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Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 03 agosto 2010 alle ore 13:51.
TOULOUSE – If history punishes those who fail to learn from it, financial history does its punishing with a sadistic twist – it also punishes those who learn from it too enthusiastically. Time and again, financial crises have reflected the weaknesses of regulatory systems founded on the lessons learned from previous crises. Today’s crisis is no exception; nor will the next one be.
The post-war system of financial regulation was founded on three supposed lessons from the 1930’s. First, we thought that the main reason why banks fail is that depositors panic, not that the main reason depositors panic is that banks are in danger of failing.
Like the view that running away from lions provokes them to eat you, there is a grain of truth in the view that banks fail because depositors panic. But it is a small grain, and one on which the average uninsured depositor, like the average tourist in a game park, would be ill-advised to rely. In fact, many panics happen for a good reason. Even in the 1930’s, most banks failed as a result of bad management and illegal activity, as is true today.
Second, we thought that the depositors prone to panic would always be small depositors – households and small firms – rather than corporations or professional investors. We now know that this is wrong, but there was never any serious reason to believe it.
If large corporations (and other banks) have deposits that they expect to be able to claim on short notice, and if they know that not all such deposits can be withdrawn at the same time, then suspicion that a bank might fail gives them as much reason to rush to the exit as households have. If bank failures typically reflect real underlying problems, sensitive professional investors can be expected to react quickly when any whiff of panic is in the air.
Lending between banks, as well as deposits placed by large corporations, increased spectacularly in the years leading up to the crisis. This is particularly true of the repo markets, which provide the equivalent services for professional investors – banks and large corporations – that ordinary bank deposits provide for individuals and small firms.
Until the financial reforms adopted since the crisis, this shadow banking system operated outside the regulatory regime that applied to traditional deposit-taking banks. Indeed, shadow banking would not have grown so fast had that regime not been devised with the apparent lessons of the 1930’s in mind. But the shadow system’s failure after the collapse of Lehman Brothers was no less a bank run just because professional investors were involved. In this case, unlike in the 1930’s, banks stopped trusting each other before the rest of us realized that it was time to stop trusting banks.