Unlikely Critic Says Banks Still Too Big To Fail, Pose 'Nuclear' Risk to US Economy
A former Goldman Sachs executive—one credited as an architect of the 2008 banking bailout—said Tuesday that the country’s largest financial institutions are “still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy.”
In his first speech delivered as the newly appointed president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, Neel Kashkari “came out swinging,” Business Insider reported.
He likened the risk posed by big banks to that of a nuclear reactor, noting: “The cost to society of letting a reactor melt down is astronomical.”
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“Enough time has passed that we better understand the causes of the crisis, and yet it is still fresh in our memories,” Kashkari said at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, D.C. “Now is the right time for Congress to consider going further than Dodd-Frank with bold, transformational solutions to solve this problem once and for all.”
To that end, Kashkari continued, “the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is launching a major initiative to develop an actionable plan to end [too-big-to-fail, or TBTF], and we will deliver our plan to the public by the end of the year. Ultimately Congress must decide whether such a transformational restructuring of our financial system is justified in order to mitigate the ongoing risks posed by large banks.”
Among the solutions he floated: “breaking up large banks into smaller, less connected, less important entities” and “turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail (with regulation akin to that of a nuclear power plant).”
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