Bank regulators should be forced to see “Hell on Wheels” and read John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”

In the TV series Hell on Wheels, its main character, Cullen Bohannon, when asked to testify before the US Senate about all the obvious corruption of Thomas ‘Doc’ Durant, someone absolutely not Bohannon’s friend, someone absolutely not one having been sanctimonious or behaved according to any social norms, repeats, over and over again, to the great chagrin of his interrogators: “The Transcontinental railroad could not have been built without Thomas Durant”

And John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his “Money: Whence it came where it went” 1975 the following: “For the new parts of the country [USA’s West]… there was the right to create banks at will and therewith the notes and deposits that resulted from their loans…[if] the bank failed…someone was left holding the worthless notes… but some borrowers from this bank were now in business...[jobs created]

It was an arrangement which reputable bankers and merchants in the East viewed with extreme distaste… Men of economic wisdom, then as later expressing the views of the reputable business community, spoke of the anarchy of unstable banking… The men of wisdom missed the point. The anarchy served the frontier far better than a more orderly system that kept a tight hand on credit would have done…. what is called sound economics is very often what mirrors the needs of the respectfully affluent.”

And Galbraith also opined in his book that: “The function of credit in a simple society is, in fact, remarkably egalitarian. It allows the man with energy and no money to participate in the economy more or less on a par with the man who has capital of his own. And the more casual the conditions under which credit is granted and hence the more impecunious those accommodated, the more egalitarian credit is… Bad banks, unlike good, loaned to the poor risk, which is another name for the poor man.”

Therefore I cannot but conclude in that bank regulators should be forced to see “Hell on Wheels” and read John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”. That in order to, hopefully, be able realize that with their risk weighted capital requirements for banks, these will not finance the risky future, but only refinance the safer past and present and, as a result, the economy will stall and fall. 

To add insult to the injury, bank regulators are doing all this in the belief that bank crises result from excessive exposures to what is perceived as risky, which is utter nonsense. Bank crises have always, and will always, result from uncertainties; that which includes unexpected events, like devaluations earthquakes and regulators not knowing what they are doing, criminal behavior and excessive exposures to something ex ante perceived as safe but that ex post turned out to be very risky.

“If you see something, say something”. Someone should run to the Homeland Security of the Home of the Brave and denounce that, most probably, unwittingly; some serious terrorism is taking place by means of dangerously risk adverse faulty bank regulations.