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Citi’s Moral Hazard

The Special Inspector General of the TARP has just released a report on the government’s role in saving Citigroup from failure. You can read the report here (PDF). If you are short on time, just skip down to the “Conclusions” section on p.47. While it appears that the govt. has profited by the bailout, the TARP legacy has left “too big to fail” intact. The following excerpt examines the danger still latent in the system:

When the Government assured the world in 2008 that it would use TARP to prevent the failure of any major financial institution, and then demonstrated its resolve by standing behind Citigroup, it did more than reassure troubled markets – it encouraged high-risk behavior by insulating the risk takers from the consequences of failure. Unless and until institutions like Citigroup are either broken up so that they are no longer a threat to the financial system, or a structure is put in place to assure that they will be left to suffer the full consequences of their own folly, the prospect of more bailouts will potentially fuel more bad behavior with potentially disastrous results.

Notwithstanding the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, which does give FDIC new resolution authority for financial companies deemed systemically significant, the market still gives the largest financial institutions an advantage over their smaller counterparts. They are able to raise funds more cheaply, and enjoy enhanced credit ratings based on the assumption that the Government remains as a backstop. Specifically, creditors who believe that the Government will not allow such institutions to fail may under price their extensions of credit, giving those institutions access to capital at a price that does not fully account for the risk created by their behavior. Cheaper credit is effectively a subsidy, which translates into greater profits, giving the largest financial institutions an unearned advantage over their smaller competitors. And because of the prospect of another Government bailout, executives at such institutions might be motivated to take greater risks than they otherwise would, shooting for a big payoff but with reason to hope that if things went wrong they might still be able to keep their jobs.

I think that Citi’s moral hazard = America’s moral hazard. More thoughts on our current state of affairs soon.

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