Was It The Banks Fault?

Unsafe at Any Speed, and the limits on bailouts

The banks failed because they could. And they could fail because they were leveraged. They falsely promised to make repayments regardless of the circumstances. 

The overall level of leverage is way too high. This reinforces my earlier interpretation of Larry’s comment about leverage not being the problem — there was way too much leverage, but its increase did not directly cause a crisis. 

The next part is really interesting. 

The Federal Reserve is also leveraged. In the aftermath of Lehman’s collapse, the Fed effectively insured not just checking and saving accounts, but also money market funds. These obligations were officially and, respectively, FDIC and Treasury obligations. They ran to some $6 trillion. But neither institution had $6 trillion in ready cash to make good on its insurance. Hence, the Fed would have been on the hook. Indeed, had things gotten worse, there would surely have been a run on the life insurance industry’s cash-surrender value policies, which, at the time, also totaled roughly $6 trillion.

Now imagine, as discussed in Kotlikoff (2010), that the government’s explicit and implicit pledges of insurance had been called by the public. I.e., suppose the public had, despite the promises of government insurance, headed straight to the banks, money market funds, and insurance companies to empty out their accounts and cash out their cash-surrender value policies. In this case, the Fed would have had to print $12 trillion virtually overnight. The M1 money supply at the time was just $1.5 trillion. Hence, this would have produced fully-justified fears of hyperinflation leading everyone to run for their money before prices soared