Author: From the Outside

After working in the Australian banking system for close to four decades, time to read, write and reflect on what I have learned. My primary area of expertise is bank capital management but this blog aims to offer a bank insider's outside perspective on banking, capital, economics, finance and risk.

Capital adequacy reform – what we have learned from the crisis

A speech by APRA Chair Wayne Byres released today had some useful remarks on the post 2008 capital adequacy reforms and what we have learned thus far. A few observations stood out for me. Firstly, a statement of the obvious is that the reforms are getting their first real test and we are likely to find areas for improvement

“… the post-2008 reforms will be properly tested, and inevitably we will find areas they can be improved.”

The speech clarifies that just how much, if any, change is required is not clear at this stage

“Before anyone misinterprets that comment, I am not advocating a watering down of the post-2008 reforms. It may in fact turn out they’re insufficient, and we need to do more. Maybe they just need to be reshaped a bit. I do not know. But inevitably there will be things we learn, and we should not allow a determination not to backtrack on reforms to deter us from improving them.”

Everyone is focused on fighting the COVID 19 fire at the moment but a discussion paper released in 2018 offered some insights into the kinds of reforms that APRA was contemplating before the crisis took priority. It will be interesting to see how the ideas floated in this discussion paper are refined or revised in the light of what we and APRA learn from this crisis. One of the options discussed in that 2018 paper involved “APRA modifying the calculation of regulatory capital ratios to utilise more internationally harmonised definitions of capital and RWA“. It was interesting therefore to note that the speech released today referred to the internationally comparable ratios rather than APRA’s local interpretation of Basel III.

“We had been working for some years to position our largest banks in the top quartile of international peers from a capital adequacy perspective, and fortuitously they had achieved that positioning before the crisis struck. On an internationally comparable basis, our largest banks are operating with CET1 ratios in the order of 15-16 per cent, and capital within the broader banking system is at a historical high – and about twice the level heading into the 2008 crisis.”

The speech makes a particular note of what we are learning about the capacity to use capital buffers.

“One area where I think we are learning a lot at present is the ability to use buffers. It is not as easy as hoped, despite them having been explicitly created for use during a crisis. One blockage does seem to be that markets, investors and rating agencies have all adjusted to contemporary capital adequacy ratios as (as the name implies) ‘adequate capital’. But in many jurisdictions, like Australia, ratios are at historical highs. We often hear concern about our major banks’ CET1 ratios falling below 10 per cent. This is even though, until a few years ago, their CET1 ratios had never been above 10 per cent and yet they were regarded as strong banks with AA ratings. So expectations seem to have shifted and created a new de facto minimum. We need to think about how to reset that expectation.”

I definitely agree that there is more to do on the use of capital buffers and have set out my own thoughts on the topic here. One thing not mentioned in the speech is the impact of procyclicality on the use of capital ratios.

This chart from a recent Macquarie Wealth Management report summarises the disclosure made by the big four Australian banks on the estimated impact of the deterioration in credit quality that banks inevitably experience under adverse economic conditions such as are playing out now. The estimated impacts collated here are a function of average risk weights calculated under the IRB approach increasing as average credit deteriorates. This is obviously related to the impact of increased loan loss provisioning on the capital adequacy numerator but a separate factor driving the capital ratios down via its impact on the denominator of the capital ratio.

There are almost certainly issues with the consistency and comparability of the disclosure but it does give a rough sense of the materiality of this factor which I think is not especially well understood. This is relevant to some some observations in Wayne Byres speech about the capital rebuilding process.

“A second possible blockage is possibly that regulatory statements permitting banks to use their buffers are only providing half the story. Quite reasonably, what banks (and their investors) need to understand before they contemplate using buffers is the expectation as to their restoration. But we bank supervisors do not have a crystal ball – we cannot confidently predict the economic pathway, so we cannot provide a firm timetable. The best I can offer is that it should be as soon a circumstances reasonably allow, but no sooner. In Australia, I would point to the example of the way we allowed Australian banks to build up capital to meet their ‘unquestionably strong’ benchmarks in an orderly way over a number of years. We should not be complacent about the rebuild, but there are also risks from rushing it.”

Given that the estimated impacts summarised in the chart above are entirely due to “RWA inflation” as credit quality deteriorates, it seems reasonable to assume that part of the capital buffer rebuild will be generated by the expected decline in average risk weights as credit quality improves. The capital buffers will in a sense partly self repair independent of what is happening to the capital adequacy numerator.

I think we had an academic understanding of the capital ratio impact of this RWA inflation and deflation process pre COVID 19 but will have learned a lot more once the dust settles.

