Como Melhorar a Lei da Reforma Financeira Americana

Artigo de Oliver Hart e Luigi Zingales no City Journal: Now that the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill has become law, the real battle begins. Despite the law’s 2,000 pages—or possibly because of them—there is much ambiguity about what its eventual impact will be. The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, as the law is officially known, grants the Federal Reserve enormous regulatory power. The Fed can now unilaterally decide that any financial institution is “systemically important”—meaning that its failure could destabilize the financial system itself—and impose any sort of regulation on it, such as requiring that it hold more equity capital, limiting the amount of short-term debt it can issue, forcing it to write up a living will, and so on. (...)
There is a better alternative. The Federal Reserve can announce what minimum conditions firms must meet to avoid being designated as systemically important. Each firm can then decide whether to meet those conditions or face federal regulation. And basic principles of economics can tell us what these minimum conditions should be. For a financial firm to cause a systemic shock, two conditions are necessary. First, the firm must be at risk of defaulting and harming the value of financial claims held by depositors and other financial institutions—that is, it has systemic claims against it. Second, it must be sufficiently large or sufficiently interconnected that the losses caused by a default spread through the entire economic system. While the second condition is difficult to assess, the first is not. Fortunately, as long as we can prevent a financial institution from becoming at risk of defaulting on its systemic claims, we don’t need to get the second definition right. With an early-warning system in place and enough equity and long-term debt (which is better able than the short-term kind to absorb losses) in its capital structure to act as a buffer and absorb losses without jeopardizing systemic claims, even the largest financial institution will be safe—and thus unimportant systemically.