I’ve been browsing through a new book, [amazon_link id=”0817918841″ target=”_blank” ]Making Failure Feasible: How Bankruptcy Reform Can End Too Big to Fail[/amazon_link], edited by Kenneth Scott, Thomas Jackons and John Taylor. The book is the product of a Hoover Institution project formed in 2009 to address concerns about the moral hazard that would result from bank bailouts. The project quickly concluded that a bank ‘resolution’ procedure was vital, and proposed a Chapter 14 of the US Bankruptcy Code to create a mechanism ready to be applied to restructure or liquidate any large financial institution of systemic importance that gets into trouble.

[amazon_image id=”B015M9SQYK” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Making Failure Feasible: How Bankruptcy Reform Can End Too Big to Fail[/amazon_image]

The book spells out the rationale for a bank resolution mechanism and explains in more detail how the Chapter 14 would work. It argues that the proposal would make it easier for US banks to comply with the ‘living will’ requirement of the Dodd-Frank Act. As the book notes in a later chapter, however, a domestic resolution procedure, even for the US, is only a partial answer for banks that are of global importance. The Bank of England and IMF have said there are 16 of these institutions. And there is, the cross border chapter here says, no consensus internationally about the right approach to bankruptcy. So if there is another global financial crisis in the short term, we will be in huge trouble again.

Still, it is good to see that people have been working on detailed bankruptcy proposals – although the detail will be of interest mainly to banking specialists, which I’m not. Let’s hope the regulators get on to the global complexities soon.