Regulation – Page 6 – From the outside

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:

Safety measures are likely to be more effective is they are less visible
Measures designed to promote prudent behaviour are likely to be more effective than measures which make risky behaviour safer
Recognise that sometimes it is better to do nothing if the actions we take just leads to an offset in risk behaviour somewhere else
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
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

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)

Bank dividends

Matt Levine’s “Money Stuff” column (Bloomberg) offers some interesting commentary on what is happening with bank dividends in the US. Under the sub heading “People are worried about dividends” he writes:

So, again, I am generally pretty impressed by the performance of bank regulation in the current crisis, but this is unfortunate:
US banks’ annual capital plans, due to be submitted to the Federal Reserve on Monday, are expected to include proposals to continue paying dividends, reinforcing comments from prominent bank chief executives in recent days, according to people familiar with the situation.
The bankers, including Goldman Sachs boss David Solomon, Morgan Stanley boss James Gorman and Citigroup chief Mike Corbat, argued that they had the means to continue paying dividends and that cutting them would be “destabilising to investors”.
“We’re in a very different position than what we see in Europe,” said Marty Mosby, a veteran banks analyst at Vining Sparks.
“How we set it up [post-crisis capital requirements] was to be able to not have those dividends collapse [in a crisis]. That’s what creates a financial crisis: when dividends start to be ratcheted lower that shakes confidence.”
What is unfortunate is not so much that U.S. banks want to continue paying dividends; for all I know some of them are so well capitalized and so well equipped to weather this crisis that they will actually make a lot of money and have plentiful profits to pay out to shareholders. What is unfortunate is that their explicit view is that cutting dividends would be destabilizing. Common shareholders are supposed to be the lowest-ranking claimants on a bank’s money. The point of equity capital is that you don’t have to pay it out, that it doesn’t create any cash drain in difficult times. But if your view is “we need to maintain our dividend every quarter or else there will be a run on the bank,” then that means that the dividend is destabilizing; it means that your common stock is really debt; it means that your equity capital is not as good—not as equity-like—as it’s supposed to be.
If you take seriously the claim that banks can’t cut dividends in a generational crisis, for fear of undermining investor confidence, then, fine, I guess, but then the obvious conclusion is that when times are good you can never let banks raise their dividends. Every time a bank raises its dividend, on this theory, it incurs more unavoidable quarterly debt and creates a new drain on its funding, one that can’t be turned off in the bad times for fear of being “destabilising to investors”
Bloomberg Opinion “Money Stuff” 7 April 2020

I get the argument that if banks have the means to pay a dividend then they should be free to make a commercial decision. People may however feel entitled to be skeptical given the ways in which some banks were slow to adjust to the new realities of the GFC. There is also a line where the position some US banks appear to be projecting risks becoming an expectation that the dividend should be stable even under a highly stressed and uncertain outlook. It is not clear if that is exactly what the US banks quoted in his column are saying but that is how Matt Levine frames it and it would clearly be a concern if that is their view. That does seem to a fair description of the view some investors and analysts are expressing.

Jamie Dimon seems to be offering a more nuanced perspective on this question. He has advised JP Morgan shareholders that the Board expects the bank to remain profitable under its base base projections but would consider suspending the dividend under an extremely adverse scenario.

Our 2019 pretax earnings were $48 billion – a huge and powerful earnings stream that enables us to absorb the loss of revenues and the higher credit costs that inevitably follow a crisis. For comparison, the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) results for 2020 that we submitted to the Federal Reserve in 2019 (which assumed outcomes like U.S. unemployment peaking at 10% and the stock market falling 50%) showed a decline in revenue of almost 20% and credit costs of approximately $20 billion more than what we experienced in 2019. We believe we would perform better than this if the Fed’s scenario were to actually occur. But even in the Fed’s scenario, we would be profitable in every quarter. These stress test results also show that following such a meaningful reduction in our revenue (and assuming we continue to pay dividends), our common equity Tier 1 (CET1) ratio would likely hold at a very strong 10%, and we would have in excess of $500 billion of liquid assets.
Additionally, we have run an extremely adverse scenario that assumes an even deeper contraction of gross domestic product, down as much as 35% in the second quarter and lasting through the end of the year, and with U.S. unemployment continuing to increase, peaking at 14% in the fourth quarter. Even under this scenario, the company would still end the year with strong liquidity and a CET1 ratio of approximately 9.5% (common equity Tier 1 capital would still total $170 billion). This scenario is quite severe and, we hope, unlikely. If it were to play out, the Board would likely consider suspending the dividend even though it is a rather small claim on our equity capital base. If the Board suspended the dividend, it would be out of extreme prudence and based upon continued uncertainty over what the next few years will bring.
It is also important to be aware that in both our central case scenario for 2020 results and in our extremely adverse scenario, we are lending – currently or plan to do so – an additional $150 billion for our clients’ needs. Despite this, our capital resources and liquidity are very strong in both models. We have over $500 billion in total liquid assets and an incremental $300+ billion borrowing capacity at the Federal Reserve and Federal Home Loan Banks, if needed, to support these loans, as well as meet our liquidity requirements (these numbers do not include the potential use of some of the Fed’s newly created facilities). We could, of course, make our capital and liquidity buffer better by restricting our activities, but we do not intend to do that – our clients need us.
JP Morgan Chairman and CEO Letter to Shareholders 2019 Annual Report

Banks are cyclical investments – who knew?

Stress testing models must of course be treated with caution but what I think this mostly illustrates is that banks are highly cyclical investments. That may seem like a statement of the obvious but there was a narrative post GFC that banks were public utilities and that bank shareholders should expect to earn public utility style returns on their investments.

There is an element of truth in this analogy in so far as banks clearly provide an essential public service. I am also sympathetic to the argument that banking is a form of private/public partnership. This pandemic is however a timely reminder of the limits of the argument that banks are just another low risk utility style of business. Bank shareholders are much more exposed to the cyclical impacts than true utility investments.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have a substantial exposure to bank shares and I for one need a lot more than a single digit return to compensate for the pain that part of my portfolio is currently experiencing. The only upside is that I never bought into the thesis that banks are a low risk utility style investment requiring a commensurately low return.

The higher capital and liquidity requirements built up in response to the lessons of the GFC increase the odds that banks will survive the crisis and be a big part of the solution but banks are, and remain, quintessentially cyclical investments and the return bank investors require should reflect this. I think the lesson here is not to worry about the extent to which dividend cuts would be destabilising to investors but to focus on what kind of return is commensurate with the risk.

I will let APRA have the final say on what to expect …

APRA expects ADIs and insurers to limit discretionary capital distributions in the months ahead, to ensure that they instead use buffers and maintain capacity to continue to lend and underwrite insurance. This includes prudent reductions in dividends, taking into account the uncertain outlook for the operating environment and the need to preserve capacity to prioritise these critical activities.
Decisions on capital management need to be forward-looking, and in the current environment of significant uncertainty in the outlook, this can be very challenging. APRA is therefore providing Boards with the following additional guidance.²
During at least the next couple of months, APRA expects that all ADIs and insurers will:
– take a forward-looking view on the need to conserve capital and use capacity to support the economy;
– use stress testing to inform these views, and give due consideration to plausible downside scenarios (periodically refreshed and updated as conditions evolve); and
– initiate prudent capital management actions in response, on a pre-emptive basis, to ensure they maintain the confidence and capacity to continue to lend and support their customers.
During this period, APRA expects that ADIs and insurers will seriously consider deferring decisions on the appropriate level of dividends until the outlook is clearer. However, where a Board is confident that they are able to approve a dividend before this, on the basis of robust stress testing results that have been discussed with APRA, this should nevertheless be at a materially reduced level. Dividend payments should be offset to the extent possible through the use of dividend reinvestment plans and other capital management initiatives. APRA also expects that Boards will appropriately limit executive cash bonuses, mindful of the current challenging environment.
“APRA issues guidance to authorised deposit-taking institutions and insurers on capital management”, 7 April 2020

Tony (From the Outside)

The power of ideas

This post was inspired by a paper by Dani Rodrik titled “When Ideas Trump Interests: Preferences, Worldviews, and Policy Innovations”. I have set out some more detailed notes here for the policy wonks but the paper is not light reading. The short version here attempts to highlight a couple of ideas I found especially interesting.

Rodrik starts by noting a tendency to interpret economic and social outcomes through the lens of “vested interests” while paying less attention to the ideas that underpin these outcomes. The vested interest approach looks for who benefits and how much power they have to explain outcomes. Rodrik does not dispute the relevance of understanding whose interests are in play when economic choices are being made but argues that “ideas” are an equally powerful motivating force.

Rodrik expresses his point this way:

“Ideas are strangely absent from modern models of political economy. In most prevailing theories of policy choice, the dominant role is instead played by “vested interests”—elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public. Economists, political scientists, and other social scientists appeal to the power of special interests to explain key puzzles in regulation, international trade, economic growth and development, puzzles in regulation, international trade, economic growth and development, and many other fields.”
“When Ideas Trump Interests: Preferences, Worldviews, and Policy Innovations” Dani Rodrik, Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 28, Number 1—Winter 2014—Pages 189–208

Applying this lens offers a broader and more nuanced perspective of how self and vested interest operates (emphasis added).

“… a focus on ideas provides us with a new perspective on vested interests too. As social constructivists like to put it, “interests are an idea.” Even if economic actors are driven purely by interests, they often have only a limited and preconceived idea of where their interests lie. This may be true in general, of course, but it is especially true in politics, where preferences are tightly linked to people’s sense of identity and new strategies can always be invented. What the economist typically treats as immutable self-interest is too often an artifact of ideas about who we are, how the world works, and what actions are available.”
Ibid

The importance of understanding how ideas drive public policy and personal choices resonates with me. One of the examples Rodrik used to illustrate his argument was bank regulation pre the GFC. Rodrik does not dispute that self and vested interests play a significant role but he explores the equally important role of ideas in shaping how interests are defined and pursued and the ways in which the models people use to understand the world shape their actions.

Applying this lens to bank regulation

Many observers … have argued that the policies that produced the crisis were the result of powerful banking and financial interests getting their way, which seems like a straightforward application of the theory of special interests.

But this begs the question why were banking vested interests allowed to get their way. The “vested interest” argument is “regulatory capture” but Rodrik offers an alternative explanation …

Still, without the wave of ideas “in the air” that favored financial liberalization and self-regulation and emphasized the impossibility (or undesirability) of government regulation, these vested interests would not have gotten nearly as much traction as they did. After all, powerful interests rarely get their way in a democracy by nakedly arguing for their own self-interest. Instead, they seek legitimacy for their arguments by saying these policies are in the public interest. The argument in favor of financial deregulation was not that it was good for Wall Street, but that it was good for Main Street.

Other observers have argued that the financial crisis was a result of excessive government intervention to support housing markets, especially for lower-income borrowers. These arguments were also grounded on certain ideas—about the social value of homeownership and the inattentiveness of the financial sector to those with lower incomes. Again, ideas apparently shaped politicians’ views of how the world works— and therefore their interest in acting in ways that precipitated the crisis.

I want to come back to this topic in another post. I have touched on the issue of self interest in an earlier post looking at a book by Samuel Bowles titled “The Moral Economy”. Rodrik’s paper offers another perspective on the issue as does his book “Economics Rules: Why Economics Works, When It Fails, and How To Tell The Difference”. I have some notes on a couple of other books including “The Economists’ Hour” by Binyamin Applebaum and The Value of Everything” by Mariana Mazzucato. All of these have something interesting to say but I want to think some more before attempting to say something.

Let me conclude for the moment with John Maynard Keynes (emphasis added …

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936

Tony (From the Outside)

IFRS 9 loan loss provisioning faces its first real test

My long held view has been that IFSR 9 adds to the procyclicality of the banking system (see here, here, and here) and that the answer to this aspect of procyclicality lies in the way that capital buffers interact with loan loss provisioning (here, here, and here).

So it was interesting to see an article in the Financial Times overnight headlined “New accounting rules pose threat to banks amid virus outbreak”. The headline may be a bit dramatic but it does draw attention to the IFRS 9 problem I have been concerned with for some time.

The article notes signs of a backlash against the accounting rules with the Association of German Banks lobbying for a “more flexible handling” of risk provisions under IFRS 9 and warning that the accounting requirements could “massively amplify” the impact of the crisis. I agree that the potential exists to amplify the crisis but also side with an unnamed “European banking executive” quoted in the article saying “IFRS 9, I hate it as a rule, but relaxing accounting standards in a crisis just doesn’t look right”.

There may be some scope for flexibility in the application of the accounting standards (not my area of expertise) but that looks to me like a dangerous and slippery path to tread. The better option is for flexibility in the capital requirements, capital buffers in particular. What we are experiencing is exactly the kind of adverse scenario that capital buffers are intended to absorb and so we should expect them to decline as loan loss provisions increase and revenue declines. More importantly we should be seeing this as a sign that the extra capital put in place post the GFC is performing its assigned task and not a sign, in and of itself, indicating distress.

This experience will also hopefully reinforce the case for ensuring that the default position is that the Counter Cyclical Capital Buffer be in place well before there are any signs that it might be required. APRA announced that it was looking at this policy in an announcement in December 2019 but sadly has not had the opportunity to fully explore the policy initiative and implement it.

Tony

Capital Rules Get Less Stressful – Matt Levine

Nice quote from Matt Levine’s opinion piece on the change in US bank capital requirements

“Everything in bank capital is controversial so this is controversial. Usually the controversy is that some people want higher capital requirements and other people want lower capital requirements. Here, pleasantly, part of the controversy is about whether this is a higher or lower capital requirement.“

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-05/capital-rules-get-less-stressful

Using machine learning to predict bank distress

Interesting post on the Bank Underground blog by Bank of England staff Joel Suss and Henry Treitel.

This extract summarises their findings

“Our paper makes important contributions, not least of which is practical: bank supervisors can utilise our findings to anticipate firm weaknesses and take appropriate mitigating action ahead of time.

However, the job is not done. For one, we are missing important data which is relevant for anticipating distress. For example, we haven’t included anything that speaks directly to the quality of a firm’s management and governance, nor have we included any information on organisational culture.

Moreover, our period of study only covers 2006 to 2012 – a notoriously rocky time in the banking sector. A wider swathe of data, including both good times and bad, would help us be more confident that our models will perform well in the future.

So while prediction, especially about the future, remains tough, our research demonstrates the ability and improved clarity of machine learning methodologies. Bank supervisors, armed with high-performing and transparent predictive models, are likely to be better prepared to step-in and take action to ensure the safety and soundness of the financial system.”

Australian banking – “Unquestionably Strong” gets a bit more complicated

Students of the dark art of bank capital adequacy measurement were excited this week by the release of some proposed revisions to APRA’s “Prudential Standard APS 111 Capital Adequacy” (APS 111); i.e. the one which sets out the detailed criteria for measuring an ADI’s Regulatory Capital.

Is anyone still reading? Possibly not, but there is something I think worth noting here if you want to understand what may be happening with Australian bank capital. This is of course only a consultation at this stage but I would be very surprised if the key proposal discussed below is not adopted.

The Short Version

The consultation paper has a number of changes but the one that I want to focus on is the proposal to apply stricter constraints on the amount of equity an ADI invests in banking and insurance subsidiaries.

In order to understand how this impacts the banks, I have to throw in two more pieces of Australian bank capital jargon, specifically Level 1 and Level 2 capital.

Level 1 is the ADI itself on a stand alone basis (note that is a simplification but close enough to the truth for the purposes of this post).
Level 2 is defined in the consultation paper as “The consolidation of the ADI and all its subsidiaries other than non-consolidated subsidiaries; or if the ADI is a subsidiary of a non-operating holding company (NOHC), the consolidation of the immediate parent NOHC and all the immediate parent NOHC’s subsidiaries (including any ADIs and their subsidiaries) other than non-consolidated subsidiaries.”

You can be forgiven for not being familiar with this distinction but the capital ratios typically quoted in any discussion of Australian bank capital strength are the Level 2 measures. The Unquestionably Strong benchmark that dominates the discussion is a Level 2 measure. The changes proposed in this consultation however operate at the Level 1 measurement (the ones that virtually no one currently pays any attention to) and not the Level 2 headline rate.

This has the potential to impact the “Unquestionably Strong” benchmark and I don’t recollect seeing this covered in the consultation paper or any public commentary on the proposal that I have seen to date.

APRA has been quite open about the extent to which these changes are a response to the RBNZ proposal to substantially increase equity requirements for NZ banks.

“This review was prompted in part by recent proposals by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) to materially increase capital requirements in New Zealand. The RBNZ’s proposals and APRA’s processes are a natural by-product of both regulators working to protect their respective communities from the costs of financial instability and the regulators continue to support each other as these reforms are developed.”

The changes have however been calibrated to maintain the status quo based on the amounts of capital the Australian majors currently have invested in their NZ subsidiaries.

“APRA has calibrated the proposed capital requirements so they are broadly consistent with … the current capital position of the four major Australian banks, in respect of these exposures (i.e. preserving most of the existing capital uplift).”

It follows that any material increase in the capital the majors are required to invest in their NZ subsidiaries (in response to the RBNZ’s proposed requirement) will in turn require that they have to hold commensurately more common equity on a 1:1 basis in the Level 1 ADI to maintain the existing Level 1 capital ratios.

So far as I can see, the Level 2 measure does not require that this extra capital invested in banking subsidiaries be subject to the increased CET1 deductions applied at Level 1. It follows that the Level 2 CET1 ratio will increase but the extent to which a creditor benefits from that added strength will depend on which part of the banking group they sit.

