Allister Heath, crítico con el nuevo impuesto sobre la banca en el Reino Unido y la propuesta de regulación de Obama en Estados Unidos, escribe un manifiesto constructivo: All can fail: my new manifesto for the banks. Copio el grueso de su propuesta, bastante liberal y coherente con una visión austriaca de los fenómenos monetarios:
We need two revolutionary reforms: a new “all can fail” manifesto, based around a new resolution process to wind down insolvent firms without disrupting the market; and a system to automatically convert debt into equity at troubled banks, helping to reduce the risk of failure in the first place. Modern financial giants are the heart of the economy: if one or several of these interconnected firms were suddenly to stop functioning, we would be faced with a catastrophic systemic crisis: thousands of employers would go bust, payrolls would go unpaid, ATMs would stop working, markets would cease to function and the economy would collapse. Clearly, therefore, giant banks are different beasts to most other businesses. (...)
For banks, bankruptcy triggers a rush to the door, as counterparties to derivatives terminate contracts, net out exposures, and sell collateral. Instead, we need a process that provides for continuity in functions while a special body of administrators undertake an orderly transfer or unwinding of the firms’ positions. There is some research going on in this area, albeit not enough. The government’s call for “living wills” would help to achieve this; big firms should also make greater amounts of information available to the authorities, including all their counterparties.
My second major reform would make all banks more resilient and substantially reduce the likelihood of failure. All banks that hold insured deposits would have to issue a large amount of contingent core Tier-1 capital (since Lloyds sold some last year, they are known as CoCos). This is debt that automatically converts into shares if the bank’s cushion of equity capital (the key buffer against insolvency) falls below a certain threshold, shoring up the balance sheet. Bondholders get hit – they end up holding depreciating shares – while shareholders get diluted. This threat would incentivise investors to force management to be disciplined and preserve capital. The bank would have to pay a high interest rate on the CoCos to reflect the risk of conversion into equity; it would thus have another incentive to be prudent to minimise this cost. If banks had to issue CoCos worth five per cent of all assets, their chance of ever going bankrupt would be drastically minimised.
