Category: Money

The alchemy of deposits

Patrick McKenzie dropped an interesting post on the seemingly humble but actually quite awesome deposit. You can find my (Australian focussed) perspective on the mechanics of bank deposits here but who could resist learning more about “…the terrible majesty of the humble bank deposit”.

The perspective Patrick offers is not necessarily new for anyone who understands banking but a lot of this is probably not well understood by the broader public actually using bank deposits. His post is short and worth reading if only for the “pink slime” analogy.

His first point is that “deposits are money”

The actual core feature of deposits is that you can transfer them to other people to effect payments. Big deal, you might think. You can also transfer cows, sea shells, Bitcoin, an IOU from a friend, or bonds issued by Google to effect payments. But deposits are treated as money by just about everyone who matters in the economy, including (pointedly) the state. Economists can wax lyrical about what “treated as money” means, but the non-specialist gloss is probably just as useful: anything is money if substantially everyone looking at the money both agrees that it is money and agrees at the exchange rate for it. This is sometimes referred to as the “no questions asked” property; money is the Schelling point for value transfers that all parties to a transaction are already at.

This is so fundamental a feature of deposits that, in developed nations, we don’t remember that it isn’t automatic

His second point is that bank deposits are “heavily engineered structured products pretending to be simple”.

From the consumer’s perspective, deposits are “my money,” functionally riskless. This rounds to correct. From the bank’s perspective, deposits are part of the capital stack of the bank, allowing it to engage in a variety of risky businesses. This rounds to correct. The reconciliation between this polymorphism is a feat of financial and social engineering. A bank packages up its various risky businesses—chiefly making loans, but many banks have other functions in addition to the risks associated with any operating business—puts them in a blender, reduces them to a homogenous mix, and then pours that risk mix over a defined waterfall.

The simplest model for that waterfall is, in order of increasing risk: deposits, bonds, preferred equity, and common equit

The “pink slime” analogy referenced above is a colourful way of saying that deposits benefit from having a claim on a diversified pool of assets, the “homogeneous mix” in the extract above. Equally important however is the fact that deposits have a super senior claim on that diversified pool as outlined in the waterfall analogy.

Patrick has packed quite a few nice turns of phrase into his post but one of my favourites addresses the pervasive misuse of the term “deposit”

The fintech industry has not covered itself in glory here. Sometimes firms misclaim a product to be a deposit where it is not. Sometimes they actually institutionally misunderstand the nature of the product they have created. One would hope that that never happens, but … smart people are doomed to continue discovering that just because a deposit is a complex structured product involving a bank which has a stable dollar value, not every complex structured product involving a bank which appears to have a stable dollar value is actually a deposit

To repeat “…just because a deposit is a complex structured product involving a bank which has a stable dollar value, not every complex structured product involving a bank which appears to have a stable dollar value is actually a deposit”

Patrick uses the recent example of Voyager as a case in point. I don’t think it is being pedantic to argue that a “crypto bank” is an oxymoron but I don’t hold out much hope that the term will go away any time soon. A “bank” is arguably a highly regulated institution by definition and the crypto versions to date are either not regulated or subject to a less onerous form of regulation.

This is Patrick’s take on Voyager

Voyager, a publicly traded company, marketed a deposit-adjacent product to users, paying a generous interest rate. Then a cascading series of events in crypto, outside the scope of this essay, blew up a series of firms, including one which had taken out a loan of hundreds of millions of dollars from Voyager. Suddenly, the information-insensitivity of Voyagers not-deposits was pierced, the pink slime appears both undermixed and undercooked, and customers now need to follow a bankruptcy proceeding closely. … When something which was believed to be a deposit is discovered to not actually be a deposit, infrastructure around it breaks catastrophically. Matt Levine has an excellent extended discussion about how Voyager discovered that attaching the ACH payment rail to their deposit-adjacent product became a huge risk once they went under.)

As regular readers will know, I am a big fan of Matt Levine so I endorse Patrick’s recommendation to read Matt’s accounts of what is going on in the crypto world. There is one aspect of Patrick’s post however that I struggled with and that is his account of bank deposits as a cheap source of funding

Why fund the risks of a bank with deposits, as opposed to funding them entirely with bonds and equity (and of course, revenue), like almost all businesses do? From the bank’s perspective, this is simple: deposits are very inexpensive funding sources, and the capability to raise them is the one of the main structural advantages banks have vis-a-vis all other firms in the economy. 

He is correct of course in the sense that the nominal interest rate on bank deposits is quite low, commensurate with their low risk. Two observations however,

Firstly, the true cost of a bank deposit has to take account of the cost of running all the infrastructure that facilities creating a diversified pool of assets and operating the payment rails that allow deposits to effect payments.

The second is that the super senior preferred claim that bank deposits have on the waterfall makes the other parts of the bank liability stack more risky. I know that the “bail-out” or “Too Big To Fail” have traditionally created a subsidy. However, banks are now required to hold both a lot more capital and to issue “bail-in” instruments that should in principle mean that this subsidy is much reduced if not eliminated. If the other parts of the bank liability stack are not pricing in these changes then the really interesting question is why not.

So there is a lot more to this than what Patrick has written (and he has promised further instalments) but I can still recommend his post as a useful (and entertaining) read for anyone seeking a better understanding of this particular corner of the banking universe.

Tony – From the Outside

Matt Levine on stuff that gets lost in translation

I have been referencing Matt Levine a lot lately. No apologies, his Money Stuff column is a regular source of insight and entertainment for banking and finance tragics such as myself and I recommend it. His latest column (behind a paywall but you can access a limited number of articles for free I think) includes a discussion of the way in which the DeFi industry has created analogues of conventional banking concepts like “deposits” but with twists that are not always obvious or indeed intuitive to the user/customer.

We have talked a lot recently about how crypto has recreated the pre-2008 financial system, and is now having its own 2008 financial crisis. But this is an important difference. Traditional finance is in large part in the business of creating safe assets: You take stuff with some risk (mortgages, bank loans, whatever), you package them in a diversified and tranched way, you issue senior claims against them, and people treat those claims as so safe that they don’t have to worry about them. Money in a bank account simply is money; you don’t have to analyze your bank’s financial statements before opening a checking account.

Matt Levine “Money Stuff” column 28 June 2022 – Crypto depositors

How banks can create safe assets is a topic that I have looked at a number of times but this post is my most complete attempt to describe the process that Matt outlines above. To me at least, this is a pretty fundamental part of understanding how finance works and Matt also did a good post on the topic that I discussed here.

One of the key points is that the tranching of liabilities also creates a division of labour (and indeed of expertise and inclination) …

There is a sort of division of labor here: Ordinary people can put their money into safe places without thinking too hard about it; smart careful investors can buy equity claims on banks or other financial institutions to try to make a profit. But the careless ordinary people have priority over the smart careful people. The smart careful heavily involved people don’t get paid unless the careless ordinary people get paid first. This is a matter of law and banking regulation and the structuring of traditional finance. There are, of course, various possible problems; in 2008 it turned out that some of this information-insensitive debt was built on bad foundations and wasn’t safe. But the basic mechanics of seniority mostly work pretty well.

The DeFi industry argues that they want to change the ways that traditional finance operates for the benefit of users but it also expects those users to be motivated and engaged in understanding the details of the new way of doing things. A problem is that some users (maybe “many users”?) might be assuming that some of the rules that protect depositors (and indeed creditors more generally) in the conventional financial system would naturally be replicated in the alternative financial system being created.

Back to Matt …

The reason people put their money in actual banks is that we live in a society and there are rules that protect bank deposits, and also everyone is so used to this society and those rules that they don’t think about them. Most bank depositors do not know much about bank capital and liquidity requirements, because they don’t have to; that is the point of those requirements.

