank of China
• Banco Santander
• Bank of America
• Bank of China
• Bank of New York Mellon
• Barclays
• BNP Paribas
• China Construction Bank
• Citigroup
• Crédit Agricole
• Credit Suisse
• Deutsche Bank
• Goldman Sachs
• Groupe BPCE
• HSBC
• Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited
• ING Bank
• JPMorgan Chase
• Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group
• Mizuho Financial Group
• Morgan Stanley
• Royal Bank of Canada
• Société Générale
• Standard Chartered
• State Street Corporation
• Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group
• UBS
• Unicredit Group
• Wells Fargo

Notable views on the issue

Economists

More than fifty notable economists, financial experts, bankers, finance industry groups, and banks themselves have called for breaking up large banks into smaller institutions.

Some economists such as Paul Krugman hold that economies of scale in banks and in other businesses are worth preserving, so long as they are well regulated in proportion to their economic clout, and therefore that "too big to fail" status can be acceptable. The global economic system must also deal with sovereign states being too big to fail. Krugman wrote in January 2010 that it was more important to reduce bank risk taking (leverage) than to break them up.

Economist Simon Johnson has advocated both increased regulation as well as breaking up the larger banks, not only to protect the financial system but to reduce the political power of the largest banks.

Politicians

One of the most vocal opponents in the United States government of the "too big to fail" status of large American financial institutions in recent years has been Elizabeth Warren. At her first U.S. Senate Banking Committee hearing on February 14, 2013, Senator Warren pressed several banking regulators to answer when they had last taken a Wall Street bank to trial and stated, "I'm really concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial'." Videos of Warren's questioning, centering on "too big to fail", became popular on the internet, amassing more than 1 million views in a matter of days.

On March 6, 2013, United States Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department faces difficulty charging large banks with crimes because of the risk to the economy. Four days later, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard W. Fisher wrote in advance of a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference that large banks should be broken up into smaller banks, and both Federal Deposit Insurance and Federal Reserve discount window access should end for large banks. Other conservatives including Thomas Hoenig, Ed Prescott, Glenn Hubbard, and David Vitter also advocated breaking up the largest banks.

International organizations

On April 10, 2013, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde told the Economic Club of New York "too big to fail" banks had become "more dangerous than ever" and had to be controlled with "comprehensive and clear regulation [and] more intensive and intrusive supervision".

Other commentators

Ron Suskind claimed in his book Confidence Men that the administration of Barack Obama considered breaking up Citibank and other large banks that had been involved in the financial crisis of 2008. He said that Obama's staff, such as Timothy Geithner, refused to do so. The administration and Geithner have denied this version of events.

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England during 2003–2013, called for cutting "too big to fail" banks down to size, as a solution to the problem of banks having taxpayer-funded guarantees for their speculative investment banking activities. "If some banks are thought to be too big to fail, then, in the words of a distinguished American economist, they are too big. It is not sensible to allow large banks to combine high street retail banking with risky investment banking or funding strategies, and then provide an implicit state guarantee against failure."

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling disagreed: "Many people talk about how to deal with the big banks – banks so important to the financial system that they cannot be allowed to fail, but the solution is not as simple, as some have suggested, as restricting the size of the banks". Additionally, Alan Greenspan said that "If they're too big to fail, they're too big", suggesting U.S. regulators to consider breaking up large financial institutions considered "too big to fail". He added, "I don't think merely raising the fees or capital on large institutions or taxing them is enough ... they'll absorb that, they'll work with that, and it's totally inefficient and they'll still be using the savings."

Public opinion polls

Gallup reported in June 2013 that: "Americans' confidence in U.S. banks increased to 26% in June, up from the record low of 21% the previous year. The percentage of Americans saying they have 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in U.S. banks is now at its highest point since June 2008, but remains well below its pre-recession level of 41%, measured in June 2007. Between 2007 and 2012, confidence in banks fell by half—20 percentage points." Gallup also reported that: "When Gallup first measured confidence in banks in 1979, 60% of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in them—second only to the church. This high level of confidence, which hasn't been matched since, was likely the result of the strong U.S. banking system established after the 1930s Great Depression and the related efforts of banks and regulators to build Americans' confidence in that system."

Lobbying by banking industry

In the US, the banking industry spent over $100 million lobbying politicians and regulators between January 1 and June 30, 2011. Lobbying in the finance, insurance and real estate industries has risen annually since 1998 and was approximately $500 million in 2012.