Tony – From the Outside

When safety proves dangerous …

… is the title of a post on the Farnham Street blog that provides a useful reminder of the problem of “risk compensation”; i.e. the way in which measures designed to make us safer can be a perverse prompt for us to take more risk because we feel safer. I want to explore how these ideas apply to bank capital requirements but will first outline the basic ideas covered by Farnham Street.

we all internally have a desired level of risk that varies depending on who we are and the context we are in. Our risk tolerance is like a thermostat—we take more risks if we feel too safe, and vice versa, in order to remain at our desired “temperature.” It all comes down to the costs and benefits we expect from taking on more or less risk.

The notion of risk homeostasis, although controversial, can help explain risk compensation.

The classic example is car safety measures such as improved tyres, ABS braking systems, seat belts and crumple zones designed to protect the driver and passengers. These have helped reduce car fatality rates for the people inside the car but not necessarily reduced accident rates given that drivers tend to drive faster and more aggressively because they can. Pedestrians are also at greater risk.

Farnham Street suggests the following lessons for dealing with the problem risk compensation:

  1. Safety measures are likely to be more effective is they are less visible
  2. Measures designed to promote prudent behaviour are likely to be more effective than measures which make risky behaviour safer
  3. Recognise that sometimes it is better to do nothing if the actions we take just leads to an offset in risk behaviour somewhere else
  4. If we do make changes then recognise that we may have to put in place other rules to ensure the offsetting risk compensating behaviour is controlled
  5. Finally (and a variation on #3), recognise that making people feel less safe can actually lead to safer behaviour.

If you are interested in this topic then I can also recommend Greg Ip’s book “Foolproof” which offers a good overview of the problem of risk compensation.

Applying these principles to bank capital requirements

The one area where I would take issue with the Farnham Street post is where it argues that bailouts and other protective mechanisms contributed to scale of the 2008 financial crisis because they led banks to take greater risks. There is no question that the scale of the crisis was amplified by the risks that banks took but it is less obvious to me that the bailouts created this problem.

The bailouts were a response to the problem that banks were too big to fail but I can’t see how they created this problem; especially given that the build up of risk preceded the bailouts. Bailouts were a response to the fact that the conventional bankruptcy and restructure process employed to deal with the failure of non-financial firms simply did not work for financial firms.

It is often asserted that bankers took risks because they expected that they would be bailed out; i.e/ that banks deliberately and consciously took risk on the basis that they would be bailed out. I can’t speak for banks as a whole but I have never witnessed that belief in the four decades that I worked in the Australian banking system. Never attribute to malice what can be equally explained by mistaken beliefs. I did see bankers placing excessive faith in the economic capital models that told them they could safely operate with reduced levels of capital. That illusion of knowledge and control is however a different problem altogether, largely to do with not properly understanding the distinction between risk and uncertainty (see here and here).

If I am right, that would suggest that making banks hold more capital might initially make them safer but might also lead to banks looking for ways to take more risk. This is a key reason why I think the answer to safer banks is not just making them hold higher and higher levels of common equity. More common equity is definitely a big part of the answer but one of the real innovations of Basel 3 was the development of new forms of loss absorbing capital that allow banks to be recapitalised by bail-in rather than bail-out.

If you want to go down the common equity is the only solution path then it will be important to ensure that Farnham Street Rule #4 above is respected; i.e. bank supervisors will need to ensure that banks do not simply end up taking risks in places that regulation or supervision does not cover. This is not a set and forget strategy based on the idea that increased “skin in the game” will automatically lead to better risk management.

Based on my experience, the risk of common equity ownership being diluted by the conversion of this “bail-in” capital is a far more effective constraint on risk taking than simply requiring banks to hold very large amounts of common equity. I think the Australian banking system has this balance about right. The Common Equity Tier 1 requirement is calibrated to a level intended to make banks “Unquestionably Strong”. Stress testing suggest that this level of capital is likely to be more than sufficient for well managed banks operating with sensible risk appetites but banks (the larger ones in particular) are also required to maintain a supplementary pool of capital that can be converted to common equity should it be required. The risk that this might be converted into a new pool of dilutive equity is a powerful incentive to not push the boundaries of risk appetite.

Tony – From the Outside

Navigating a radically uncertain world

The distinction between risk and uncertainty is a long running area of interest for me so I have enjoyed reading John Kay and Mervyn King’s book “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future”. My initial post on the book offered an overview of the content and a subsequent post explored Kay and King’s analysis of why the world is prone to radical uncertainty.

This post looks at how Kay and King propose that we navigate a world that is prone to radical uncertainty. Kay and King start (Ch 8) with the question of what it means to make rational choices.

No surprises that the answer from their perspective is not the pursuit of maximum expected value based on a priori assumptions of what is rational in a world ruled by probability (“axiomatic reasoning”). They concede that there are some problems that can be solved this way. Games of chance where you get repeated opportunities to play the odds is one, but Kay and King are firmly in the camp that the real world is, for the most part, too complex and unknowable to rely on this approach for the big issues.

It is not just that these models do not offer any useful insight into these bigger world choices. They argue, convincingly I think, that these types of precise quantitative models can also tend to create an illusion of knowledge and control that can render the systems we are seeking to understand and manage even more fragile and more prone to uncertainty. An obvious example of this risk is the way in which the advanced measures of bank capital requirements introduced under Basel II tended to encourage banks to take (and bank supervisors to approve) more leverage.

Their argument broadly makes sense to me but there was nothing particularly new or noteworthy in this part of the book. It goes over familiar ground covered equally well by other writers – see for example these posts Epsilon Theory, Bank Underground, Paul Wilmott and David Orrell, Andrew Haldane which discuss contributions these authors have made to the debate.

However, there were two things I found especially interesting in their analysis.

  • One was the argument that the “biases” catalogued by behavioural finance were not necessarily irrational when applied to a radically uncertain world.
  • The other was the emphasis they place on the idea of employing abductive reasoning and reference narratives to help navigate this radically uncertain future.

Behavioural Finance

Kay and King argue that some of the behaviours that behavioural finance deems to be irrational or biased might be better interpreted as sensible rules of thumbs that people have developed to deal with an uncertain world. They are particularly critical of the way behavioural finance is used to justify “nudging” people to what behavioural finance deems to be rational.

Behavioural economics has contributed to our understanding of decision-making in business, finance and government by introducing observation of how people actually behave. But, like the proselytisers for the universal application of probabilistic reasoning, practitioners and admirers of behavioural economics have made claims far more extensive than could be justified by their findings…

…. a philosophy of nudging carries the risk that nudgers claim to know more about an uncertain world than they and their nudgees do or could know.

I struggled with this part of the book because I have generally found behavioural finance insights quite useful for understanding what is going on. The book reads at times like behavioural finance as a whole was a wrong turn but I think the quote above clarifies that they do see value in it provided the proponents don’t push the arguments too far. In particular they are arguing that rules of thumb that have been tested and developed over time deserve greater respect.

Abductive Reasoning and Reference Narratives

The part of Kay and King’s book I found most interesting was their argument that “abductive reasoning” and “reference narratives” are a useful way of mapping our understanding of what is going on and helping us make the right choices to navigate a world prone to enter the domain of radical uncertainty.

If we go back to first principles it could be argued that the test of rationality is that the decisions we make are based on reasonable beliefs about the world and internal consistency. The problem, Kay and King argue, is that this approach still does not address the fundamental question of whether we can ever really understand a radically uncertain world. The truely rational approach to decision making has to be resilient to the fact that our future is shaped by external events taking paths that we have no way of predicting.

The rational answer for Kay and King lies in an “abductive” approach to reasoning. I must confess that I had to look this up (and my spell checker still struggles with it) but it turns out that this is a style of reasoning that works with the available (not to mention often incomplete and ambiguous) information to form educated guesses that seek to explain what we are seeing.

Abduction is similar to induction in that it starts with observations. Where it differs is what the abductive process does with the evidence. Induction seeks to derive general or universal principles from the evidence. Abduction in contrast is context specific. It looks at the evidence and tries to fit “an explanation” of what is going on while being careful to avoid treating it as “the explanation” of what is going on.

Deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning each have a role to play in understanding the world, and as we move to larger worlds the role of the inductive and abductive increases relative to the deductive. And when events are essentially one-of-a-kind, which is often the case in the world of radical uncertainty, abductive reasoning is indispensable.

Reference Narratives

If I have understood their argument correctly, the explanations or hypotheses generated by this abductive style of reasoning are expressed in “reference narratives” which we use to explain to ourselves and others what we are observing. These high level reference narratives can then provide a basis for longer term planning and a framework for day-to-day choices.

Deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning each have a role to play in understanding the world, and as we move to larger worlds the role of the inductive and abductive increases relative to the deductive. And when events are essentially one-of-a-kind, which is often the case in the world of radical uncertainty, abductive reasoning is indispensable.

Kay and King acknowledge that this approach is far from foolproof and devote a considerable part of their book to what distinguishes good narratives from bad and how to avoid the narrative being corrupted by groupthink.

