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The Ezra Klein Show

A Radical Way of Thinking About Money

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.611K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2023

⏱️ 63 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s been two weeks since the Silicon Valley Bank run, and we’re still feeling the ripple effects — not just at banks like Signature, First Republic and Credit Suisse, which are definitely taking a beating. Across the industry, too, banks are on edge, and regulators are rushing to keep the system together. Every financial crisis is different. And every financial crisis is the same. Assets that a lot of people thought were safe — mortgage-backed securities in the 2008 crisis and long-term Treasury bonds in this latest bank run — end up not being so secure. When assets start failing, people panic. Usually, regulators pick up the pieces with some kind of bailout, and there are calls for more oversight. The theory goes that regulations should focus on keeping a couple of wayward institutions in line, and we’ve gone through this playbook over and over again. We’re going through it now, and it’s time we take a different approach to banking regulation. Morgan Ricks is a law professor at Vanderbilt University who thinks those measures often miss the mark in addressing the problems baked into our banking system. He’s worked both on Wall Street and in the Treasury Department. He wrote the book “The Money Problem,” which reflects on the 2008 financial crisis. But the theory he presents in the book ends up being explanatory today. We discuss what lessons banking regulators missed from the Great Recession; the need to panic-proof the entire financial system, as opposed to developing regulations around a systemic risk that he finds hard to define; why it’s important now to revisit the basics of banking, its relationship to creating money and the tendencies that get banks in trouble; the government’s role in insuring or backstopping deposits; what it would mean for the government to start treating money as a public good for us all; and more. Mentioned: “Scrap the Bank Deposit Insurance Limit” by Lev Menand and Morgan Ricks “FedAccounts: Digital Dollars” by Morgan Ricks, J. Crawford and L. Menand Book Recommendations: Flash Boys by Michael Lewis The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner The Fed Unbound by Lev Menand Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin and Jeff Geld. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Carole Sabouraud and Kristina Samulewski.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

0:23.1

So bit of housekeeping before we get started. We are going to do another AMA episode

0:27.0

pretty soon. There is really a lot going on and we need your questions. We're only

0:32.3

going to hold this open for a week or two to handle the volume we get, but please send

0:36.5

them over to Ezra Klein Show at nytimes.com with the subject line AMA.

0:47.6

So for my sins, I've covered a number of financial crises now and certainly read about a lot

0:52.3

more. And I think it's safe to say this. Every financial crisis is different and every

0:56.7

financial crisis is the same. It's always something that a lot of people thought was safe.

1:02.5

Mortgage back bonds or banks holding bucketfuls of long-term treasuries isn't safe. We were

1:06.6

wrong. And when we're wrong and we need to reassess how safe our money is or whether we

1:14.3

can get money on the fly, we panic. We try to get all the money out of once. We try to

1:19.1

sell off what we think isn't going to be worth anything. We have bank runs and runs

1:23.5

on money markets and then the system goes into crisis. But notice that there are two parts

1:29.3

of that problem. And so you can think about it differently. One is a part about being

1:33.8

wrong about something being safe. And so the application of that might be we always need

1:39.0

to know what isn't isn't safe. Regulators have to be more on the ball. Banks need to hold

1:43.5

more capital and report their financial condition in ever more detail. They need to imagine

1:48.2

what would happen to their capital if there was more financial stress. And because we can't

1:53.1

do that for every institution at the level of granularity we wish, we really need to figure

1:57.6

it out for the ones that we decide are important and we need to do it for them double hard.

2:02.9

But you could also look at the other side of that equation, the panic. You can say, well,

2:08.5

we can't always know what's safe. Life's going to surprise us. It always does. So we need to do

...

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