By Simon Johnson
No doubt there is still a lot of shouting to come, but this week a team at the International Monetary Fund completely nailed the issue of whether large global banks receive an implicit subsidy courtesy of the American government. Is there a subsidy, is it large, and how much damage could it end up causing to the broader economy?
The answers, in order, are: yes, there is an implicit subsidy that lowers the funding costs for very large banks; the subsidy is big, with costs of borrowing for these banks lowered by as much as 100 basis points, i.e., 1 percentage point; and yet this large scale of implicit support is small relative to the macroeconomic damage that is likely to be caused by the high leverage and incautious risk-taking that the subsidy encourages.
If anything the IMF’s work provides a conservative (i.e., low) set of estimates.
Still, as I explain in my NYT.com Economix column, I’m a big fan of this work because the Fund’s report is very good on how to handle and reconcile the main alternative methodologies for getting at the issue.
The Fund offers an entirely reasonable approach that sets a very high quality bar. The Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.) is expected to produce a report on TBTF subsidies in the summer; their work now needs to be at least as careful and as comprehensive as that of the IMF. The same applies to the Federal Reserve and anyone in the private sector who attempts to dispute these numbers.
