Summers speaks

Relax. That was Larry Summers’ basic advice to the bankers and officials at Davos when he spoke to me last night.

For days, the great and good of world finance had been full of questions about President Obama'’s surprising new plans for reforming the banks -– particularly the part about banning commercial banks from owning hedge funds or trading on their own account.

What did it mean for the global reform effort? How could it work across different national jurisdictions? Was it practical –or even relevant to the crisis we have just had? And –- of course -– what did it tell us about the political standing of the Obama administration, and the relative position of the likes of Summers or Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner?

But in his interview Summers rather took the air out of a lot of that discussion – by suggesting that the contentious parts of the new Obama plan needn'’t have much effect on the global reform effort at all.

He pointed out that although we have tended to look for global rules for things like minimum bank capital standards or limits on leverage -– there'’s always been a wide range of institutional and regulatory arrangements for the structure of banking institutions within countries.

Continental Europe has had its universal banks, the US, after all, had Glass-Steagall until quite recently. No-one thought that was a great need to bring the systems closer together.

“We'’ve followed what we'’ve perceived to be the best approach -– other countries have different approaches –- this has always been an area where countries have had different views”, he said.

Now it seems rather an obvious point. But it was one that a lot of people here at the World Economic Forum missed.

True, there could be complications to applying the US approach to big global banks like JP Morgan. But he doesn'’t think they are insurmountable. (Others may well disagree.)

Nor does he think this piece of Obama’'s plans will solve every problem or prevent every crisis. It’'s not intended to. It’'s one piece of the puzzle, and -– arguably - a relatively unimportant one.

Alistair Darling, the UK Chancellor, told me yesterday that he thought the US approach, in effect, was either impractical or irrelevant to the issues we faced with, say, Northern Rock or a Lehman Brothers.

Summers response: “in matters of finance, generals should be wary of fighting the last war.” But funnily enough, in their meeting the chancellor told Summers that the US was doing the same thing.

Enough, already. What’'s the “take-away” from all this bickering and debate? I would draw three conclusions.

First, governments are going to disagree on this important but not all-important structural issue of whether or not to limit the activities of commercial banks. But it needn’'t prevent agreement on core pieces of reform on critical issues such as bank capital and liquidity - or coming up with an effective resolution regime for failing institutions.

With luck, it won'’t . Ministers and central bank governors just need to take a collective deep breath between now and their meeting in the far Northern reaches of Canada next weekend. (They’'ll need to stay close together to keep warm.)

But second, you can still worry about countries going their own way too much. The IMF Managing Director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn told me yesterday he thought there were risks in a country-by-country approach on some of these issues. He worries about starting another dangerous race to the bottom in global finance.

The chancellor insists that he'’s rejecting the Obama solution on the merits -– not to reassure the City that London’'s a nice place to be after all. (He’'s not alone, by the way -– behind the scenes, French and German officials here have been voicing similar doubts.)

Maybe it is all principled and innocent. But we can’'t get back to ministers playing the City against New York, chipping away at regulation or standards to steal a march on the competition. Without a bit more coordination, that is definitely a risk.

Finally, on the broader question of what this tells us about the Obama administration – of course, Summers denied that the US bank plans were a knee-jerk response to the disaster of the Massachusetts vote. (If you watch the interview you’'ll see his response on this was quite amusing.) You wouldn’'t expect him to say anything else.

I don'’t think anyone sensible really thought these plans were cobbled together in two days, as a result of last Tuesday’'s catastrophe. Certainly Summers vehemently denies that -– insisting that the speech came as a result of a memo agreed between himself, Geithner and Volcker at the turn of the year.

But reading between the lines, you can’'t help concluding that the fanfare around the speech was politically-driven. Summers and Geithner might have agreed the policy. But the politicos dictated the set-piece speech and the fiery talk about bankers from President Obama at that Thursday press conference.

If the resulting headlines generated more global heat than the proposals strictly deserved,– you could say the Administration has no-one to blame but itself.