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Of course, all this has risks of its own. Do you really want the banks running high-tech experiments with your money? One of the ideas behind these new superbanks is that with large customer bases they will be able to offer infinitely complex (and incredibly efficient) wealth accounts to the average investor. But taking complex finance out of the hands of Wall Street rocket scientists and putting it into the hands of consumers or even inexperienced bankers is hardly a riskless activity. "Banks have been making less and less money from traditional lines of business," says Douglas Gale, an economics professor at New York University who is considered a leading thinker about next-generation finance. "What they have found lucrative is designing derivatives. But if you're using derivatives and you don't understand the technology or you don't know what you're doing, there is a real danger here. It's like letting a child play with a nuclear reactor."
In fact, the China Syndrome aspect of all this interconnected finance is among its most worrisome features. What if the whole nterconnected computer network crashes? (Hell, what if just your part does?) What if a hacker breaks in at the wrong place? What if the bank "blows up," as Barings PLC did in 1995 after 28-year-old Nicholas Leeson bet the house and lost? Industry insiders--the folks who have designed the systems--argue that the infrastructure they have built is secure enough to survive any tampering and that the markets themselves will factor in the risks of rogue or inexperienced traders. "There is no chance that a money market will fail and threaten the underpinnings of the system," says Cone of Fidelity Investments. This new electronic world challenges everything we thought we knew about finance, but maybe not what we know about economics. Will a high-speed global economy put an end to the boom and bust of the business cycle, or will it create dangerous interlinkages across borders, where a bad year for the Mexican economy, say, might accidentally trigger a global depression?
But the risks of the new system do point up the problems of trying to regulate such a quickly changing world. In the week after their deal, Weill and Reed tipped their hats toward Washington, but it was just a courtesy. Banking, everyone seems to have acknowledged, has entered an era that may be larger than old-fashioned laws. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, for one, has abandoned the notion that it is possible to regulate this broad frontier with old-style rules. The burden, he says, has to rest with private industry: Regulate yourselves. "To continue to be effective, government's regulatory role must increasingly assure that effective risk-management systems are in place in the private sector," he observed in a 1996 paper. "As financial systems become more complex, detailed rules and standards have become both burdensome and ineffective." In fact, many governments are competing with one another to see who can offer the fewest regulations. And the money is following right along. Economist Skoorka calls this regulatory arbitrage--the flight of money from highly regulated markets to barely regulated ones.