John Tamny of Forbes
The wise minds of the financial world have, it seems, reached a banking compromise that will please everyone. Banks benefiting from their FDIC backing and ability to access the Federal Reserve’s discount window will be required to curb their speculative activity, while those that do not receive explicit government aid will be free to take big risks as well as fail.
Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker is the author of this plan, and in a letter to the editor in last week’s Wall Street Journal, former Treasury secretaries W. Michael Blumenthal, Nicholas Brady, Paul O’Neill, George Shultz and John Snow lent their support. The bipartisan backing of the Volcker Rule by some of the “gray eminences” of finance seems to suggest relatively easy passage of his idea, despite rumblings last week that the U.S. Senate wasn’t exactly sanguine.