Several commentators have reacted to Senator McConnell’s floor statement regarding the Dodd bill as a defense of “doing nothing”. And accordingly argue that such a position would be, in the words of Simon Johnson, both dangerous and irresponsible. This familiar canard is based upon the oft repeated assertion that the failure of Lehman proved that we cannot simply let large financial companies enter bankruptcy.
The simple, but important, fact is that we have no idea what would have happened had we let AIG and Bear go into bankruptcy proceedings. Nor do we know what would have happened if Lehman had been saved. Macroeconomics does not have the luxury of running natural experiments to determine the impact of a corporate failure. Scholars have an obligation to accurately reflect the uncertainties in the debate. Those that assert Lehman proved anything, are being at best disingenuous, and at worst, dishonest.
Let us, however, put forth a few things we do know:
- We know none of Lehman’s counterparties failed as a result of Lehman’s failures. Just as we know none of AIG”s counterparties would have failed if they did not get 100 cents on the dollar from their CDS positions. So where exactly is the proof of contagion?
- We know we had a nasty housing bubble. We were going to lose millions of jobs in construction and real estate regardless of what we did. We knew financial institutions heavily invested in housing would suffer. How exactly would saving Lehman have prevented any of that?
The debate over ending bailouts and too-big-to-fail will not progress, we will not learn a thing, if we let simple, empty assertion pass as fact. Much of the public remains angry at Washington because those responsible, such as Bernanke and Geithner, have never laid out a believable or plausible narrative for the bailouts. It always comes back to “panic.” If we are ever to hope to return to being a country governed by the rule of law, rather than the whims of men, then we need a lot more of an explanation than “panic.”