Historical examples

Prior to the 2008 failure and bailout of multiple firms, there were "too big to fail" examples from 1763 when Leendert Pieter de Neufville in Amsterdam and Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky in Berlin failed, and from the 1980s and 1990s. These included Continental Illinois and Long-Term Capital Management.

Continental Illinois case

An early example of a bank rescued because it was "too big to fail" was the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company during the 1980s.

Distress

The Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company experienced a fall in its overall asset quality during the early 1980s. Tight money, Mexico's default (1982) and plunging oil prices followed a period when the bank had aggressively pursued commercial lending business, Latin American syndicated loan business, and loan participation in the energy sector. Complicating matters further, the bank's funding mix was heavily dependent on large certificates of deposit and foreign money markets, which meant its depositors were more risk-averse than average retail depositors in the US.

Payments crisis

The bank held significant participation in highly speculative oil and gas loans of Oklahoma's Penn Square Bank.^[76] When Penn Square failed in July 1982, the Continental's distress became acute, culminating with press rumors of failure and an investor-and-depositor run in early May 1984. In the first week of the run, the Fed permitted the Continental Illinois discount window credits on the order of $3.6 billion. Still in significant distress, the management obtained a further $4.5 billion in credits from a syndicate of money center banks the following week. These measures failed to stop the run, and regulators were confronted with a crisis.

Regulatory crisis

The seventh-largest bank in the nation by deposits would very shortly be unable to meet its obligations. Regulators faced a tough decision about how to resolve the matter. Of the three options available, only two were seriously considered. Even banks much smaller than the Continental were deemed unsuitable for resolution by liquidation, owing to the disruptions this would have inevitably caused. The normal course would be to seek a purchaser (and indeed press accounts that such a search was underway contributed to Continental depositors' fears in 1984). However, in the tight-money financial climate of the early 1980s, no purchaser was forthcoming.

Besides generic concerns of size, contagion of depositor panic and bank distress, regulators feared the significant disruption of national payment and settlement systems. Of special concern was the wide network of correspondent banks with high percentages of their capital invested in the Continental Illinois. Essentially, the bank was deemed "too big to fail", and the "provide assistance" option was reluctantly taken. The dilemma then became how to provide assistance without significantly unbalancing the nation's banking system.

Stopping the run

To prevent immediate failure, the Federal Reserve announced categorically that it would meet any liquidity needs the Continental might have, while the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) gave depositors and general creditors a full guarantee (not subject to the $100,000 FDIC deposit-insurance limit) and provided direct assistance of $2 billion (including participations). Money center banks assembled an additional $5.3 billion unsecured facility pending a resolution and resumption of more-normal business. These measures slowed, but did not stop, the outflow of deposits.

Controversy

In a United States Senate hearing afterwards, the then Comptroller of the Currency C. T. Conover defended his position by admitting the regulators will not let the largest 11 banks fail.

Long-Term Capital Management

Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) was a hedge fund management firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut that utilized absolute-return trading strategies combined with high financial leverage. The firm's master hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Portfolio L.P., collapsed in the late 1990s, leading to an agreement on September 23, 1998 among 14 financial institutions for a $3.6 billion recapitalization (bailout) under the supervision of the Federal Reserve.

LTCM was founded in 1994 by John W. Meriwether, the former vice-chairman and head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers. Members of LTCM's board of directors included Myron S. Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who shared the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a "new method to determine the value of derivatives". Initially successful with annualized returns of over 40% (after fees) in its first years, in 1998 it lost $4.6 billion in less than four months following the Russian financial crisis requiring financial intervention by the Federal Reserve, with the fund liquidating and dissolving in early 2000.

International

Canada

In March 2013, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions announced that Canada's six largest banks, the Bank of Montreal, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, National Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank, were too big to fail. Those six banks accounted for 90% of banking assets in Canada at that time. It noted that "the differences among the largest banks are smaller if only domestic assets are considered, and relative importance declines rapidly after the top five banks and after the sixth bank (National)."

New Zealand

Despite the government's assurances, opposition parties and some media commentators in New Zealand say that the largest banks are too big to fail and have an implicit government guarantee.

United Kingdom

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer under David Cameron (2010–2016), threatened to break up banks which are too big to fail.

The too-big-to-fail idea has led to legislators and governments facing the challenge of limiting the scope of these hugely important organisations, and regulating activities perceived as risky or speculative—to achieve this regulation in the UK, banks are advised to follow the UK's Independent Commission on Banking Report.