Thanks to unprecedented interventions by central banks and fiscal authorities, the pandemic-induced financial strains of March-April 2020 are now well behind us. Unfortunately, as a consequence of the official actions necessary to stabilize the financial system, market participants now count on government backstops to insure them against the fallout from future disturbances.

Naturally, central banks should be prepared to combat extreme shocks that threaten financial stability. However, to limit excessive reliance on central banks, we need to ensure that financial institutions can continue to operate smoothly on their own even in bad times. This means redesigning parts of the financial architecture. While market participants have a major role to play, it is authorities who need to address externalities—spillover effects—and to improve incentives for the private sector to maintain the liquidity of markets and access to short-term funding in times of moderate stress.

With the pandemic-induced disruptions still fresh in memory, this is the perfect time to identify deficiencies and implement reforms aimed at improving the resilience of the financial system. Fortunately, the June 2021 Report of the Hutchins Center-Chicago Booth Ta sk Force on Financial Stability (H-B) addresses all the key challenges, laying out a broad agenda for U.S. financial reform. In addition, we have the July 2021 G-3 0 R e port that provides detailed proposals for reforming the U.S. Treasury market.

In this post, we discuss these reform proposals, highlighting areas where we strongly agree and believe that implementation is urgent. In particular, we emphasize the benefits that would come from changes in the Treasury market (cash and repo), in the central counterparties (CCPs) that have become the most critical links in the global financial system, and in open-end mutual funds holding illiquid assets. We also highlight the governance proposals in the H-B Report. In our view, full implementation of the agendas set out in the these reports would make the U.S. financial system far safer than it is today….

The Treasury's Missed Opportunity

Last week, the U.S. Treasury published the first of four reports designed to implement the seven core principles for regulating the U.S. financial system announced in President Trump’s Executive Order 13772 (February 3, 2017).

Seven years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, it’s entirely appropriate to take stock of the changes it wrought, whether they have been effective, and whether in certain cases they went too far or in others not far enough. President Trump’s stated principles provide an attractive basis for making the financial system both more cost-effective and safer. And much of the Treasury report focuses on welcome proposals to reduce the unwarranted compliance burden imposed by a range of regulations and supervisory actions on small and medium-sized depositories that—if adequately capitalized—pose no threat to the financial system. We hope these will be viewed universally as “motherhood and apple pie.”

Unfortunately, at least when considering the largest banks, our conclusion is that adopting the Treasury’s recommendations would sacrifice resilience to achieve cost reductions, yet with little prospect for boosting economic growth. Put simply, implementation of the Treasury plan would reduce regulation of the most systemic intermediaries, and in so doing, unacceptably reduce the resilience of the U.S. financial system....

Commentary

Money, Banking, and Financial Markets