I am not saying this a problem in itself. The RBNZ has the authority to set the capital requirements it deems necessary, Australian bank shareholders can make their own commercial decisions on whether the diluted return on equity meets their requirements and APRA has to respond to protect the interests of the Australian banking system.

I am saying that measuring relative capital adequacy is getting more complicated so you need to pay attention to the detail if this matters to you. In particular, I am drawing attention to the potential for the Level 2 CET1 ratios of the Australian majors to increase in ways that the existing “Unquestionably Strong” benchmark is not calibrated to. I don’t think this matters much for Australian bank depositors who have a very safe super senior position in the Australian loss hierarchy. It probably does matter for creditors who are closer to the sharp end of the loss hierarchy including senior and subordinated bondholders.

To date, the Level 2 capital adequacy ratios have been sufficient to provide a measure of relative capital strength; a higher CET1 ratio equals greater capital strength and that was probably all you needed to know. Going forward, I think you will need to pay closer attention to what is happening at the Level 1 measure to gain a more complete understanding of relative capital strength. The Level 2 measure by itself may not tell you the full story.

The detail

As a rule, APRA’s general capital treatment of equity exposures is to require that they be deducted from CET1 Capital in order to avoid double counting of capital. The existing rules (APS 111) however provides a long-standing variation to this general rule when measuring Level 1 capital adequacy. This variation allows an ADI at Level 1 to risk weight (after first deducting any intangibles component) its equity investments in banking and insurance subsidiaries. The risk weight is 300 percent if the subsidiary is listed or 400 per cent if it is unlisted.

APRA recognises that this improves the L1 ratios by around 100bp versus what would be the case if a full CET1 deduction were applied but is comfortable with that outcome based on current exposure levels.

The RBNZ’s (near certain) move towards higher CET1 requirements however threatens to undermine this status quo and potentially see a greater share of the overall pool of equity in the group migrate from Australia to NZ. APRA recognises of course that the RBNZ can do whatever it deems best for NZ depositors but APRA equally has to ensure that the NZ benefits do not come at the expense of Australian depositors (and other creditors).

To address this issue, APRA is proposing to limit the extent to which an ADI may use debt to fund investments in banking and insurance subsidiaries.

ADIs, at Level 1, will be required to deduct these equity investments from CET1 Capital, but only to the extent the investment in the subsidiary is in excess of 10 per cent of CET1 Capital.
An ADI may risk weight the investment, after deduction of any intangibles component, at 250 per cent to the extent the investment is below this 10 per cent threshold.
The amount of the exposure that is risk weighted would be included as part of the related party limits detailed in the recently finalised APS 222.

As APRA is more concerned about large concentrated exposures, it is proposing to limit the amount of the exposure to an individual subsidiary that can be leveraged to 10 per cent of an ADI’s CET1 Capital. This means capital requirements are increasing for large concentrated exposures, as amounts over the 10 per cent threshold would be required to be met dollar-for-dollar by the ADI parent company.

Summing up

What APRA is proposing to do makes sense to me. We can debate the necessity for the RBNZ to insist on virtually 100% CET1 capital (for the record, I continue to believe that a mix of CET1 and contingent convertible debt is likely to be a more effective source of market discipline). However, once it became clear that the RBNZ was committed to its revised capital requirements, APRA was I think left with no choice but to respond.

What will be interesting from here is to see whether investments of CET1 in NZ banking subsidiaries increase in response to the RBNZ requirement or whether the Australian majors choose to reduce the size of their NZ operations.

If the former (i.e. the majors are required to increase the capital committed to NZ subsidiaries) then we need to keep an eye on how this impacts the Level 2 capital ratios and what happens to the “Unquestionably Strong” CET1 benchmark that currently anchors the capital the Australian majors maintain.

This is a pretty technical area of bank capital so it is possible I am missing something; if so please let me know what it is. Otherwise keep an eye on how the capital adequacy targets of the Australian majors respond to these developments.

Tony (From the Outside)

Is the financial system as resilient as policymakers say?

This is the question that Sir Paul Tucker poses in a BIS Working Paper titled “Is the financial system sufficiently resilient: a research programme and policy agenda” (BIS WP790) and answers in the negative. Tucker’s current role as Chair of the Systemic Risk Council and his experience as Deputy Governor at the Bank of England from 2009 to 2013 suggests that, whether you agree or disagree, it is worth reading what he has to say.

