The Decline of Too Big to Fail By ANTJE BERNDT,DARRELL DUFFIE, AND YICHAO ZHU* For globally systemically important banks (GSIBs) with U.S. headquarters, we find significant post-Lehman reductions in market-implied probabilities of government bailout, along with 50%-to-100% higher wholesale debt financing costs for these banks after controlling for insolvency risk. The data are consis- tent with measurable effectiveness for the official sector’s post- Lehman GSIB failure-resolution intentions, laws, and rules. GSIB creditors now appear to expect to suffer much larger losses in the event that a GSIB approaches insolvency. In this sense, we esti- mate a major decline of “too big to fail.” JEL: G12, G13, G21, G28 Keywords: Too big to fail, systemically important banks, govern- ment bailouts * Berndt: Professor of Finance, College of Business and Economics, Australian National Univer- sity, 26C Kingsley Street, Acton, ACT 2601, Australia,
[email protected]. Duffie: Adams Distinguished Professor of Management and Professor of Finance, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305, duffi
[email protected]. Zhu: Senior Lec- turer (Assistant Professor) in Finance, College of Business and Economics, Australian National University, 26C Kingsley Street, Acton, ACT 2601, Australia,
[email protected]. Duffie is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Between October 2008 and April 2018, Duffie was on the board of directors of Moody’s Corporation, which supplied some of the data used in this