Break Them Up

This was unexpected:

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said Thursday that banks deemed “too big to fail” should be split up. “We do not need these companies to be as big as they are,” Bullard said. His remarks come a week after J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. disclosed a $2 billion trading loss. “We should say we want smaller institutions so that they can safely fail if they need to fail,” he said...

I don't like excessively large banks because of the economic and political power that they have. For me, that is the main reason to break them up (especially since I have yet to see convincing evidence that we need banks this large in order to exploit economies of scope and scale).

But when it comes to stabilizing the financial system, it's not so clear. If we break a big bank into smaller banks, and a systemic shock hits that threatens to cause all of the small banks to fail, it may be harder to shore up the system and prevent a domino-style collapse than it would be if there was just one large bank to deal with. The Great Depression, for example, was characterized by the failure of many, many smaller banks rather than the toppling of a few large, systemically important institutions.

But that is not an insurmountable problem. A coordinated policy across the smaller banks can be equivalent to policy at a single, large institution, and we simply have to be ready to implement the appropriate policies when trouble threatens. So although it may be somewhat easier to deal with one bank rather than, say, 10 or 20, that's not a reason to allow banks to be so large. So I'm glad to see Bullard's comments.

However, Tim Duy is less pleased with his views on inflation:

Don't Let the Data Get in the Way of Your Story, by Tim Duy: St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard:

The main risk lies in potentially overcommitting to the ultra-easy monetary policy, reigniting the global inflation debacle of the 1970s.

Ten-year inflation expectations via the Cleveland Federal Reserve:

Bullard is obviously a Serious Central Banker, because Serious Central Bankers only see inflation everywhere.

Undue fear of inflation generally among FOMC memebers is holding policy back. There are those who favor more aggressive policy, but not enough to make a difference.