Tucker is quick to acknowledge that his assessment is “… intended to jolt the reader” and recognises that he risks “… overstating weaknesses given the huge improvements in the regulatory regime since 2007/08”. The paper sets out why Tucker believes the financial system is not as resilient as claimed, together with his proposed research and policy agenda for achieving a financial system that is sufficiently resilient.

Some of what he writes is familiar ground but three themes I found especially interesting were:

The extent to which recourse by monetary policy to very low interest rates exposes the financial system to a cyclically higher level of systemic risk that should be factored into the resilience target;
The need to formulate what Tucker refers to as a “Money Credit Constitution” ; and
The idea of using “information insensitivity” for certain agreed “safe assets” as the target state of resilience for the system.

Financial stability is of course one of those topics that only true die hard bank capital tragics delve into. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) demonstrated, however, that financial stability and the resilience of the banking system is also one of those topics that impacts every day life if the technocrats get it wrong. I have made some more detailed notes on the paper here for the technically inclined while this post will attempt (and likely fail) to make the issues raised accessible for those who don’t want to read BIS working papers.

Of the three themes listed above, “information insensitivity” is the one that I would call out in particular. It is admittedly a bit clunky as a catch phrase but I do believe it is worth investing the time to understand what it means and what it implies for how the financial system should be regulated and supervised. I have touched on the concept in a couple of previous posts (here, here, and here) and, as I worked through this post, I also found some interesting overlaps with the idea introduced by the Australian Financial System Inquiry that systemically important banks should be required to be “unquestionably strong”.

How resilient is the financial system?

Tucker’s assessment is that Basel III has made the financial system a lot safer than it was but less resilient than claimed. This is because the original calibration of the higher capital requirements under Basel III did not allow for the way in which any subsequent reduction in interest rates means that monetary policy has less scope to help mitigate economic downturns. All other things being equal, any future stress will have a larger impact on the financial system because monetary policy will have less capacity to stimulate the economy.

We could quibble over details:

The extent to which the capital requirements have been increased by higher Risk Weights applied to exposures (Tucker is more concerned with the extent to which capital requirements get weakened over time in response to industry lobbying)
Why is this not captured in stress testing?
The way in which cyclical buffers could (and arguably should) be used to offset this inherent cyclical risk in the financial system.

But his bigger point sounds intuitively right, all other things being equal, low interest rates mean that central banks will have much less scope to stimulate the economy via monetary policy. It follows that the financial system is systemically riskier at this point in time than historical experience with economic downturns might suggest.

How should we respond (in principle)?

One response is common equity and lots of it. That is what is advocated by some academic commentators , influential former central bankers such as Adair Turner and Mervyn King, and most recently by the RBNZ (with respect to the quantum and the form of capital.

Tucker argues that the increased equity requirements agreed under Basel III are necessary, but not sufficient. His point here is broader than the need to allow for changes in monetary policy discussed above. His concern is what does it take to achieve the desired level of resilience in a financial system that has fractional reserve banking at its core.

”Maintaining a resilient system cannot sanely rely on crushing the probability of distress via prophylactic regulation and supervision: a strategy that confronts the Gods in its technocratic arrogance. Instead, low barriers to entry, credible resolution regimes and crisis-management tools must combine to ensure that the system can keep going through distress. That is different from arguing that equity requirements (E) can be relaxed if resolution plans become sufficiently credible. Rather, it amounts to saying that E would need to be much higher than now if resolution is not credible.”
“Is the Financial system sufficiently resilient: a research programme and policy agenda” BIS WP 790, p 23

That is Tucker’s personal view expressed in the conclusion to the paper but he also advocates that “unelected technicians need to frame the question [of target resilience] in a digestible way for politicians and public debate“. It is especially important that the non-technical people understand the extent to which there may be trade-offs in the choice of how resilient the financial system should be. Is there, for example, a trade-off between resilience and the dynamism of the financial system that drives its capacity to support innovation, competition and growth? Do the resource misallocations associated with credit and property price booms damage the long run growth of the economy? And so on …

Turner offers a first pass at how this problem might be presented to a non-technical audience:

Staying with crisp oversimplification, I think the problem can be put as follows:
• Economists and policymakers do not know much about this. Models and empirics are needed.
• Plausibly, as BIS research suggests, credit and property price booms lead resource misallocation booms? Does that damage long-run growth?
• Even if it does, might those effects be offset by net benefits from greater entrepreneurship during booms?
• Would tough resilience policies constrain capital markets in ways that impede the allocation of resources to risky projects and so growth?
If there is a long-run trade off, then where people are averse to boom-bust ‘cycles’, resilience will be higher and growth lower. By contrast, jurisdictions that care more about growth and dynamism will err on the side of setting the resilience standard too low.
BIS WP790, Page 5

He acknowledges there are no easy answers but asking the right questions is obviously a good place to start.

