Det sätter onekligen i perspektiv det som Kotlokoff säger om USAs egentliga underskott som idag ligger på över $70 trillioner.
How Much Is $1 Trillion?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPfY0q-rEdY
Och här lite hur Kotlikoff tänker sig lösa USAs problem:
Kotlikoff would drain the risk-taking out of commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, and insurance companies—turning them into boring, narrow intermediaries akin to mutual-fund firms. Instead of taking deposits and making loans, banks would connect borrowers and depositors with ultrasafe mutual funds created for those purposes. That would solve the problem of banks not keeping enough money in their vaults to pay depositors if they all wanted their money at once, a flaw vividly demonstrated to George Bailey, the character played by Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life (hence the title of Kotlikoff's book).
In Kotlikoff's scenario, banks would be shorn of their risk-taking functions. A deposit would be pooled with other deposits in a new kind of mutual fund, equivalent to a stock mutual fund but with all the money held in plain old cash so there's no chance of not getting it back (though it could still lose value to inflation). That eliminates any reason for a panicky bank run. Mutual funds would supply loans, too. Already, companies raise money by issuing bonds, which are bought by fixed- income mutual funds on behalf of investors. Kotlikoff says loans could work the same way: Mutual funds would pool investors' money and use it to make loans to vetted borrowers. That would cut banks out of the picture, except as go-betweens. The advantage is that if certain borrowers didn't repay, there would be no systemic, global-economy-threatening crisis, like the ones that can occur when one bank goes down and drags others with it. Instead, the worst that could happen is that investors who funded a particular loan would lose part or all of their investment. Insurers couldn't go bust, either, because they would no longer be on the hook for paying claims. People who wanted insurance would simply pool their money for a certain period, and those with verified claims would divvy up whatever was in the pot at the period's end.
One side benefit: Kotlikoff says 100-plus regulatory agencies could be disbanded because financial firms would no longer have other people's money to play with. They would be replaced with a single Federal Financial Authority whose main job would be to verify data supplied by would-be borrowers, such as income statements and the value of collateral. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_07/b4166042289206.htm
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar