Easy Money, Easy Mergers, Less Competition
From 1987 up until the end of Greenspan’s rein in 2006, there was a period of easy money and what Barry Ritholtz called “ultra easy money” which was created by Greenspan flooding the market with easy cash.
Ritholtz points out that yet another ingredient to the crisis pie might have been that there were too few banks and too many giants. You had super mergers in which smaller banks were snatched by the larger banks. One argument is that banking should be done on smaller scale. A scale where the bank manager as a more personal relationship with person he is lending to.
The principal of banking has always been the same throughout history, borrow money cheaply (deposits) and lend it out to someone who will pay as much interest as possible. What we saw develop through the use of technology was a man (or computer software) lend money to man in on Long Island to buy his house without personally verifying the financial standing of the borrower.
Sweet plan, right? The lender is now executive somewhere else and the taxpayer is left holding the ball, the proverbial “Moral Hazard” at its best.
The easy money policy that allowed for super mergers to occur is another example of how Federal Reserve policies often limits competition and encourages malinvestment.
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