The Moment When The Fed Admits It Has Become The Market’s Muppet

The following exchange between then-Kansas Fed president (and current FDIC director) Thomas Hoenig and the Chairsatan, uttered during the historic Sept 16, 2008 FOMC meeting, is of particular importance for four reasons: 1) it appears to be the first instance in the Fed records, where the phrase “too big to fail” is memorialized; 2) it highlights something that has become all too clear by now: in giving to a culture of moral hazard, the Fed is now being openly “played” by the market (read the big banks); 3) it confirms that the Fed has learned zero lessons from the crisis and 4) the thinking behind the “Bernanke (global) Put” is laid out for all to see.

MR. HOENIG. Mr. Chairman, I have thought about this considerably because I think we have come to a time in our history when we have institutions that clearly ought to be and may in fact be too big to fail. I think we tend to react ad hoc during the crisis, and we have no choice at this point. But as you look at the situation, we ought, instead of having a decade of denying too big to fail, to acknowledge it and have a receivership and intervention program that extends some of the concepts of the FDIC but goes beyond that. That is, if you are insolvent, it is not a central bank issue—we are a liquidity provider—and therefore the government comes in.

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