Category: Monetary and Financial Institutions

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

Alternative monetary and financial systems

We probably tend to take the monetary and financial system we have today for granted, somewhat like the air we breathe. I was also challenged during the week to describe a non-money future and my response was judged a failure to look outside the square. The best I could offer was to note that Star Trek imagines a society in which unlimited cheap energy coupled with replicators has made money redundant.

By chance, I came across a couple of articles in recent weeks that offer interesting perspectives on what money is and its role in the economy.

One was by Tyler Cowen marking the 75th anniversary of Bretton Wood’s but more imaginatively subtitled “Every era’s monetary and financial institutions are unimaginable until they are real”. The other was an interview with a German philosopher Stefan Heidenreich discussing his book titled “Money: For a Non-money Economy”.

The Bretton Woods agreement of course is not the system we have today but Cowen makes the point that the system we operate under today would appear equally unlikely to previous generations:

“Currencies are fiat, the ties to gold are gone, and most exchange rates for the major currencies are freely floating, with periodic central bank intervention to manipulate exchange rates. For all the criticism it receives, this arrangement has also proved to be a viable global monetary order, and it has been accompanied by an excellent overall record for global growth.

Yet this fiat monetary order might also have seemed, to previous generations of economists, unlikely to succeed. Fiat currencies were associated with the assignat hyperinflations of the French Revolution, the floating exchange rates and competitive devaluations of the 1920s were not a success, and it was hardly obvious that most of the world’s major central banks would pursue inflation targets of below 2%. Until recent times, the record of floating fiat currencies was mostly disastrous”

Cowen’s main message is that the lesson of history suggests that it is brave to assume that the monetary and financial institution status quo will hold forever – so what comes next?

This brings us to Stefan Heidenreich.

“Stefan Heidenreich believes that some day, money will seem like an ancient religion. In his recent book Money: For a Non-money Economy, the German philosopher and media theorist speculates on how the money-based global economy could soon transition to an entirely different system based on the algorithmic matching of goods and services. Such a system could match people with what they need at a given moment without relying on the concept of a stable, universal price — and, just possibly, do away with the vast inequities caused by the market.

If you find the idea of an economy without money hard to imagine, you’re not alone. As the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But that very difficulty proves Heidenreich’s main point: We have to imagine what may sound like wild possibilities now in order to steer the future before it’s upon us. Getting rid of money could lead to what he calls a “leftist utopia” of equal distribution — or it could enable mass surveillance and algorithmic control on a whole new scale. Faced with the second option, Heidenreich says, we have no choice but to try to envision the first.”

“The Economy of the Future Won’t Rely on Money” Elvia Wilk (Medium 30 November 2018) https://medium.com/s/story/the-economy-of-the-future-wont-rely-on-money-5a703e0ad30b

It is not obvious to me that Heidenreich’s “matching” proposal provides a workable alternative to what we have today but that is not the point. The bigger point raised by both Cowen and Heidenreich is that what we have today is unlikely to be the system that governs our economic interactions in 50 years time so what is the alternative?

Tony