Good and Bad Reference Narratives

Kay and King argue that credibility is a core feature distinguishing good and bad narratives. A good narrative offers a coherent and internally consistent explanation but it also needs to avoid over-reach. A warning sign for a bad narrative is one that seeks to explain everything. This is especially important given that our species seems to be irresistibly drawn to grand narratives – the simpler the better.

Our need for narratives is so strong that many people experience a need for an overarching narrative–some unifying explanatory theme or group of related themes with very general applicability. These grand narratives may help them believe that complexity can be managed, that there exists some story which describes ‘the world as it really is’. Every new experience or piece of information can be interpreted in the light of that overarching narrative.

Kay and King use the fox and the hedgehog analogy to illustrate their arguement that we should always be sceptical of the capacity of any one narrative to explain everything,

…. The hedgehog knows one big thing, the fox many little things. The hedgehog subscribes to some overarching narrative; the fox is sceptical about the power of any overarching narrative. The hedgehog approaches most uncertainties with strong priors; the fox attempts to assemble evidence before forming a view of ‘what is going on here’.

Using Reference Narratives

Kay and King cite the use of scenario based planing as an example of using a reference narrative to explore exposure to radical uncertainty and build resilience but they caution against trying too hard to assign probabilities to scenarios. This I think is a point well made and something that I have covered in other posts (see here and here).

Scenarios are useful ways of beginning to come to terms with an uncertain future. But to ascribe a probability to any particular scenario is misconceived…..

Scenario planning is a way of ordering thoughts about the future, not of predicting it.

The purpose is … to provide a comprehensive framework for setting out the issues with which any business must deal: identifying markets, meeting competition, hiring people, premises and equipment. Even though the business plan is mostly numbers–many people will describe the spreadsheet as a model–it is best thought of as a narrative. The exercise of preparing the plan forces the author to translate a vision into words and numbers in order to tell a coherent and credible story.

Kay and King argue that reference narratives are a way of bringing structure and conviction to the judgment, instinct and emotion that people bring to making decisions about an uncertain future

We make decisions using judgement, instinct and emotions. And when we explain the decisions we have made, either to ourselves or to others, our explanation usually takes narrative form. As David Tuckett, a social scientist and psychoanalyst, has argued, decisions require us ‘to feel sufficiently convinced about the anticipated outcomes to act’. Narratives are the mechanism by which conviction is developed. Narratives underpin our sense of identity, and enable us to recreate decisions of the past and imagine decisions we will face in the future.

Given the importance they assign to narratives, Kay and King similarly emphasise the importance of having a good process for challenging the narrative and avoiding groupthink.

‘Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here. Then, I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until the next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement, and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.’

Alfred P. Sloan (Long time president chairman and CEO of General Motors Corporation) quoted in the introduction to Ch 16: Challenging Narratives

These extracts from their book nicely captures the essence of their argument

Knowledge does not advance through a mechanical process of revising the probabilities people attach to a known list of possible future outcomes as they watch for the twitches on the Bayesian dial. Instead, current conventional wisdom is embodied in a collective narrative which changes in response to debate and challenge. Mostly, the narrative changes incrementally, as the prevalent account of ‘what is going on here’ becomes more complete. Sometimes, the narrative changes discontinuously – the process of paradigm shift described by the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn.

the mark of the first-rate decision-maker confronted by radical uncertainty is to organise action around a reference narrative while still being open to both the possibility that this narrative is false and that alternative narratives might be relevant. This is a very different style of reasoning from Bayesian updating.

Kay and King argue that the aim in challenging the reference narrative is not simply to find the best possible explanation of what is going on. That in a sense is an almost impossible task given the premise that the world is inherently unpredictable. The objective is to find a narrative that seems to offer a useful guide to what is going on but not hold too tightly to it. The challenge process also tests the weaknesses of plans of action based on the reference narrative and, in doing so, progressively secures greater robustness and resilience.


The quote below repeats a point covered above but it does nicely capture their argument that the pursuit of quantitative precision can be a distraction from the broader objective of having a robust and resilient process. By all means be as rigorous and precise as possible but recognise the risk that the probabilities you assign to scenarios and “risks” may end up simply serving to disguise inherent uncertainties that cannot be managed by measurement.

The attempt to construct probabilities is a distraction from the more useful task of trying to produce a robust and resilient defence capability to deal with many contingencies, few of which can be described in any but the sketchiest of detail.

robustness and resilience, not the assignment of arbitrary probabilities to a more or less infinite list of possible contingencies, are the key characteristics of a considered military response to radical uncertainty. And we believe the same is true of strategy formulation in business and finance, for companies and households.

