As I remember it, the reason for weakening these regulations was that Dodd-Frank is/was extremely expensive to comply with, and that created a banking sector where only the biggest banks could survive and it made no sense to start any new banks.
The thing is, we were already employed by the bank to run risk management and the bank already had the subscription to the software. So from the bank’s perspective it was close to 0 marginal cost to conduct the stress tests because even if they weren’t required, we would be doing them anyway as good risk management practice.
If a bank says that stress tests are too expensive to run, that means that absent regulatory requirements they would perform no risk management.
This feels so damn true about almost every megacorp belly-aching about regulation.
Or “do nothing until someone(s) else gets stung/slapped, and hope that it is someone/someones else not you, so you are around to learn from the mistake”.
You're imagining a scenario where one set of clearly written and fairly interpreted rules applies to your core business. You're excluding scenarios where there are fifty states and two hundred countries wildly swinging back and forth from idiotic legislation drafted to apply to three companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) that is impossible to apply to everyone else.
Imo the situation I describe is worthy of belly aching. I don't work in finance so I guess theoretically the US banking system could be easier to comply with than everything else - but I definitely disagree that everything else is easy to comply with.
The idea that we shouldn't regulated because it's too hard, is the same rationale for suppressing wages, costs money.
For a corporation, too hard === costs money.
No corporation is entitled to exist.
Hiring a team of 5, paying a $100k/year software license, etc are big barriers when you’re a small regional bank with $30 million in deposits.
I'd draw an analogy to having breakfast. If we legally required people to have breakfast every day, that would actually be quite expensive. It'd go from a reflex to something that has to be considered, we have to spend a little bit of time creating evidence that we had breakfast to satisfy the regulator, there'd have to be enforcement where parents check on their kids to make sure they have breakfast, situations where it doesn't make sense to have breakfast (eg, really excessive sleep-ins) now need big reworks to make sure that despite that someone rolls out of bed to have breakfast. The police would roll in and muck up people's life because they skipped breakfast one day due to illness.
It'd be a debacle. It is funny to even imagine what mandatory breakfast would look like if we tried to legally enforce it. It would be expensive, both in dollar figures and hours of lives wasted; no question of it. Just because the act itself is cheap and necessary doesn't make legal compliance cheap and easy. There is a huge gap between the everyday "should do" and the legal "must do".
This is part of why I like the analogy; something being important is different from whether it is a legal necessity. Making it a legal necessity is what brings in the complaints about costs, not the cost of doing the thing itself. The cost is in proving compliance under all possible conditions. The complying act, as the thread ancestor I first replied to noted, is often cheap and generally already done as good practice.
A government is formed by people, not corporations.
Corporations exist inside of a space governments specifically carve out for them.
The mantra that corporations are people is political ideology.
did SVB do any risk management either?
It would be a lot easier for banks to comply with a reinstated Glass Steagall law, but banks don't want that either. The problem is really just that the banks don't want any restrictions, but as this situation shows, restrictions exist for good reason.