ゴードン「米国銀行小史」と金融危機 |
何人かの米経済評論家が、ビジネス史家ジョン・スティール・ゴードンの「米国銀行小史」を必読と勧めていたので、一読し、確かに頭の中が少し整理された気がした。『ウォール・ストリート・ジャーナル』(10月10日)掲載の一文である(全文下記)。
授業の資料に使った機会に、現下の金融危機に触れた一節のみ訳しておく。
Congress's attempt to force banks to make home loans to people who had limited creditworthiness, while encouraging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take these dubious loans off their hands so that the banks could make still more of them, created another crisis in the banking system that is now playing out.
(仮訳)議会が、返済能力の限られた人々も住宅ローン審査に通るよう銀行へ強要を試み、一方で、ファニー・メイとフレディ・マックにこれら疑わしいローンを引き受けさせ、さらに銀行が融資を拡大するよう奨励して、銀行システムに新たな危機を作り出した。それが今われわれの眼前に展開している事態である。
※ ファニー・メイとフレディ・マックは、民間金融機関に対し住宅ローン債権の保障業務を行う「政府系」金融機関。それぞれの頭字語(FNMA、FHLMC)を、かなり無理して、そう発音したものだ。よく細部を忘れるので、自分用にもメモしておく。
Fannie Mae
Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA)
連邦住宅抵当公庫
Freddie Mac
Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC)
連邦住宅金融抵当公庫
The Wall Street Journal
OCTOBER 10, 2008
A Short Banking History of the
Why our system is prone to panics.
By JOHN STEELE GORDON
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122360636585322023.html#
We are now in the midst of a major financial panic. This is not a unique occurrence in American history. Indeed, we've had one roughly every 20 years: in 1819, 1836, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, 1929, 1987 and now 2008. Many of these marked the beginning of an extended period of economic depression.
How could the richest and most productive economy the world has ever known have a financial system so prone to periodic and catastrophic break down? One answer is the baleful influence of Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson, to be sure, was a genius and fully deserves his place on
Consider central banking. A central bank's most important jobs are to guard the money supply -- regulating the economy thereby -- and to act as a lender of last resort to regular banks in times of financial distress. Central banks are, by their nature, very large and powerful institutions. They need to be to be effective.
Jefferson's chief political rival, Alexander Hamilton, had grown up almost literally in a counting house, in the West Indian
To Jefferson, who may not have understood the concept of central banking,
But as the Federalists lost power and the Jeffersonians became the dominant party, the bank's charter was not renewed in 1811. The near-disaster of the War of 1812 caused President James Madison to realize the virtues of a central bank and a second bank was established in 1816. But President Andrew Jackson, a Jeffersonian to his core, killed it and the country had no central bank for the next 73 years.
We paid a heavy price for the Jeffersonian aversion to central banking. Without a central bank there was no way to inject liquidity into the banking system to stem a panic. As a result, the panics of the 19th century were far worse here than in
Even
No small part of the reason that an ordinary recession that began in the spring of 1929 turned into the calamity of the Great Depression was the inability of the Federal Reserve to do its job. It was completely reorganized in 1934 and the
While the Constitution gives the federal government control of the money supply, it is silent on the control of banks, which create money. In the early days they created money both through making loans and by issuing banknotes and today do so by extending credit. Had
Without it, banking regulation was left to the states. Some states provided firm regulation, others hardly any. Many states, influenced by Jeffersonian notions of the evils of powerful banks, made sure they remained small by forbidding branching. In banking, small means weak. There were about a thousand banks in the country by 1840, but that does not convey the whole story. Half the banks that opened between 1810 and 1820 had failed by 1825, as did half those founded in the 1830s by 1845.
Many "wildcat banks," so called because they were headquartered "out among the wildcats," were simple frauds, issuing as many banknotes as they could before disappearing. By the 1840s there were thousands of issues of banknotes in circulation and publishers did a brisk business in "banknote detectors" to help catch frauds.
The Civil War ended this monetary chaos when Congress passed the National Bank Act, offering federal charters to banks that had enough capital and would submit to strict regulation. Banknotes issued by national banks had to be uniform in design and backed by substantial reserves invested in federal bonds. Meanwhile Congress got the state banks out of the banknote business by putting a 10% tax on their issuance. But National banks could not branch if their state did not allow it and could not branch across state lines.
The reorganization of the Federal Reserve and the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation hugely reduced the number of bank failures and mostly ended bank runs. But there remained thousands of banks, along with thousands of savings and loan associations, mutual savings banks, and trust companies. While these were all banks, taking deposits and making loans, they were regulated, often at cross purposes, by different authorities. The Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the FSLIC, the SEC, the banking regulators of the states, and numerous other agencies all had jurisdiction over aspects of the American banking system.
The system was stable in the prosperous postwar years, but when inflation took off in the late 1960s, it began to break down. S&Ls, small and local but with disproportionate political influence, should have been forced to merge or liquidate when they could not compete in the new financial environment. Instead Congress made a series of quick fixes that made disaster inevitable.
In the 1990s interstate banking was finally allowed, creating nationwide banks of unprecedented size. But Congress's attempt to force banks to make home loans to people who had limited creditworthiness, while encouraging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take these dubious loans off their hands so that the banks could make still more of them, created another crisis in the banking system that is now playing out.
While it will be painful, the present crisis will at least provide another opportunity to give this country, finally, a unified banking system of large, diversified, well-capitalized banking institutions that are under the control of a unified and coherent regulatory system free of undue political influence.
Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).