Memo to JP Morgan Chase: What works for Wal-Mart doesn’t work for banks
Wednesday, 07/29/2009 - 10:12 am by Lucas Puente | One Comment
Student blogger Lucas Puente reveals good, the bad, and the ugly in the banking industry.
Recently, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, told the McKinsey Quarterly that JP Morgan’s “size and scale allow us to find ways to deliver those products better, faster, and cheaper to the customer.” It’s the same myth at work in his 2008 letter to shareholders, when Dimon bragged that JP Morgan has “exponentially grown” through its recent acquisitions. Unfortunately, Dimon made a common mistake: confusing what works for Wal-Mart with what works for banks.
Banks simply can’t achieve the economies of scale that industrial or retail giants can. Alan Berger and David Humphrey at Wharton’s Financial Institutions Center present a neat summary of the academic consensus: “the average cost curve in banking has a relatively flat U-shape.” Even Alan Greenspan has said that the Fed “had been unable to find economies of scale in banking beyond a modest-sized institution.” But no one involved in the intense fury of mergers and acquisitions over the two last decades got that memo; instead, they were likely preoccupied by a desire to expand their market share, broaden product and geographical diversity, and reap large bonuses from these deals.
So what does such enormous growth among these financial institutions mean for our economy? First, there appears to be a positive correlation between bank size and probability of failure. The bigger the bank, the more likely it is to fail -and to leave taxpayers on the hook. Additionally, the most important part of (traditional) banks’ business– their customers– appears to be adversely affected by the trend toward consolidation. According to an influential paper published in the Journal of Finance, diminished competition in the banking industry leads banks to “charg[e] higher loan rates.” Finally, a highly consolidated banking industry also tends to limit entrepreneurial activity.
It looks like the Times is closer to the truth than Dimon and JP Morgan: If it’s too big to fail, it might just be “too big to exist.”
The article: Ben “Systemic Risk” Bernanke proves that Bernanke knowingly maintained a strict monetary policy long after he knew of the sub prime problem as he knew it would cause of the “Depression”.
It shows that he probably engineered it on purpose!
If you want to sleep tonight, Don’t Read It!
“In contradiction to the prevalent view of the time, that money and monetary policy played at most a purely passive role in the Depression, Friedman and Schwartz argued that “the [economic] contraction is in fact a tragic testimonial to the importance of monetary forces” (Friedman and Schwartz, 1963, p. 300).
…..
The slowdown in economic activity, together with high interest rates, was in all likelihood the most important source of the stock market crash that followed in October.
In other words, the market crash, rather than being the cause of the Depression, as popular legend has it, was in fact largely the result of an economic slowdown and the inappropriate monetary policies that preceded it.
Of course, the stock market crash only worsened the economic situation, hurting consumer and business confidence and contributing to a still deeper downturn in 1930.”
Governor Ben S. Bernanke
Money, Gold, and the Great Depression.
At the H. Parker Willis Lecture in Economic Policy, Washington and Lee University,
Lexington, Virginia.
March 2nd, 2004
You can read also: Preparing for the Crash, The Age of Turbulence Update: 30/07/09., which tries to accomplish Greenspan Mission Impossible:
“That is mission impossible. Indeed, the international financial community has made numerous efforts in recent years to establish such oversight, but none prevented or ameliorated the crisis that began last summer.
Much as we might wish otherwise, policy makers cannot reliably anticipate financial or economic shocks or the consequences of economic imbalances.
Financial crises are characterised by discontinuous breaks in market pricing the timing of which by definition must be unanticipated - if people see them coming, then the markets arbitrage them away.
…
The clear evidence of underpricing of risk did not prod private sector risk management to tighten the reins.
In retrospect, it appears that the most market-savvy managers, although conscious that they were taking extraordinary risks, succumbed to the concern that unless they continued to “get up and dance”, as ex-Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince memorably put it, they would irretrievably lose market share.
Instead, they gambled that they could keep adding to their risky positions and still sell them out before the deluge. Most were wrong.“
Alan Greenspan
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World [Economic Order?].
The Age of Turbulence: Plea for a New World Economic Order. explains the nature and causes of economic depressions and proposes a plausible alternative solution.
Posted by Shalom P. Hamou | July 29th, 2009 at 7:13 pm