Summing Up

Overall a thought provoking book. I am not yet sure that I am ready to embrace all of their proposed solutions. In particular, I am not entirely comfortable with the criticisms they make of risk maps, bayesian decision models and behavioural finance. That said, I do think they are starting with the right questions and the reference narrative approach is something that I plan to explore in more depth.

I had not thought of it this way previously but the objective of being “Unquestionably Strong” that was recommended by the 2014 Australian Financial System Inquiry and subsequently fleshed out by APRA can be interpreted as an example of a reference narrative that has guided the capital management strategies of the Australian banks.

Tony – From The Outside

Debt jubilees revisited

I flagged a post by Michael Reddell (Croaking Cassandra) on the (admittedly wonky) topic of debt jubilees. This is not a general interest topic by any means but I am interested in economic history and the role of debt in the economy in particular so this caught my interest.

Michael has returned to the topic here focussing on a book by Michael Hudson titled “… and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from the Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year” and a call by Steve Keen calling for widespread government funded debt forgiveness as part of the response to the COVID 19 recession. Michael is not a fan of the idea and I think sets out a quite good summary of the case against a modern debt jubilee.

I have copied a short extract from his post here

Keen, for example, emphasises the high level of housing debt in countries like New Zealand and Australia.  But it is mostly a symptom not of hard-hearted banks but of governments (central and local) that keep on rendering urban land artificially scarce, and then –  in effect –  compelling the young to borrow heavily from, in effect, the old to get on the ladder of home ownership.   I count that deeply unconscionable and unjust.  But the primary solution isn’t debt forgiveness –   never clear who is going to pay for this –  but fixing the problem at source, freeing up land use law.  The domestic-oriented elites of our society might not like it –  any more than their peers in ancient Mesopotomia were too keen on the remission –  but that is the source of the problem.  Fix that and then there might be a case for some sort of compensation scheme for those who had got so highly-indebted, but at present –  distorted market and all –  the highly indebted mostly have an asset still worth materially more (a very different situation from a subsistence borrowing in the face of extreme crop failure).

… and you can read the whole post here.

Michael has I think some good points to make regarding the causes of escalating housing debt. One thing he does not cover is the extent to which direct bail outs and extraordinary monetary policy support has contributed to the escalating level of debt. This is a huge topic in itself but I suspect that some of the increasing debt burden can be attributed to the fact that we have chosen not to allow debts to be written down or restructured in previous crises. I think there were legitimate reasons for not imposing losses on bank debt during the GFC but the subsequent development of a “bail-in” capacity should mean that bank supervisors and the government will have a better set of choices in the next banking crisis.

Tony – From The Outside

Why we fail to prepare for disasters

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) offers a short and readable account here of some of the reasons why, faced with clear risks, we still fail to act. We can see the problem, typically one of many, but don’t do enough to manage or mitigate the risk. New Orleans’ experiences with severe weather events features prominently as does (not surprisingly) COVID 19.

This, then, is why you and I did not see this coming: we couldn’t grasp the scale of the threat; we took complacent cues from each other, rather than digesting the logic of the reports from China and Italy; we retained a sunny optimism that no matter how bad things got, we personally would escape harm; we could not grasp what an exponentially growing epidemic really means; and our wishful thinking pushed us to look for reasons to ignore the danger.

Why we fail to prepare for disasters; Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist)

Another big part of the problem is that the cost of being fully prepared can be more than we are willing to pay. Especially when there is continuous pressure to find cost economies in the here and now

Serious scenarios are useful, but … no use if they are not taken seriously. That means spending money on research that may never pay off, or on emergency capacity that may never be used. It is not easy to justify such investments with the day-to-day logic of efficiency.

So the key points I took from his post:

  • Sometimes it can be something genuinely new and unexpected (i.e. Black Swan events) but risks we are well aware of can be equally damaging
  • Part of the problem is that we are social animals and take our cues from what the rest of the herd is doing (“normalcy bias” or “negative panic”)
  • Even where we understand the statistics and know that someone will be impacted, we tend to assume it will be someone else or someone else’s family (“optimism bias”)
  • We are especially bad at understanding risks that have an exponential driver (“exponential myopia”)
  • We are also quite good at finding reasons to justify ignoring risks we want to ignore or otherwise find inconvenient (“wishful thinking”)
  • Last, but far from least, efficiency is the enemy of resilience.

We need to remember that most of the factors listed above can also be useful in many other contexts (arguably most of the time). A tendency not to panic can be pretty useful and optimism has helped dreamers and ordinary people achieve many great things that have benefited the herd. Efficiency as a rule seems like a good thing to strive for.

