LIFE-INSURANCE companies usually go to inordinate lengths to demonstrate their dullness. That makes MetLife’s chief executive, Steven Kandarian, extraordinary. He did what the head of no other big American financial firm has dared to: challenge head-on the legitimacy of the business-shaping decisions made with increasing frequency by regulators in the wake of the financial crisis. More remarkable still, he won. On March 30th a federal court ordered the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a new regulatory committee, to rescind its designation of MetLife as a “strategically important financial institution”—a label that required it to have a bigger, and thus more expensive, cushion of capital.
MetLife is one of only four non-banks to have been declared a SIFI. Prudential Insurance, one of the other three, acceded after grumbling a bit. General Electric said little but has since dispensed with much of its financial operations. AIG, another insurer, seemed gleefully to accept the new status, perhaps because being a SIFI is seen as being synonymous with being too big to fail, and thus implies a government backstop. AIG’s implosion had...Continue reading
Source: Business and finance http://ift.tt/1RN8oKP
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