Penn Law bankruptcy prof David Skeel tackles Obama's proposal to "give regulators the power to step in and take control of large nonbank financial institutions, as the FDIC already does with commercial banks" in an essay for the Weekly Standard:
The conventional wisdom about the bailouts of 2008 goes something like this. Federal regulators started off on the right foot by bailing out Bear Stearns and midwifing its sale to JPMorgan Chase. They were right to bail out AIG six months later, but botched the execution. And Lehman Brothers, the only exception to the bailout rule, showed once and for all that bankruptcy is not an adequate way to handle the collapse of a large financial institution.
But what if regulators hadn't bailed out Bear Stearns? If we conduct this simple thought experiment, it raises serious questions about both the conventional wisdom and the Obama administration's new proposals for regulating investment banks and bank and insurance holding companies. Bankruptcy starts to look much better, although it could use several market-correcting tweaks.
The bankruptcy alternative would not prevent regulators from regulating. Nothing would stop them from imposing high capital requirements on systemically important institutions, for instance, to make them less risky. But it would give creditors an incentive to pay close attention to the creditworthiness of systemically important institutions. And it would give the managers of these institutions a reason to file for bankruptcy before the house of cards crumbled, rather than running to regulators to beg for money.
What is there to say, but "ditto"?
