US President Donald Trump and a Republican majority in Congress are moving to roll back some of the banking regulations put in place after the Great Recession. Proponents maintain that deregulation would boost the economy by freeing banks to offer credit to more people and businesses.
In a 2008 visit to the London School of Economics, Queen Elizabeth famously asked economists why no one had predicted the onset of the financial crisis then afflicting the global economy.
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It might work, at least for a while, but there is some recent history that lawmakers might take into account. One of the last major efforts to deregulate banking proved quite successful for some states in the short run, but these same states were later hurt by the effects of the regulatory easing.
Princeton’s Atif Mian, Princeton PhD candidate Emil Verner, and Chicago Booth’s Amir Sufi studied the rollback of banking regulations in the 1980s, when states had the latitude to control the speed of deregulation. Those that moved quickly experienced the greatest benefits as wages and employment rose, GDP expanded, and house prices climbed. But they also later saw the steepest declines in those same metrics when the United States fell into recession in 1990–91.
Where recession hit harder
When the US fell into recession in 1990–91, many of the states that were quicker to roll back banking regulations during the ’80s fared worse by these economic measures:
Changes in US states’ economies, 1989–92
Note: Research includes Washington, DC, but excludes Delaware and South Dakota, which enacted special laws to lure banks’ credit-card business. Real GDP chart excludes Alaska.
Mian et al., 2017
States that rapidly deregulated banking sharply expanded credit availability. More money available to borrow led to increased demand for goods and services, particularly from individuals who bought nontradable goods such as real estate and services. Wages and employment grew in areas such as construction, the service industries, and public services.
But the regulatory easing magnified the effects of the 1990–91 recession in early-deregulation states, the researchers find. With household debt high, consumers had to cut back, and they did so in the nontradable sectors that had seen growth. “Credit supply shocks that operate primarily on the demand side of the economy may lead to an amplified business cycle, boosting demand during the expansion but leading to a more severe subsequent contraction,” write the researchers, who also find a link between the rise in a state’s household debt prior to the recession and the severity of the recession in that state.
Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Emil Verner, “How Do Credit Supply Shocks Affect the Real Economy? Evidence from the United States in the 1980s,” Working paper, May 2017.
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