The scale of that help is huge. Loans from central banks and debt guarantees alone amount to $2.7 trillion. As with any private industry in receipt of almost unlimited cheap public funds, finance now has every incentive to be as big as possible””beyond the point of usefulness. Change the assumptions behind this weird system, and everything else, including pay and the heads-I-win, tails-you-lose culture, will move too.
Removing the explicit side of the state’s commitment is relatively simple. Some guarantees are still plainly needed now, but a firm deadline of, say, five years for the final expiry of the governments’ various crisis-induced pledges should be set globally. With the world economy in better shape, this looks more realistic than it did six months ago. But even then the implicit assumption will linger that banks will always be bailed out. This is the core problem. There are two possible responses to it: regulate banks to try to make them safer, and attempt to limit the implicit guarantee. Both approaches are now needed.
“In America, the euro zone and Britain the sums involved so far amount to about one sixth of GDP.”
The sums involved here really do stagger the imagination.