MICHAEL M.GRYNBAUM 美国应扩大和集中金融监管 否则金

扩大和集中金融监管，否则金融危机不可收拾

New York Fed Chief Calls for Regulatory Shake-Up

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Published: June 10, 2008

One of the nation’s top central bankers called Monday for a significant overhaul in regulation of the financial industry, declaring that the current system of supervision is confusing and susceptible to “perverse” abuses.

The official, Timothy Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and one of the chief architects of the Bear Stearns bailout, said banks and government regulators must take pre-emptive steps to prevent future disruptions from snowballing into crises.
Among his recommendations: placing investment banks and other major private-sector financial players under a single regulatory umbrella; “strengthening shock absorbers within institutions” by raising the required levels of capital reserves; and streamlining a system of oversight that, he said, had ballooned into “an enormously complex web of rules.”

The New York Fed will also begin addressing the oversight of credit derivatives, a sophisticated type of financial instrument that led to much of the trouble related to the mortgage crisis of last summer. Mr. Geithner said 17 firms, whose business represents more than 90 percent of derivatives trades, would meet at the bank on Monday to discuss a more centralized system for reducing the risks associated with that market.

Mr. Geithner’s remarks, in a speech to the Economic Club of New York, represented the strongest words to date in support of a more stringent and broadly reaching oversight plan for the government and the Fed. It went beyond a plan introduced in March by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., by calling for the Fed to have more authority in overseeing the stability of global markets.

“At present the Federal Reserve has broad responsibility for financial stability not matched by direct authority, and the consequences of the actions we have taken in this crisis make it more important that we close that gap,” Mr. Geithner said.

Mr. Geithner, 46, has been at the center of a closely watched policy debate that arose from the ashes of Bear Stearns, the venerable investment bank that nearly defaulted at the height of the winter’s credit crisis. The Fed’s bailout of Bear, orchestrated by Mr. Geithner, raised questions about the appropriate role of the central bank in mitigating financial crises, namely the extent of supervision that should be extended over private banks.

Mr. Geithner acknowledged that central bankers faced a delicate balance in seeking to avoid either suppressing innovation or rewarding reckless behavior. “We have to distinguish carefully between problems the markets will solve on their own and those markets cannot solve,” he said. “We have to acknowledge not just that regulation comes with costs, but that if not carefully crafted it can distort incentives in ways that may make the system less safe.”

But he said the shocks of the past few months were reason enough “to require significant changes to the way we regulate and supervise financial institutions.”

“I believe the severity and complexity of this crisis makes a compelling case for a comprehensive reassessment of how to use regulation to strike an appropriate balance between efficiency and stability,” he said.

He said the Fed planned to extend the financial faucets it put into place since the summer’s mortgage meltdown, to provide banks with a wide range of sources of liquidity. But he called for central banks to go further.

“The major central banks should put in place a standing network of currency swaps, collateral policies and account arrangements that would make it easier to mobilize liquidity across borders quickly in crisis,” he said.