By James Kwak
Many of you have probably already seen Shahien Nasiripour’s interview with Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and the most prominent advocate of simply breaking up big banks. (Paul Volcker is more prominent, but his views are more nuanced; the famous Volcker limit on bank size, it turns out, would not affect any existing banks, at least as interpreted by the Treasury Department.) It largely elaborates on Hoenig’s positions that we’ve previously applauded in this blog, so I’ll just jump to the direct quotations:
On megabanks:
“I think they should be broken up. . . . We’ve provided this support and allowed Too Big To Fail and that subsidy, so that they’ve become larger than I think they otherwise would. I think by breaking them up, the market itself would begin to help tell you what the right size was over time.”
The Baseline Scenario 