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Comment by flourpower | Hacker News Reader

That would work if we wanted to stop banks from transferring losses to shareholders - the real problem is that they transfer losses to taxpayers. Pre-IPO Goldman Sachs was probably considered "systemically important" enough for their losses to have been covered in the event of a large trading loss.

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Yeah, there needs to be a clear distinction in advance between entities which can be bailed out (and thus must be highly regulated) and entities which can experiment/innovate freely (but which can't socialize their losses).

LTCM would have clearly been "not bailed out", except it was. Admittedly not directly by the USG/FR, but at the direction of the Federal Reserve.

And even then it's tricky, because a non-regulated entity can make a bet with a regulated one and end up getting bail-out money by virtue of that bet. That seems undesirable, but you also can't really stiff the non-regulated entity, because then nobody will ever want to bet with the regulated one again, thereby destroying its ability to hedge.

I wonder what the costs to the economy would be if we had Canadian levels of regulation of the financial industry, or even greater (something like how utilities themselves are regulated).

Canada believes in allowing only a few, highly regulated banks. Since there are only a handful of banks, it makes it very easy to regulate them.

But this model does hurt the little guys. Since Canadian banks form an oligopoly, they charge you for lending them money; account maintenance fees are standard. This hurts the smallest savers the most. Similarly, there is minimal competition in setting interest rates. Finally, financial innovation, done right, does help people---think Vanguard, index funds, ETFs, etc. All much more limited and much more expensive in Canada (I think).

In contrast to Canada, I think we would be better off with many small institutions, lightly regulated. Then they can compete for your business and do not need taxpayer support when they fail. When they become too big, break them up.

The banking system in Canada is not significantly different than the United States, except that it is just a banking industry. The U.S. has a banking/gambling industry. Actually it's more of a gambling industry with a small banking sideline.

IMHO they would also have been considered "politically important" enough to have their losses covered, given their long history of private => public => private employment.

In which case they should not be a corporation with limited liability.

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