Harford does not offer any easy answers but his post touches on issues that I have also been considering in Kay and King’s book titled “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future”. I have done a couple of posts on that book already (here and here) and am working on a final one that focuses on Chapters 8-16 which set out their ideas for how we navigate a world prone to radical uncertainty.

Tony – From the Outside

Talking about a debt jubilee

This might be post for the super wonks but Michael Reddell (Croaking Cassandra) is debating with Steve Keen on the merits of writing down the value of debt under what is known as a debt “jubilee”. For those unfamiliar with the term, Michael offers a short summary including a link to the passage in the Old Testament where the practice appears to have started.

“In the Western tradition, the idea of the year of jubilee comes to us from the Old Testament. The idea was to avoid permanent alienation of people from their ancestral land – in effect, land transfers were term-limited leases, and if by recklessness or bad luck or whatever people lost their land it was for no more than fifty years. In the fiftieth year – the Year of Jubilee – all would be restored: land to the original owners and hired workers could return to their land. It wasn’t a recipe for absolute equality – the income earned wasn’t returned etc – but about secure long-term economic and social foundations.”

My understanding is that the process was a lot simpler in biblical times in part because all the players knew that the write-down would occur (and so adjusted their lending behaviour accordingly) and also because the debt was owed, for the most part, to the King and the political elite associated with the King. From my reading, this was not just an act of generosity on the part of the King. Michael refers to its place in securing the economic and social foundations of the kingdom which included the capacity to raise an army from the population when required.

If you are interested then you can read his whole post here …

A debt jubilee? https://croakingcassandra.com/2020/04/30/a-debt-jubilee/

The why of Radical Uncertainty

A recent post offered an overview of a book by John Kay and Mervyn King titled “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future”. It is a rich topic and this post covers the underlying drivers that tend to result in radically uncertain outcomes.

Kay and King nominate “reflexivity” as a key driver of radical uncertainty

The sociologist Robert K. Merton identified reflexivity as a distinctive property of social systems–the system itself is influenced by our beliefs about it. The idea of reflexivity was developed by the Austrian émigré philosopher Karl Popper and became central to the thinking of Popper’s student, the highly successful hedge fund manager George Soros. And it would form part of the approach to macroeconomics of the Chicago economist Robert Lucas and his followers … although their perspective on the problem and its solution would be very different.

Reflexivity undermines stationarity. This was the essence of ‘Goodhart’s Law’–any business or government policy which assumed stationarity of social and economic relationships was likely to fail because its implementation would alter the behaviour of those affected and therefore destroy that stationarity.

Kay and King, Chapter 3: Radical Uncertainty is Everywhere”

Radical uncertainty also features in Richard Bookstaber’s book “The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction”. Bookstaber identifies four broad phenomena he argues are endemic to financial crises

Emergent phenomena.
“When systemwide dynamics arise unexpectedly out of the activities of individuals in a way that is not simply an aggregation of that behavior, the result is known as emergence”.

Non-ergodicity.
“An ergodic process … is one that does not vary with time or experience.
Our world is not ergodic—yet economists treat it as though it is.”

Radical uncertainty.
“Emergent phenomena and non-ergodic processes combine to create outcomes that do not fit inside defined probability distributions.”

Computational irreducibility.
“There is no formula that allows us to fast-forward to find out what the result will be. The world cannot be solved; it has to be lived.“

Bookstaber, Chapter 2: Being Human

If you want to delve into the detail of why the world can be radically uncertain then Bookstaber arguably offers the more detailed account; albeit one couched in technical language like emergent phenomena, ergodicity and computational irreducibility. In Chapter 10 he lays out the ways in which an agent based modelling approach to the problem of radical uncertainty would need to specify the complexity of the system in a structured way that takes account of the amount of information required to describe the system and the connectedness of its components. Bookstaber also offers examples of emergent phenomena in seemingly simple systems (e.g. Gary Conways’s “Game of Life”) which give rise to surprisingly complex outcomes.

I am not sure if either book makes this point explicitly but I think there is also an underlying theme in which the models that provide the illusion of control over an uncertain future create an incentive to “manage” risk in ways that increases the odds of bad outcomes based on insufficient resilience. That seems to be the clear implication of Kay and King’s discussion of the limits of finance theory (Chapter 17: The World of Finance). They acknowledge the value of the intellectual rigour built on the contributions of Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe and Eugene Fama but highlight the ways in which it has failed to live up to its promiseI .

