The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve released resolution plans submitted by the nine largest banks, should they near insolvency.
The so-called “living wills” are required under the Dodd-Frank Act for any bank with $250 billion or more in nonbank assets. At the height of the financial crisis, federal regulators faced the failure of many institutions considered “too big to fail.”
Instead of winding down these firms, Congress passed $700 billion in bailouts through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and the Federal Reserve began lending trillions of dollars at near-zero interest rates to keep the firms afloat.
“We believe that the resolution planning process, as required by our Supervisors, is a critical building block in the development of orderly resolution plans for major financial institutions that will address the “too big to fail” problem, an objective we fully support,” Goldman Sachs (GS) said in its plan.
All submissions can be found here on the FDIC website.
At the heart of the plans are the different operations each bank considers core to their business and how unprofitable sectors would be dealt with under the hypothetical scenarios. Each also outlines strategies taken to ensure the “core” businesses continue to operate in times of distress.
“Certain assets and liabilities would be transferred to a bridge bank that would, subject to certain assumptions, emerge from resolution as a viable going concern,” according to the Bank of America (BAC) submission. “Bank of America’s other material entities would be wound down in an orderly manner, subject to certain assumptions.”
