What’s the Connection Between “Living Wills” for Banks vs Humans?

Lately, I’ve been hearing and seeing the phrase “living wills” in mainstream news sources such as the New York Times, but at first the context was confusing to me because the media were speaking and writing about Big Banks, not humans. So, how did it come about that following the 2008 financial crisis, regulators started requiring large financial institutions to have “living wills?”

The Wall Street Journal explains in What You Need to Know About Living Wills [in the context of Big Banks]:

A living will is a document from a financial firm that describes how it would go through bankruptcy without causing a broader economic panic or needing a bailout from taxpayers. The largest U.S. banks have filed several versions of them since the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, which ​required living wills from financial firms ​that were judged to pose a potential risk to the broader economy. The documents are also known as resolution plans. “Resolution” is regulatory parlance for dealing with a failing financial firm.  Living wills are separate from other regulatory requirements, such as annual “stress tests” that measure whether could banks survive a severe recession.

I’ve not yet determined who first came up with “living wills” to describe what Dodd-Frank, at 12 U.S.C. Section 5361(d), refers to as “resolution plans.” Without accurate, full disclosure, addressing all aspects of the financial institution’s operations, such plans — by any name — seem unlikely to achieve the goal of greater market stability.  As another WSJ writer points out, the utility of Big Banks’ living wills comes if not just regulators, but the Bank executives, are paying attention:

The point of the living wills, like the stress tests, is to sit banks down and make them comb through their businesses in excruciating detail, with a focus on grim aspects like liquidity crunches and operational risks in bankruptcy. A useful result of the living wills is that, if they’re done correctly, they give regulators a good overall picture of how a bank works, how money flows between its parts, what its pressure points are, and how it responds to crisis. But a much more important result is that, if they’re done correctly, they give bankers themselves that same overall picture: They force a bank’s executives and directors to understand the workings of the bank in a detailed and comprehensive way. And if they’re done incorrectly, that’s useful too: They let the regulators and bankers know what they don’t know.   

The full article on this point is titled, with nice irony, Living Wills Make Banks Think About Death.  There, a least, is one similarity in living wills for humans and banks.