Financial Institutions

Well, not exactly. But for anyone who is interested, here is my written Congressional testimony for a House Financial Services Committee, Subcommittee on Capital Markets and GSEs hearing on "The Dodd-Frank Act's Impact on Asset-Backed Securities".

The postal banking idea has been getting a lot of attention.  See, e.g., here (David Dayen) and here (Elizabeth Warren). Yet, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the postal part of the idea is actually convoluting things.

There has been a big push, from several different directions, to develop a more "free market" – as compared with Dodd-Frank's OLA – approach to financial institution insolvency, the Hoover Institute's "chapter 14" proposal being the most famous of these "pushes."

The problem is in the funding. Chapter 11 depends on private DIP funding, but even the largest DIP loans are much smaller than the liquidity needs of a SIFI.

So this morning's FT tells us that Royal Bank of Scotland is in hot water for allegedly playing hardball with its borrowers, in the hopes of acquiring some of their assets on the cheap. That is RBS has adopted something of a "loan to own" strategy.