No Apparent Rush on Banking Reforms: Today's Outrage
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- How slow can we go? I'm sorry, but putting new global banking requirements in place by the end of 2012 doesn't sound like a rush order to me.
Here it is one year after the fall of
Lehman Brothers
and the rescue of
Merrill Lynch
by
Bank of America
(BAC) - Get Report
and all those trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts doled out to rescue
Citigroup
(C) - Get Report
,
AIG
(AIG) - Get Report
,
Wells Fargo
(WFC) - Get Report
,
JPMorgan
(JPM) - Get Report
,
Goldman Sachs
(GS) - Get Report
,
Morgan Stanley
(MS) - Get Report
, etc, etc.
So we've already lost a year and now we're talking about another two years before anything is in place.
That's why I can't get too excited about the report from TheStreet's Dan Freed this morning about the
that came out late last night.
I know Dan is right that based on historical norms, a two-year deadline is an aggressive timetable to agree on and implement new global requirements for bigger capital cushions at banks to prevent a repeat of the credit crunch that we're all still living through.
But come on, these are extraordinary circumstances that require extraordinary effort. We should be able to get something done faster.
By the time 2012 rolls around, we may not even care anymore. The impetus will be gone, the pain will be forgotten and the world may just let it all slide until the next banking crisis emerges and everyone blames each other for doing nothing the last time.
I hope that the threat of action will at least prompt banks to take preemptive measures. Nothing is preventing individual banks from changing their own internal standards.
For that matter, nothing is preventing the U.S. from laying down some interim requirements while we wait for the rest of the world to hash this out. Heck, the Treasury pretty much runs the show at many of the big U.S. banks.
Why wait?
--Written by Glenn Hall in New York.
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Glenn Hall is the New York-based Editor in Chief of
TheStreet.com
. Previously, he served as deputy editor and chief innovation officer at
The Orange County Register
and as a news manager at
Bloomberg News
in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Washington, D.C. As a reporter, he covered business and financial markets, worked in both print and television in the U.S. and Europe, and conducted in-depth investigative coverage at
The Journal-Gazette
in Fort Wayne, Ind. His work also has been published in a variety of newspapers including
The Wall Street Journal
,
The New York Times
and
International Herald Tribune
. Hall received a bachelor's degree in journalism and political science from The Ohio State University and a certificate in project and program management from Boston University.
