Now I'd like to say a few words about the famous concept of too big to fail. That is closely linked to what people observed to be the result of the recent crisis. And this concept really was up to the surface and drew a lot of interest. Well, first of all, at the first glance it seems to be, like I said before, political blackmail. So the big bank says, if you allow me to fail, then I will bury a lot of people under what remains from me. And that will be a much more damaging situation in the capital market compared to the cost of this check that you have to inject in me in order to keep me afloat. Well, it really produced this idea that there are these big fat cats that dictate the markets and the people of what to do. And then they say, for any reason, if they agreed and if their poor risk management result in fundamental potential losses and damages. And then say, well, now you help us. And they obviously go to the government as the lender of last resort. And it seems to be sort of unfair. And a lot of people who participated in this Occupy Wall Street movement said, well, we don't need them. These guys are really ripping us off, so they're not doing their job in the right way. Now let's see what would happen if we allowed all them to crash. Well, we are back to our classic picture. So these are investors, here are various kinds of borrowers. And here are these, Now I will put a bank and then the investment bank together. You can say, why?. Well, because there is no longer Glass-Steagall. A few words about that in just a moment. So we can see what's going on. And if this is the case, we remove these guys. We are back to the stone age of capital market. So these guys should deal with those directly. Well, some people say, well, we have to be back to roots. But this is really in a wishful thinking case. You cannot rewind all this market development over the last couple of decades. And go back to what was the case 50 or 100 years ago. It would be a too huge a damage for the economy. To say nothing of this, we can keep in mind that actually right now we have these markets global. And we have technology developments. So you can really not take this progress back again. But that's not it, there is something else to be observed here. We saw that the key objection to the behavior of these big banks was the fact that they were together. Now, in the previous episode when I was showing that there's a bank, and there's the investment bank that buys the mortgages from it. But oftentimes this was one in the same structure. Remember, there was no longer Glass-Steagall. So banks were now in reality enjoying both commercial and investment banking. And that, as we know, produces some temptations and then produces some adverse incentives. And that was happening at a very large scale. So, basically, a lot of people said, worry not for the repealing of the Glass-Steagall act. Then all this maybe would have happened, but at a lower scale. And some very well-known specialists in the area, they directly blame the sort of relaxed regulation for the depth and the scale of the crisis. So soon after that happened, there were some new pieces of legislation put in place. And some of them were actually aimed at making sure that small investors are not damaged that much. And the famous Dodd-Frank Act of the 2010 to 2012 all this development. It just showed that, some people said, we are bringing back basically this Glass-Steagall back again with the but it's not exactly the same. You cannot really come back and down to the waters of the river twice. But the spirit was sort of brought back, so this market discipline. The responsibility of large institutions, it was really brought in the center. And the people said that without that we can not really afford to support these too big to fail, these bulge bracket banks, with all the money that we accumulate in the economy. That would be unfair, and, in this case, the check would be probably way too high to justify the positive services that they provide. And now I would like to conclude that with the following idea. We can see that the concept of too big to fail really is close to the moral hazard problem at a higher level. At the global level, and at the level of combined instruments and institutions. So we can say that starting from the very famous and very simple thing without these banks from here. We've been developing throughout this course this idea of recognizing moral hazard problems, not only them, but primarily them. And then trying to cope with them to some extent. And then we saw that these problems always would find a way to go up at the next level. That was the case from individuals to banks, then from banks to bank insurers. And here it came up to the level of too big to fail at a global scale. So we can sort of metaphorically claim that this whole course is about the ascent of moral hazard. Now I'm quoting the title of the very well known book by Niall Ferguson that's called The Ascent of Money, when he tells the stories of various segments of capital markets and the history of developments in a very nice way. But this is a book that is not a sort of specialized course, it's just nice to read. But we here try to analyze what was going on. And therefore, we see that the crisis, by recognizing the problems caused by private information at a new global level, we came to a challenge, what can be done? And we will study that in the next episodes, but before we have to say a few words about this globalization. I've mentioned that many times that the crisis was at a global scale. But now I'll just say a few words, what we mean by globalization. How it has developed, and how it has been the background of capital markets for the last couple of decades. So in the next episode, we will discuss globalization.
