The Shadow Banking System is Unravelling

Nouriel Roubini | Sep 21, 2008

The Financial Times published in its Monday edition my Op-Ed column “The Shadow Banking System is Unravelling”. The column was written and posted on their web site a few hours before the sudden announcement of the end of major independent broker dealers with the Fed announcement that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will become bank holding companies and will be thus regulated as banks. This is the additional step in the demise of Wall Street as we know it and the unraveling and demise of the “shadow banking system” that I described in my Financial Times Op-Ed column.

Here is the text of my Op-Ed column:

The shadow banking system is unravelling

Nouriel Roubini

Financial Times Published: September 21 2008 17:57 | Last updated: September 21 2008 17:57

Last week saw the demise of the shadow banking system that has been created over the past 20 years. Because of a greater regulation of banks, most financial intermediation in the past two decades has grown within this shadow system whose members are broker-dealers, hedge funds, private equity groups, structured investment vehicles and conduits, money market funds and non-bank mortgage lenders.