The Wall Street Journal
OPINION
SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

The Resilience of American Finance

By JEREMY J. SIEGEL

The turmoil in the financial markets will reorganize the financial landscape. But this does not mean the financial industry will shrink dramatically. In fact the current crisis could well lead to an increase in the demand for financial services, as the world grapples with the need for new financial instruments, new risk management techniques, and the increasing complexity of the financial world.

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There is no doubt that some of the most hallowed names in the industry, such as Bear Stearns, Merrill, Lehman and others will disappear as separate entities. Their demise was caused by bad risk management, and a failure to understand the high risks of an overheated real-estate market, the root cause of our current problems.

We can argue about who was responsible for the overleveraging of the financial industry and the poor to nonexistent credit standards that prevailed in real estate. Certainly the regulatory agencies, including the Federal Reserve, should have sounded a warning. But the lion's share of the blame must go to the heads of the financial firms that issued and held these flawed credit instruments and then, in many cases, "doubled down" by buying more when their price was falling.

Overleveraging has been the cause of many past financial crises, and will undoubtedly be the cause of those in the future. It was the cause of the 1998 blowup of Long Term Capital Management, where the Fed also intervened to prevent a crisis. Then two years later the tech and Internet boom burst. If banks would have been allowed to buy on leverage these stocks during the bubble, they would have been in even more trouble than now.

But few were willing to admit that subprime real-estate loans could be as risky as stocks. It was just too profitable to issue these mortgages. So eyes were closed and the money kept pouring in. Groupthink prevailed. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, it is much easier for a man to fail conventionally than to stand against the crowd and speak the truth.

There is no doubt in my mind that if we didn't have a proactive Federal Reserve and deposit insurance, we would have been following the same course as we did in the 1930s, when the bursting of the stock bubble and fear of loan defaults led to thousands of bank failures and ushered in the Great Depression.

That will not happen this time. The rapid provisions of liquidity by the Fed will prevent any full scale downturn. In fact, I take it as a mark of confidence in our financial system that the Fed did not feel compelled to bail out Lehman Brothers as they did last March when they folded Bear Stearns into J.P. Morgan. Certainly politics played a role in this election year, as critics (and some Congressmen) criticized the government for bailing out the big boys, while letting homeowners twist in the wind.

Despite the recent turmoil, there is good evidence that the worst is over, especially for the commercial banks with access to Federal Reserve credit. Despite yesterday's severe sell-off, most are significantly higher than their July 15 low, and some such as Wells Fargo and UBS are up over 50%.

Nevertheless, the current crisis will change the financial landscape. Certainly Bear, Merrill, Lehman and others will disappear as separate corporate entitles. But other institutions, specifically the commercial banks that absorb these firms, and who have direct access to Federal Reserve credit, will become larger.

The demand for financial services will in no way disappear as the automobile pushed out the horse and buggy a century ago. Although unemployment on Wall Street will undoubtedly rise, many workers will be reabsorbed elsewhere in the industry. The current financial crisis calls out for new products and services as well as more, not less, information about what is safe and profitable in the future environment.

It is easy to be pessimistic about the future of financial services in the current climate. But objective facts indicate that the future demand for these services will be high. Looking beyond past losses, the demand for financial services, especially internationally, has been strong. The growth of the developing countries, combined with the aging in the developed countries, will lead to huge international capital flows that will be facilitated by new and existing financial intermediaries.

It is shocking that firms that withstood the Great Depression are now failing in what economists might not even call a recession. But their failure was not caused by lack of demand for their services. It was caused by management's unwillingness to understand and face the risks of the investments they made. The names of the players will change, but the future growth of the financial services industry is assured.

Mr. Siegel, a professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, is the author of "Stocks for the Long Run," now in its 4th edition from McGraw-Hill.