Reinforcing a weekend push by finance chiefs from the Group of 20 nations, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan on Monday said banks should hold more capital on their balance sheets so that they can avert tough financial situations.
?Capital requirements even during non-crisis periods have to have a larger buffer,? he said on Monday via teleconference to the Antique India Markets Conference in Mumbai. ?We do need significant changes.?
Greenspan made his call for tighter capital requirements two days after a G-20 meeting in London proposed requiring banks to increase the quantity and quality of assets they keep in reserve for when economies stumble. The drive to revamp regulation comes after excessive risk-taking by the world?s banks led to $1.61 trillion in losses and writedowns, taxpayer-funded bailouts and a global recession.
?Financial intermediaries allowed institutions to go into default by taking this kind of risk,” Greenspan said. ?It all depends on how we view the crisis. There?s no substitute for capital. Don?t think the crisis could have been prevented unless we can change human nature.”
Once regarded as the greatest central banker, Greenspan has seen his legacy criticised since the US subprime-mortgage market collapsed in 2007. Having run the Fed from 1987 to 2006, he said in October that a ?flaw? in the ideology of free-market risk management he had espoused contributed to the ?once-in-a-century? credit crisis. He repeated how rare the turmoil was and blamed it on an under-pricing of risk or ?building of euphoria? that emerged at the start of the century as interest rates and inflation ran into single-digits.
His hands-off approach to asset bubbles has been challenged by some Fed district-bank presidents, such as Janet Yellen. Former Fed vice-chairman Alan Blinder and Stanford University professor John Taylor are among the economists who say Greenspan also left interest rates too low for too long earlier this decade, encouraging the easy credit that fostered the housing bubble.
Speaking a week before the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, Greenspan said that event had led to a ?massive contraction? in trade financing and surge in inventories. He predicted some exotic financial instruments, such as collateralised debt obligations, won?t return even after the crisis passes.
On India, Greenspan said that is not an economic issue, it?s a political issue and said the financial system needs to be regulated. He also noted that countries, developed and developing, are moving out of the financial crisis and that the current financial crisis is an event once in a century.