Karen Petrou on: How FSOC Enables Systemic Risk
One can and should debate the extent to which nonbank mortgage companies (NBMCs) are as systemically-risky as FSOC says they are. But it’s indisputable that, if FSOC believed what it said, then the paltry and politically-improbable recommendations it announced are proof of only one unhappy conclusion: all FSOC can meaningfully think to do when it sees a systemic risk is figure out how to bail it out. This is certainly what taxpayers have learned the hard way and investors have come to expect. Or, as humorist Dave Barry pointed out after the mid-March systemic deposit bailout, “Eventually the financial community calms down, soothed by the reassuring knowledge that American taxpayers will, as always, step up and cheerfully provide billions of dollars to whichever part of the financial community screwed up this time.”
As we noted in our detailed analysis of FSOC’s report, the Council lays out the rapid-fire growth of NBMCs, the role regulatory arbitrage played in pushing banks to the sidelines of the residential-mortgage business that once defined so many charters, and the direct taxpayer and resulting systemic risk of NBMC liquidity shortfalls. Asked about this at Wednesday’s HFSC hearing, Acting Comptroller Hsu said that NBMC stress could lead to “widespread contagion risk” that could prove “severe.”
Could NBMCs be pulled off the brink under current law? In a little-noticed aside, FSOC says no because NBMCs lack the assets that would make viable orderly liquidation by the FDIC under its systemic authority even if the FDIC finally figured out …