We note two very different demonstrations of that failure. One is that the models used by regulators and financial institutions, directly derived from academic research in finance, not only failed to prevent the 2007–08 crisis but actively contributed to it. Another is to look at the achievements of the most successful investors of the era – Warren Buffett, George Soros and Jim Simons. Each has built fortunes of tens of billions of dollars. They are representative of three very different styles of investing.

Kay and King, Chapter 17 The World of Finance

I plan to do one more post exploring the ways in which we navigate a world of radical uncertainty.

Tony (From the Outside)

Worth reading – “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future” by John Kay and Mervyn King

I have covered some of the ideas in the book in previous posts (here and here) but have now had the chance the read the book in full and can recommend it. I have included more detailed notes on the book here but this post offers a short introduction to some of the key ideas.

Kay and King cover a lot of ground but, simply put, their book is about

“… how real people make choices in a radically uncertain world, in which probabilities cannot meaningfully be attached to alternative futures.” 

One of the things that makes the book interesting is that they were once true believers in decision making models based on rational economic agents seeking to maximise or optimise expected value.

As students and academics we pursued the traditional approach of trying to understand economic behaviour through the assumption that households, businesses, and indeed governments take actions in order to optimise outcomes. We learnt to approach economic problems by asking what rational individuals were maximising. Businesses were maximising shareholder value, policy-makers were trying to maximise social welfare, and households were maximising their happiness or ‘utility’. And if businesses were not maximising shareholder value, we inferred that they must be maximising something else – their growth, or the remuneration of their senior executives.

The limits on their ability to optimise were represented by constraints: the relationship between inputs and outputs in the case of businesses, the feasibility of different policies in the case of governments, and budget constraints in the case of households. This ‘optimising’ description of behaviour was well suited to the growing use of mathematical techniques in the social sciences. If the problems facing businesses, governments and families could be expressed in terms of well-defined models, then behaviour could be predicted by evaluating the ‘optimal’ solution to those problems.

Kay and King are not saying that these models are useless. They continue to see some value in the utility maximisation model but have come to believe that it is not the complete answer that many economists, finance academics and politicians came to believe.

Although much can be learnt by thinking in this way, our own practical experience was that none of these economic actors were trying to maximise anything at all. This was not because they were stupid, although sometimes they were, nor because they were irrational, although sometimes they were. It was because an injunction to maximise shareholder value, or social welfare, or household utility, is not a coherent guide to action.

They argue that the approach works up to a point but fails to deal with decisions that are in the domain of radical uncertainty

But we show in this book that the axiomatic approach to the definition of rationality comprehensively fails when applied to decisions made by businesses, governments or households about an uncertain future. And this failure is not because these economic actors are irrational, but because they are rational, and – mostly – do not pretend to knowledge they do not and could not have. Frequently they do not know what is going to happen and cannot successfully describe the range of things that might happen, far less know the relative likelihood of a variety of different possible events.

There are many factors that explain the current state of affairs but a key inflexion point in Kay and King’s account can be found in what they label “A Forgotten Dispute” (Chapter 5) between Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes on one side and Frank Ramsey and Bruno de Frinetti on the other, regarding the distinction between risk and uncertainty. Knight and Keynes argued that probability is an objective concept confined to problems with a defined and knowable frequency distribution. Ramsey argued that “subjective probability” is equally valid and used the mathematics developed for the analysis of frequency based probabilities to apply these subjective probabilities.

“Economists (used to) distinguish risk, by which they meant unknowns which could be described with probabilities, from uncertainty, which could not….. over the last century economists have attempted to elide that historic distinction between risk and uncertainty, and to apply probabilities to every instance of our imperfect knowledge of the future.”

Keynes and Knight lost the debate

Ramsey and de Finetti won, and Keynes and Knight lost, that historic battle of ideas over the nature of uncertainty. The result was that the concept of radical uncertainty virtually disappeared from the mainstream of economics for more than half a century. The use of subjective probabilities, and the associated mathematics, seemed to turn the mysteries of radical uncertainty into puzzles with calculable solutions. 

Ramsey and de Finetti laid the foundations for economists to expand the application of probability based thinking and decision making. Milton Friedman picked up the baton and ran with it.

There is a lot more to the book than interesting historical anecdotes on the history of economic ideas. The subject matter is rich and it crosses over topics covered previously in this blog including:

There are also overlaps with a book by Richard Bookstaber titled “The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction”. I am yet to review this book but have some detailed notes here.

One quibble with the book is that I think their critique of the Bayesian method is a bit harsh. I understand their concern to push back on the idea that Bayes solves the problem of using probability to understand uncertainty. At times however it reads like Bayes has no value at all. Read “The Theory that Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy” by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne for an alternative perspective.