A “Money-Credit Constitution”

In addition to helping frame the broader parameters of the problem for public debate, central bankers also need to decide what their roles and responsibilities in the financial system should be. Enter the idea of a Money-Credit Constitution (MCC). I have to confess that this was a new bit of jargon for me and I had to do a bit of research to be sure that I knew what Tucker means by it. The concept digs down into the technical aspects of central banking but it also highlights the extent to which unelected technocrats have been delegated a great deal of power by the electorate. I interpret Tucker’s use of the term “constitution”as an allusion to the need for the terms on which this power is exercised to be defined and more broadly understood.

A Money-Credit Constitution defined:

“By that I mean rules of the game for both banking and central banking designed to ensure broad monetary stability, understood as having two components: stability in the value of central bank money in terms of goods and services, and also stability of private-banking-system deposit money in terms of central bank money.”
Chapter 1: How can central banks deliver credible commitment and be “Emergency Institutions”? by John Tucker in “Central Bank Governance and Oversight Reform, edited by Cochrane and Taylor (2016)

The jargon initially obscured the idea (for me at least) but some practical examples helped clarify what he was getting at. Tucker defines the 19th and early 20th century MCC as comprising; the Gold Standard, reserve requirements for private banks and the Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) function provided by the central bank. The rules of the game (or MCC) have of course evolved over time. In the two to three decades preceding the 2008 GFC, the rules of the game incorporated central bank independence, inflation targeting and a belief in market efficiency/discipline. Key elements of that consensus were found to be woefully inadequate and we are in the process of building a new set of rules.

Tucker proposes that a MCC that is fit for the purpose of achieving an efficient and resilient financial system should have five key components:

– a target for inflation (or some other nominal magnitude);
– a requirement for banking intermediaries to hold reserves (or assets readily exchanged for reserves) that increases with a firm’s leverage and/or the degree of liquidity mismatch between its assets and liabilities;
– a liquidity-reinsurance regime for fundamentally solvent banking intermediaries;
– a resolution regime for bankrupt banks and other financial firms; and
– constraints on how far the central bank is free to pursue its mandate and structure its balance sheet, given that a monetary authority by definition has latent fiscal capabilities.
BIS WP, Page 9

In one sense, the chosen resilience strategy for the financial system is simply determined by the combination of the capital and liquidity requirements imposed on private banks. We are using the term capital here in its broadest sense to incorporate not just common equity but also the various forms of hybrid equity and subordinated debt that can be converted into equity without disrupting the financial system.

But Tucker argues that there is a bigger question of strategy that must be addressed; that is

“whether to place the regime’s weight on regulatory requirements that impose intrinsic resilience on bank balance sheets or on credible crisis management that delivers safety ex post. It is a choice with very different implications for transparency.”
BIS WP 790; Page 11

Two alternative strategies for achieving a target state of financial system resilience

Strategy 1: Crisis prevention (or mitigation at least)

The first strategy is essentially an extension of what we have already been doing for some time; a combination of capital and liquidity requirements that limits the risk of financial crisis to some pre-determined acceptable level.

“… authorities set a regulatory minimum they think will be adequate in most circumstances and supervise intermediaries to check whether they are exposed to outsized risks.
BIS WP 790, Page 11

Capital and liquidity requirements were increased under Basel III but there was nothing fundamentally new in this part of the Basel III package. Tucker argues that the standard of resilience adopted should be explicit rather than implicit but he still doubts that this strategy is robust. His primary concern seems to be the risk that the standard of resilience is gradually diluted by a series of small concessions that only the technocrats understand.

“How did we know that firms are really satisfying the standard: is it enough that they say so? And how do we know that the authorities themselves have not quietly diluted or abandoned the standard?”
BIS WP 790; Page 11

Tucker has ideas for how this risk of regulatory capture might be controlled:

 each year central bank staff (not policymakers) should publish a complete statement of all relaxations and tightenings of regulatory and supervisory policy (including in stress testing models, rules, idiosyncratic requirements, and so on)
 the integrity of such assessments should be subject to external audit of some kind (possibly by the central auditor for the state).
BIS WP 790, Page 12

… but this is still a second best approach in his assessment; he argues that we can do better and the idea of making certain assets “informationally insensitive” is the organising principle driving the alternative strategies he lays out.

