Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

If financial reform is passed — and it looks like it will be — how can we tell if it’s working? Mike Konczal offers a couple of metrics:

The most obvious problem would be if the market finds resolution authority non-credible and starts lending to the five biggest firms as if they had a permanent government and Federal Reserve backstop….The next thing to watch is whether derivatives are reformed, and how much the laws are gamed in general. Will Goldman Sachs drop its bank holding company status, add a 20 percent non-financial wing and declare itself an end-user, and whatever other complicated acrobatics the lawyers are dreaming up? That all depends on the wink-winks that the regulators will give, and we will never see those on the outside. All we can do is watch for the effects.

I’d add a couple of other things. The first is leverage. This is easy to hide and hard to measure, so it’s imperfect. Still, there are various good measures of leverage in the banking industry, and if reform works they should stay at moderate levels even when the economy picks up.

The second is easier: industry profitability. If reform works, Wall Street should be less profitable. Not because anyone is trying to punish them (though obviously plenty of people would like to), but because a safer, more real-world-oriented banking sector is inherently less profitable than the trading and finance-oriented one we have right now. If industry profits stay at 2005-07 levels, it’s solid evidence that nothing has changed and they’re acting pretty much the same way as always. So that’s four things to watch for:

  • Borrowing rates for large banks
  • Derivatives trading
  • Leverage ratios
  • Industry profitability

My guess is that on all four of those metrics, we’ll end up improving on where we were in 2005-07 but not by as much as we should. But at this point, any improvement at all is a big win.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate