The ever reliable Matt Levine discusses the latest stress test results for the US banks. In particular the disconnect between the severity of the assumptions in the hypothetical scenario and the actual results observed to date. He notes that it is still early and plenty of room for the actual outcomes to catch up with the hypothetical. However, one of the issues with stress testing is the way you model the way people (and governments) respond to stress.
As Matt puts it …
But another important answer is that, when a crisis actually happens, people do something about it. They react, and try to make it better. In the case of the coronavirus crisis, the Fed and the U.S. government tried to mitigate the effect of a real disaster on economic and financial conditions. Unemployment is really high, but some of the consequences are mitigated by stimulus payments and increased unemployment benefits. Asset prices fell sharply, but then rose sharply as the Fed backstopped markets. Financing markets seized up, and then the Fed fixed them.
The banks themselves also acted to make things better, at least for themselves. One thing that often happens in a financial crisis is that banks’ trading desks make a killing trading for clients in turbulent markets, which helps to make up for some of the money they lose on bad loans. And in fact many banks had blowout first quarters in their trading divisions: Clients wanted to trade and would pay a lot for liquidity, and banks took their money.
In a hypothetical stress test, you can’t really account for any of this. If you’re a bank, and the Fed asks you to model how you’d handle a huge financial crisis, you can’t really write down “I would simply make a ton of money trading derivatives.” It is too cute, too optimistic. But in reality, lots of banks just went and did that.
Similarly, you obviously can’t write down “I would simply rely on the Fed to backstop asset prices and liquidity.” That is super cheating. Much of the purpose of the stress tests is to make it so the Fed doesn’t have to bail out the banking system; the point is to demonstrate that the banks can survive a financial crisis on their own without government support. But in reality, having a functioning financial system is better than not having that, so the Fed did intervene; keeping people in their homes is better than foreclosing on them, so the government supported incomes. So the banks are doing much better than you might expect with 13.3% unemployment.
So it is likely that the Fed’s stress test is both not harsh enough, in its economic scenario, and too harsh, in its assumption about how that scenario will affect banks.
Notwithstanding the potential for people to respond to and mitigate stress, there is still plenty of room for reality to catch up with and exceed the hypothetical scenario. Back to Matt…
But the fact that the stress test imagines an economic crisis that is much nicer than reality is still a little embarrassing, and the Fed can’t really say “everything is fine even in the terrible downside case of 10% unemployment, the banks are doing great.” So it also produced some new stress-test results (well, not quite a full stress test but a “sensitivity analysis”) assuming various scenarios about the recovery from the Covid crisis (“a rapid V-shaped recovery,” “a slower, more U-shaped recovery,” and “a W-shaped double dip recession”). The banks are much less well capitalized in those scenarios than they are either (1) now or (2) in the original stress tests, though mostly still okay, and the Fed is asking the banks to reconsider stress and capital based on current reality. Also stop share buybacks:
Worth reading
Tony – From the Outside
From the outside 
Now that was gold. How true that test often assume we do little to respond as organisations which of course we do
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