Dr. Doom, Nouriel Roubini, er í viðtali við Der Spiegel. Hann talar um nauðsyn þess að brjóta upp fjármálakerfið í heiminum áður en það leiðir af sér meiri hörmungar. Eitt af því sem hann telur að sé nauðsynlegt er að brjóta upp risastórar fjármálastofnanir og ofurvald þeirra:

— — —

SPIEGEL: US President Barack Obama has introduced plans for financial reform, including the so-called Volcker rule and other regulations to limit the size of banks. Is more drastic regulation needed?

Roubini: It’s a good start, but I am thinking in a more radical direction. The financial supermarket model obviously has not worked. An institution where you have, all in one place, commercial banking, investment banking, hedge funds, insurance and lots of other financial services becomes too complex to manage. No CEO can effectively monitor that. So, this all needs too be broken up into pieces. If you have many different institutions which do different types of financial services, none of them will be systemically important.

SPIEGEL: Almost 100 years ago, the US government broke up Standard Oil — and the world ended up with pieces that became bigger than the original.

Roubini: What I am proposing goes back to Glass-Steagall Act types of restrictions between commercial and investment banking, regulations that already existed until about 10 years ago. They worked well.

SPIEGEL: What additional financial reforms do you consider indispensable?

Roubini: The derivative markets have to become more transparent, and securitization has to be more strictly regulated. Financial institutions need to change their compensation systems in a way that they don’t lose sight of long-term interests. And the rating agencies need to be forced to change their business model so conflicts of interest are no longer an issue.