The problem according to Matt is ….

Broadly speaking crypto banking (and quasi-banking) is like banking in the state of nature, with no clear rules about seniority and depositor protection. But it attracts money because people are used to regular banking. When they see a thing that looks like a bank deposit, but for crypto, they think it will work like a bank deposit. It doesn’t always.

This feels like a problem to me. As the industry becomes more regulated I would expect to see the issues of seniority and deposit protection/preference more clearly spelled out. For the time being it does seem to be very much caveat emptor and don’t assume anything.

Tony – From the Outside

Where do bank deposits come from …

This is one of the more technical (and misundersood) aspects of banking but also a basic fact about money creation in the modern economy that I think is useful to understand. For the uninitiated, bank deposits are typically the largest form of money in a modern economy with a well developed financial system.

One of the better explanations I have encountered is a paper titled “Money creation in the modern economy” that was published in the Bank of England’s Quarterly Bulletin in Q1 2014. You can find the full paper here but I have copied some extracts below that will give you the basic idea …

In the modern economy, most money takes the form of bank deposits.  But how those bank deposits are created is often misunderstood:  the principal way is through commercial banks making loans.  Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.

The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:

Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.  In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.

Although commercial banks create money through lending, they cannot do so freely without limit.  Banks are limited in how much they can lend if they are to remain profitable in a competitive banking system.  Prudential regulation also acts as a constraint on banks’ activities in order to maintain the resilience of the financial system.  And the households and companies who receive the money created by new lending may take actions that affect the stock of money — they could quickly ‘destroy’ money by using it to repay their existing debt, for instance.

Money creation in the modern economy, Michale McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1

The power to create money is of course something akin to magic and the rise of stablecoins has revived a long standing debate about the extent to which market discipline alone is sufficient to ensure sound money. My personal bias (forged by four decades working in the Australian banking system) leans to the view that money creation is not something which banker’s can be trusted to discharge without some kind of supervision/constraints. The paper sets out a nice summary of the ways in which this power is constrained in the conventional banking system …

In the modern economy there are three main sets of constraints that restrict the amount of money that banks can create.

(i) Banks themselves face limits on how much they can lend.  In particular:

– Market forces constrain lending because individual banks have to be able to lend profitably in a competitive market.

– Lending is also constrained because banks have to take steps to mitigate the risks associated with making additional loans.

– Regulatory policy acts as a constraint on banks’ activities in order to mitigate a build-up of risks that could pose a threat to the stability of the financial system.

(ii) Money creation is also constrained by the behaviour of the money holders — households and businesses. Households and companies who receive the newly created money might respond by undertaking transactions that immediately destroy it, for example by repaying outstanding loans.

(iii) The ultimate constraint on money creation is monetary policy. By influencing the level of interest rates in the economy, the Bank of England’s monetary policy affects how much households and companies want to borrow. This occurs both directly, through influencing the loan rates charged by banks, but also indirectly through the overall effect of monetary policy on economic activity in the economy.  As a result, the Bank of England is able to ensure that money growth is consistent with its objective of low and stable inflation.

The confidence in the central bank’s ability to pursue its inflation objective possibly reflects a simpler time when the inflation problem was deemed solved but the paper is still my goto frame of reference when I am trying to understand how the banking system creates money.

If you want to dive a bit deeper into this particular branch of the dark arts, some researchers working at the US Federal Reserve recently published a short note titled “Understanding Bank Deposit Growth during the COVID-19 Pandemic” that documents work undertaken to try to better understand the rapid and sustained growth in aggregate bank deposits between 2020 and 2021. Frances Coppola also published an interesting post on her blog that argues that banks not only create money when they lend but also when they spend it. You can find the original post by Frances here and my take on it here.

A special shout out to anyone who has read this far. My friends and family think I spend too much time thinking about this stuff so it is nice to know that I am not alone.

Tony – From the Outside