ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an analysis of the U.S. financial system and a detailed proposal for achieving greater regulatory equality in it. The major elements of the proposal include the following:
establishment of intracompany firewalls both to separate entities performing financial functions from their financial and nonfinancial parents and affiliates and to effectively prohibit tying and other forms of anticompetitive interaffiliate transactions;
licensing financial intermediaries on a renewable basis;
systemwide compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act and other federal fair-lending statutes;
uniform application of comparable reserve, capital, and liquidity requirements; comparable risk diversification standards and risk-weighting techniques; limits on concentration and prohibitions against conflicts of interest and self-dealing;
greater systemwide transparency through the regular public disclosure of Uniform Performance Reports;
greater harmonization of the methods and costs of supervision and examination on both domestic and international bases;
enhanced self-regulation and consolidation of duplicative regulatory functions.
