"Too big to fail misses the point," Lewitt, who is also a tax lawyer, told Barron's. "There isn't just one institution too big to fail. The system is too big to fail."
The remedy? For one, Lewitt calls for a ban on naked credit-default swaps, where investors not only lack an economic interest in the underlying instrument, but also get paid only if it defaults. He says these instruments can "place the system at risk at anytime."
April 1, 2010 - HCM's Michael Lewitt discusses why global imbalances that led to financial crisis have not gone away. CNBC with David Faber
The Death of Capital: How Creative Policy Can Restore Stability (Hardcover)
In The Death of Capital, respected portfolio manager and longtime investment professional Michael Lewitt looks at how the U.S. economy has increasingly been dominated by short-term speculation rather than industrial expansion in recent years. These disastrous trends, described here as financialization, ignore the fact that capital itself is a highly unstable process rather than a fixed object or category. As a result of our failure to understand the true nature of capital, we have developed a financial and regulatory system that does exactly the opposite of what it should be doing—favoring obscurity over transparency and fomenting instability rather than growth.
"Michael Lewitt delivers bracing, unvarnished and literate analysis of the markets and financial culture- as they are, not as we'd like them to be." Kate Welling of welling@weeden
"Michael is must reading for me. Whenever his letter hits my inbox, I stop everything as soon as I can read it. His work is some of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking I know of anywhere. Even better, he is a very good writer with a wealth of style. I highly recommend him to anyone looking for a very prescient view of the financial world and markets." John Mauldin of Millennium Wave Investments
