Pros And Cons Of Volcker Rule

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3. Pros for the Volcker rule
The core idea of Volcker rule is to make banks in the U.S change mixed management to segregate management, in other words, Volcker rule tends to separate commercial banks and investment banks. This may bring harm to some people’s benefits; especially the beneficiary in Wall Street, but some people can still get benefits from Volcker rule and support this in different ways.

3.1 Government and Taxpayers
In a country with excellent risk management, mixed operation could bring improvement to the whole financial industry; conversely, if a country’s risk management may not perform very well; mixed operation may bring chaos to this country’s financial sector. What is worse, it may bring much harm to the country and even the world’s economy.
Before financial crisis in 2008, speculators including investment banks in Wall Street securitized mortgages by using OBS (Off-balance-sheet Operation), and used CDS (Credit Default Swap) to hedge funds. Finally, financial risk exposed, which caused heavy loss to the whole economy in U.S. The key reason that it is harmful is not only that commercial banks engage in investment banks’ activities, it is because commercial banks, by engaging in securities organization, misappropriated credit funds and inter-bank borrowing(lending) business for their own investment, including in security market or real estate market. This would create a “bubble” economy and if the “bubble” is broken, the whole country’s economy will seriously suffer from it. To avoid that, the government has to stop it. So the government has to put taxpayers’ money to cover this big hole caused by speculators in Wall Street.
Now Volcker rule prohibits that banks should not engage in proprietary trading, whic...

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...00 and those non-bank financial institutions (shadow banks) may have higher capital requirements and would face strict banking regulations. Higher capital requirements and lower leverage mean that revenue of these activities banned by Volcker rule is going to decrease. That is why some banks support to Volcker rule’s efforts and they are willing to spin off proprietary trading and hedge funds. If they do not do that, they will face steep of revenue anyway and may be regulated in a more strict way.
Volcker rule could also bring some benefits to banks.
First, Splitting commercial banks and investment banks could train two employees in two lines, whether professional techniques or professional management skills. Because in securities areas, employees could increase their professional technology and services by performing customers’ requirements, while commercial banks,

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