Note: I’ve updated this post at the end with another response to Jamie Dimon, this one by James Coffman. Coffman served in the enforcement division of the SEC for over twenty years, most recently as an assistant director of enforcement, and previously wrote a guest post for this blog.
In the Washington Post, Jamie Dimon asserts that we shouldn’t “try to impose artificial limits on the size of U.S. financial institutions.” Why not?
“Scale can create value for shareholders; for consumers, who are beneficiaries of better products, delivered more quickly and at less cost; for the businesses that are our customers; and for the economy as a whole.”
I don’t know of any serious person who believes this to be true for banks above, say, $100 billion in assets. Charles Calomiris, who studies this stuff, couldn’t find anything stronger to back up the economies of scale claim than a study saying that bank total factor productivity grew by 0.4% per year between 1991 and 1997 — a study whose author thinks that the main factor behind increasing productivity was IT investments.
Continue reading “Note to Jamie Dimon: Repeating Something Doesn’t Make It True”