Scott: Overhaul Plan Could Create a 'Zombie Financial System at Great Public Expense'
The director of the independent and nonpartisan Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, Hal S. Scott of Harvard University, says that the Obama Administration’s proposal on the resolution of systemically-important financial institutions, if adopted, would lead to the creation of ‘a zombie financial system’ where financial institutions can neither die nor restructure sufficiently to be viable and where the burden of sustaining them falls on the taxpayer. The Committee recommends instead that financial institutions determined by Treasury to be systemically important should be resolved by the Federal Deposit Insurance Act and not under either bankruptcy law or the open bank assistance provided under a too-big-to-fail policy (or under a too-systemically-important-to-fail policy). Derivatives contracts could be sold rather than liquidated to limit systemic issues. Scott made his comments at a forum sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute where a panel of experts commented on his pre...