Too much information

This post is possibly (ok probably) a bit technical but touches on what I think is an important issue in understanding how the financial system operates. The conventional wisdom as I understand it is that markets thrive on information. I think that is true in some cases but it may not be necessarily true for all markets. If the conventional wisdom is wrong then there are important areas of market and bank regulation that probably need to be reconsidered.

I have written on this topic before in relation to papers by Gary Gorton and Bengt Holmstrom. These papers developed an analytical argument in favour of certain assets (or markets) being “information insensitive”. That argument makes intuitive sense to me and I have used these arguments in a couple of previous posts; one titled “Why banks are different” and another titled “Deposit insurance and moral hazard“.

I hope to eventually do a longer piece where I can bring all these ideas together but the purpose today is simply to flag an interesting post (and associated paper) I came across that offers some empirical evidence in favour of the thesis. The post is titled “(When) Does Transparency Reduce Liquidity” and you can find the paper of the same name here.

This extract from the blog post I think captures the key ideas:

“To sum up, our findings can be grouped under two headings. The first is that more information in financial markets is not always beneficial. It can reduce rather than increase trading and liquidity.

The second is that one size does not fit all in terms of gauging the impact of transparency on liquidity. For the safest of the MBS securities, the impact of transparency is negligible, while for the riskiest, transparency enhances liquidity. It is in the broad middle of the risk spectrum that liquidity is negatively impacted.

Our findings ought to be of interest to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. In order to promote transparency and to bolster market discipline, supervisors have imposed various loan-level requirements in both Europe and the United States. The assumption seems to be that more transparency is always a good thing.

In such a climate, there has been insufficient investigation or understanding of the effects, including the negative effects, of such requirements on MBS market liquidity. Our work, we believe, begins to put this right.

“(When) Does Transparency Reduce Liquidity?” by Professors Karthik Balakrishnan at Rice University, Aytekin Ertan at London Business School, and Yun Lee at Singapore Management University and London Business School. Posted on “The CLS Blue Sky Blog” October 30 2019

Summing up

If this thesis is correct (i.e. that there are certain types of funding that should be “information insensitive” by design and that it is a mistake to apply to money markets the lessons and logic of stock markets) then this has implications for:

• thinking about the way that bank capital structure should be designed,
• questions like deposit preference and deposit insurance, and
• how we reconcile the need to impose market discipline on banks while ensuring that their liquidity is not adversely impacted.

I have not as yet managed to integrate all of these ideas into something worth sharing but the post referenced above and the associated paper are definitely worth reading if you are engaged with the same questions. If you think I am missing something then please let me know.

Tony