Ignatius on the financial crisis and Obama: The Right Roosevelt?

[flpoljunkie]

The Right Roosevelt?

By David Ignatius
Thursday, March 5, 2009

There has been a lot of speculation about whether Barack Obama can be another Roosevelt, but I wonder if we're talking about the right Roosevelt. In fixing the financial crisis, Obama could use a little less of FDR's affection for economic giantism and a little more of TR's zeal for trust-busting.

This week's $30 billion supplementary bailout for insurance behemoth AIG is a case in point. Keeping this insolvent monster on life support doesn't make sense. The company should have been dismantled when the crisis first hit last year, when the healthy parts could have been sold for a decent price. Treasury says that after this latest bailout, AIG should shrink and remake itself in smaller pieces. Better late than never, I guess.

Even AIG knows it's too big. "AIG's conglomerate structure is too complicated, unwieldy and opaque," said Edward Liddy, the company's new chief executive, who came in last fall to try to clean up the wreckage. The tragedy is that this was clear a few years ago, and nobody did anything about it. A former regulator remembers that AIG's transactions were so tangled and incomprehensible that it couldn't close its books on time -- yet nobody thought to call a halt.

Treasury and Federal Reserve officials have continued to operate on the assumption that in finance, bigger is better -- and safer. The argument for these huge, diversified financial institutions has been that in pooling different kinds of risks, they would increase the portfolios' overall stability. That rationale helped create the monstrosity called Citigroup. It was like the argument for securitization of subprime mortgages -- put enough of them together and the danger of default would be less. That didn't work out too well.

And yet the authorities have continued to act as if greater size will provide greater stability. That was the rationale for pushing a healthy Bank of America to acquire a sick Merrill Lynch last fall. A better response to Merrill's sickness would have been to leach out the toxic assets and then encourage an orderly breakup of the brokerage firm; it was too big already.

A case study for today's regulators is President Theodore Roosevelt's response to the financial shenanigans of 1902, when the railroad barons tried to combine the Great Northern and Northern Pacific lines into a huge holding company called Northern Securities Co. Roosevelt wanted to file an antitrust suit to stop the deal. The financiers threatened that the lawsuit would cause a panic on Wall Street, to which TR's attorney general, Philander G. Knox, memorably replied: "There is no stock ticker at the Department of Justice."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/04/AR2009030403067.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

[PM Martin]

1. I happen to agree.

The monopolies must be busted.
AIG, Citigroup, and Bank of America are monopolizing the markets. If they are too big to fail, they are too big to exist.

[Captain Hilts]

2. This is a very thought-provoking column. Perhaps if we used the TR example instead

of the FDR one in dialogue, then a few Rs would defect.

Theodore, of course, wouldn't be caught dead with the Limbaugh crowd, even though he already is dead.

[flpoljunkie]

3. Great response: 'There is no stock ticker at the Department of Justice.'

[Cha]

4. Rec'd~ I say Obama take

the best from both Roosevelts.