Fed's Kashkari: There's a 67% chance we'll have another financial crisis

What are the chances we have another financial crisis in the next 100 years?

According to research out of the Minneapolis Fed, about 67%.

And Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari does not think this is low enough.

Not even close.

“Our analysis says there’s still a 67% chance we could have another financial crisis [in the next 100 years],” Kashkari told Yahoo Finance.

“Regulations have not solved that problem. We put forward a plan to put a lot more capital in the banks, make them safer, and take that risk down to below 10%. And society as a whole will be much better off if we make the banks safer and we avoid future financial crises.”

In Kashkari’s view, preventing a financial crisis is imperative given not just the impacts that event can have to the economy near-term, but the permanent damage these incidents have to economic growth.

The gap between the red and blue lines is what happens after a financial crisis.
The gap between the red and blue lines is what happens after a financial crisis.

So what does Kashkari propose doing to prevent this issue? End too big to fail banking.

Following the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the resulting seizure of global credit markets, major US and international banks have been deemed “too big to fail” given their global scope and interconectedness in the global banking sector. It is this status, in the view of Kashkari and many others, that presents the biggest risk to the economy.

“A lot of work has been done since 2008, but the biggest banks are still too big to fail,” Kashkari said. “And in my view, we need to do something about that.”

The Minneapolis Fed published a report on Wednesday outlining its plan to end too big to fail banking in the US and drastically reduce its calculated chances of a financial crisis in the US.

The basic approach is to make being a massive bank so unattractive that firms would be likely to divide into smaller units, to face less stringent capital requirements and, by extension, pose fewer risks to the broader economy.

Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari
Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari

Under the Minneapolis Fed’s proposed plan, banks with assets over $250 billion in assets will be required to meet a minimum equity requirement of 23.5% of risk-weighted assets. This means that 23.5% of the banks total asset base must be covered by stock, not bonds, issued by the bank to meet its capital needs. And this 23.5% number is for banks not deemed systemically important (in other words, too big to fail).

If you remain a large bank still deemed systemically important by the Fed, your equity requirement will increase periodically until it reaches 38%. At the end of 2015, for example, the US’ biggest banks had an equity capital ratio of around 12.3%.

Now, the Minneapolis Fed’s plan doesn’t call for the explicit breakups of big banks. But under this outline, it quickly becomes very unattractive to be a big bank.