Bayes may not help with mysteries but its application in puzzles should not be undervalued. I don’t entirely agree with their perspective on behavioural finance either.

I want to come back to the topics of risk and uncertainty in a future post but it will take time to process all of the overlapping pieces. In the interim, I hope you found the overview above useful.

Tony (From the Outside)

Who gets the money?

Matt Levine’s “Money Stuff” column (23 April 2020) has some interesting observations commenting on which bank customers received the money the U.S. government made available under its Paycheck Protection Program. The column’s headline focus is developments in the oil market, which is worth reading in its own right, but the bank commentary is further down under the subheading “PPP”.

You can find the column here but there are a couple of extracts below that give you the basic thrust of his comments …

The U.S. government is distributing free money to small businesses so that they can stay afloat, and keep paying workers, during the coronavirus shutdown. It is doing this through the Paycheck Protection Program, in which banks lend the money to small businesses, and then the government (the U.S. Small Business Administration) pays back the loans if the businesses use the money for payroll. This is, broadly speaking, sensible. I once wrote about it:

It is a public-private partnership that plays to each side’s strengths. Banks are, precisely, in the business of vetting applications from local restaurants, examining their financial records and deciding how much money they need. The government, meanwhile, is best equipped to generate magical quantities of money. The banks do something recognizably bank-like—market and underwrite small-business loans—and the government transforms them into magical free money.

Matt Levine, Bloomberg “Money Stuff” column, 23 April 2020

Matt goes on to offer his perspective on the strengths of the program, some of the practical issues of execution but also its potential unintended outcomes

That’s the idea. But if you are enlisting banks to run your program, you are going to get … banks. Like, the banks are going to behave in recognizably bank-like ways while they are doing the bank-like job of handing out the loans. Some of that will be good: You want the banks to check that the small businesses exist and aren’t stealing the money and so forth. Some of it will be good-ish, or debatable: You want the banks to check that the documents are all in order and that the loans match the businesses’ actual financial needs, but you don’t want them to spend so much time checking that the businesses never get their money.

And some of it will be … not exactly bad, necessarily, but at least unrelated to the goals of the program.

I don’t have any insight on whether these big American banks are guilty as charged, or indeed guilty at all. Matt is I think open minded and simply presenting the facts but it is something worth watching as the COVID 19 crisis plays out. As a general observation, I feel like the Australian banks have for the most part made extra (if not extraordinary) efforts to do the right thing by both their customers and the community at large. I am of course a (now semi retired) banker so that colours my observation but, as an ongoing bank shareholder, I expect to be feeling some of the impact of the forbearance in upcoming dividend payments and see that as part of the price of investing in banks.

Tony (From the Outside)

Adair Turner makes the case for “Monetary Finance”

This link takes you to an interesting post by Adair Turner on the limits of “monetary policy” (both conventional and the unconventional negative interest rate variety) and the potential use of “monetary finance”. Turner defines Monetary Finance as running a fiscal deficit (or higher deficit than would otherwise be the case) which is not financed by the issue of interest-bearing debt, but instead financed by an increase in the monetary base (i.e. by increasing the irredeemable non-interest bearing liabilities of the government/central bank.

I am probably over simplifying but, crudely stated, I think this is colloquially referred to as printing money and conventionally deemed to be a bad thing. So it is especially interesting seeing someone who was at the heart of the central banking world making the case. The post strikes a balance between the extremes of :

– there are no limits to what governments want to finance; and

– printing money = hyperinflation = the road to ruin.

I recommend you read his post in full but this extract gives you a flavour of the key message (or at least the one that I took away).

“So, on close inspection, all apparent technical objections to monetary finance dissolve. There is no doubt that monetary finance is technically feasible and that wise fiscal and monetary authorities could choose just the “right” amount.

The crucial issue is whether politicians can be trusted to be wise. Most central bankers are skeptical, and fear that monetary finance, once openly allowed, would become excessive. Indeed, for many, the knowledge that it is possible is a dangerous forbidden fruit which must remain taboo.

They may be right: the best policy may be to provide monetary finance while denying the fact. Governments can run large fiscal deficits. Central banks can make these fundable at close to zero rates. And these operations might be reversed if future rates of economic growth and inflation are higher than currently anticipated. If not, they will become permanent. But nobody needs to acknowledge that possibility in advance.”

I don’t agree with everything he writes but Turner is to my mind one of the more thoughtful commentators on banking, economics and finance. His resume includes being the head of the UK Financial Services Authority during the GFC. A book he wrote in 2015 titled “Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit and Fixing Global Finance” is also on my recommended reading list.

Tony (From the Outside)