Given these current competitive positions, these two institutions clearly face uncertain – and possibly even unstable – futures. And it’s the shareholders and U.S. taxpayers that ultimately seem to bear the brunt of the business risks Goldman and Morgan are certain to face.
Thus, the question we need to answer is this: What will these two institutions look like a decade from now?
There seems no good reason why many of the operations undertaken by Goldman and Morgan should be housed in institutions deemed “too big to fail,” since that makes them eligible for taxpayer-finance bailouts.
Principal transactions – in normal years, a contributor to profits – are basically the provenance of a hedge fund. If we don’t want to bail out hedge funds, as we did Long-Term Capital Management, we must impose limits on the size hedge funds can achieve: After all, it’s pretty clear that gambling casinos that are large enough to bring down the entire financial system should not be permitted.
If Goldman and Morgan are deemed “too big to fail,” their scope for hedge-fund-type activity must be sharply limited, perhaps to a mere 50% of capital. This would also have the huge benefit of reducing conflicts of interest between the major investment banks and their clients. Currently, the conflicts between their direct investment activities and both their advisory work and their wealth-management activities are much too severe to be eliminated by mere “Chinese walls” that are supposed to keep proprietary information from flowing from the advisory to the investment departments.
Trading and commissions, the major revenue-producers at both Goldman and Morgan, are perfectly acceptable investment banking activities. But there is no reason why brokers and traders should benefit from state bailouts, however necessary we may feel it to protect clients who have accounts with those brokers. Arguments that traders’ derivative books cause a “nexus” with other market participants – requiring traders to be bailed out by the public – can be eliminated by mandating central clearing for derivatives contacts, and imposing harsh capital requirements on contracts, such as credit default swaps, which seem to be especially dangerous to the financial system.
Wealth-management and investment-banking advice are the core activities of an investment bank, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the leaders in those fields. However, gigantic capital bases are not necessary to practice them. The only true investment-banking function that requires large amounts of capital is new issue underwriting (such as initial public offerings, or IPOs), but even that can be carried out with a capital base much smaller than Goldman and Morgan currently employ. After all, isn’t that precisely what syndication is for?
If the principal investment business is removed because of its dangers and conflicts, and the trading businesses are scaled back to a more manageable size, Goldman and Morgan would come to resemble much more closely their 1980s ancestors, and would ideally revert to being privately owned by their partners. Nothing significant would be lost to the U.S. economy by such a change, and a great deal would be gained by the removal of the taxpayer risks and conflicts of interest that we’ve outlined here.
In such an environment, we might expect that the three universal banks – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup – would have an advantage because of their greater size.
However, Citi has made it abundantly clear with its repeated failures over the past 30 years that there is no significant advantage to be gained in combining the very high-skill activities of asset management and traditional investment banking with the low-paid, low-skill activities of retail banking, most corporate banking and most standardized trading. Thus, given good corporate governance (i.e. shareholders who demand value and rein in management self-aggrandizement), the investment banking and asset-management businesses would in the long term migrate from huge universal bank behemoths to moderately capitalized specialists, if such existed.
Leaving Goldman and Morgan as they are is bad for their shareholders, bad for taxpayers and bad for the U.S. financial system. They must be restructured.
