I salute the authors’ endeavor to usemarket price to examine the riskiness of the financial system and to evaluate the change in the subsidy represented by government guarantees. As illustrated by my work with Natasha Sarin (Sarin and Summers 2016), which the authors reference, I believe that market information is at a minimum a valuable complement to accounting information in evaluating the health of banks. I would guess that their broad conclusion—that if a crisis like 2008 were to happen again,wewould have insolvent banks—is correct. And I find it plausible that, as the authors believe, a combination of more regulatory capital, establishment of resolution procedures, and official commitments to move beyond too-big-to-fail have reduced the market’s perception of implicit guarantees. That said, I have to report that I’m almost entirely unconvinced by any of the authors’ estimates and believe that all reflect arbitrary and in some cases implausible modeling assumptions. I do not believe they have any real basis for their claims about the extent to which declining franchise value, as opposed to capitalized government subsidies, is responsible for banks’ lowmarket-to-book equity ratios. It’s not that I have clearly different views than the authors, just that I do not believe their measurements are convincing. First, there are some real questions about the theory of subsidies that are raised by the kind of analysis that is done here. Let’s imagine that the government decided to subsidize ice cream cones for all companies that sold ice cream cones. What would we expect? I think we would expect that there would be lower-priced ice cream cones. I think we would expect that the quantity of ice cream cones sold would go up. I think we would expect no change in the Q ratio of ice cream cone companies, if this was a competitive industry. If ice cream cones, and the production of ice cream cones, involved investment that took place with adjustment costs,

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评论

我向作者们努力使用市场价格来检验金融体系的风险和评估以政府担保为代表的补贴变化的努力。正如我与 Natasha Sarin 的合作（Sarin and Summers 2016）所表明的，作者参考了这一点，我相信市场信息至少是评估银行健康状况的会计信息的宝贵补充。我猜他们的广泛结论——如果像 2008 年那样的危机再次发生，我们将会有资不抵债的银行——是正确的。而且我认为，正如作者所相信的那样，更多的监管资本、解决程序的建立以及超越“大到不能倒”的官方承诺相结合，降低了市场对隐性担保的看法是有道理的。那说，我必须报告说，我几乎完全不相信作者的任何估计，并相信所有这些估计都反映了武断的，在某些情况下甚至是难以置信的建模假设。我认为他们关于特许权价值下降（而不是资本化的政府补贴）在多大程度上导致银行的低市场账面净资产比率的说法没有任何实际依据。并不是我的观点与作者明显不同，只是我不相信他们的测量结果令人信服。首先，这里进行的分析提出了一些关于补贴理论的实际问题。让我们想象一下，政府决定为所有销售冰淇淋甜筒的公司补贴冰淇淋甜筒。我们会期待什么？我想我们会期望会有价格更低的冰淇淋蛋筒。我认为我们预计冰淇淋甜筒的销量会增加。我认为，如果这是一个竞争激烈的行业，我们预计冰淇淋蛋卷公司的 Q 比率不​​会发生变化。如果冰淇淋甜筒和冰淇淋甜筒的生产涉及调整成本的投资，