How Safe is the Financial System?

Part of an interview with Tim Geithner:

... The really important distinction to make in terms of both diagnosing the risks of a crisis and of thinking about how to respond is to try to determine when your system is vulnerable to a truly systemic disruption and when it is not. If there is a lot of dry tinder, you are more vulnerable and even a modest shock can risk tipping you over into a more systemic panic. You want to make your system resilient to such shocks. So, the most important thing is to ask yourself: where today do we face the kinds of vulnerabilities, the kinds of conditions – the dry tinder – that might make us more vulnerable to a more cataclysmic kind of shock that would be very damaging to the economy?

For systems to face that kind of threat you really need to have had a long boom in credit financed either through the banking system or through the financial system in ways that create a classic vulnerability to a run. That is, you need to have a set of long-dated assets that are illiquid, are vulnerable to a loss, and are funded short. We don’t face that sort of vulnerability in the financial system today. In many ways, the crisis is still too recent. The memory is too fresh for us to have had that long build up in borrowing through the banking system that makes you susceptible to systemic panic. Since the crisis, credit growth has been very modest while financial reforms have produced a system that is much better capitalized.

The one exception I would make to that general view is that Europe is vulnerable for different reasons to a kind of classic run or panic. They don’t have the institutions that would allow them to defend themselves credibly against such an event. For them to build that kind of arsenal (like what we eventually built in 2008-2009 to break a panic) they would have to do a whole range of things – creating institutions that aren’t in place today.

Beyond that, there is a familiar set of risks out there. But they are not risks on a scale like those that made the world vulnerable to a panic in 2008-2009. ...

We should probably remember that he has an incentive to say that the things he helped to do during the financial crisis have made the system safer today.