Strategy 2: Making assets informationally insensitive via crisis-management regimes

Tucker identifies two approaches to crisis management both based around the objective of ensuring that the value of certain agreed liabilities, issued by a defined and pre-determined set of financial intermediaries, is insensitive to information about the financial condition of these intermediaries:

Strategy 2a: Integrate LOLR with liquidity policy.

Central bankers, as the suppliers of emergency liquidity assistance, could make short term liabilities informationally insensitive by requiring banks to hold reserves or eligible collateral against all runnable liabilities. Banks would be required to cover “x”% of short term liabilities with reserves and/or eligible collateral. The key policy choices then become

The definition of which short term liabilities drive the liquidity requirement;
The instruments that would be eligible collateral for liquidity assistance; and
The level of haircuts set by central banks against eligible collateral

What Tucker is outlining here is a variation on a proposal that Mervyn King set out in his book “The End of Alchemy” which I covered in a previous post. These haircuts operate broadly analogously to the existing risk-weighted equity requirements. Given the focus on emergency requirements, they would be based on stress testing and incorporate systemic risk surcharges.

Tucker is not however completely convinced by this approach:

“… a policy of completely covering short-term labilities with central bank-eligible assets would leave uninsured short-term liabilities safe only when a bank was sound. They would not be safe when a bank was fundamentally unsound.
That is because central banks should not (and in many jurisdictions cannot legally) lend to banks that have negative net assets (since LOLR assistance would allow some short-term creditors to escape whole at the expense of equally ranked longer-term creditors). This is the MCC’s financial-stability counterpart to the “no monetary financing” precept for price stability.
Since only insured-deposit liabilities, not covered but uninsured liabilities, are then safe ex post, uninsured liability holders have incentives to run before the shutters come down, making their claims information sensitive after all.
More generally, the lower E, the more frequently banks will fail when the central bank is, perforce, on the sidelines. This would appear to take us back, then, to the regulation and supervision of capital adequacy, but in a way that helps to keep our minds on delivering safety ex post and so information insensitivity ex ante.”
BIS WP 790, Page 14

Strategy 2b: Resolution policy – Making operational liabilities informationally insensitive via structure

Tucker argues that the objective of resolution policy can be interpreted as making the operational liabilities of banks, dealers and other intermediaries “informationally insensitive”. He defines “operational liabilities” as “… those liabilities that are intrinsically bound to the provision of a service (eg large deposit balances, derivative transactions) or the receipt of a service (eg trade creditors) rather than liabilities that reflect a purely risk-based financial investment by the creditor and a source of funding/leverage for the bank or dealer”

Tucker proposes that this separation of operational liabilities from purely financial liabilities can be “… made feasible through a combination of bail-in powers for the authorities and, crucially, restructuring large and complex financial groups to have pure holding companies that issue the bonds to be bailed-in” (emphasis added).

Tucker sets out his argument for structural subordination as follows.

“…provided that the ailing operating companies (opcos) can be recapitalised through a conversion of debt issued to holdco …., the opcos never default and so do not go into a bankruptcy or resolution process. While there might be run once the cause of the distress is revealed, the central bank can lend to the recapitalised opco …
This turns on creditors and counterparties of opcos caring only about the sufficiency of the bonds issued to the holdco; they do not especially care about any subsequent resolution of the holding company. That is not achieved, however, where the bonds to be bailed in … are not structurally subordinated. In that respect, some major jurisdictions seem to have fallen short:
 Many European countries have opted not to adopt structural subordination, but instead have gone for statutory subordination (eg Germany) or contractual subordination (eg France).
 In consequence, a failing opco will go into resolution
 This entails uncertainty for opco liability holders given the risk of legal challenge etc
 Therefore, opco liabilities under those regimes will not be as informationally insensitive as would have been possible.
BIS WP 790, Page 15

While structural subordination is Tucker’s preferred approach, his main point is that the solution adopted should render operational liabilities informationally insensitive:

“….the choice between structural, statutory and contractual subordination should be seen not narrowly in terms of simply being able to write down and/or convert deeply subordinated debt into equity, but rather more broadly in terms of rendering the liabilities of operating intermediaries informationally insensitive. The information that investors and creditors need is not the minutiae of the banking business but the corporate finance structure that enables resolution without opcos formally defaulting or going into a resolution process themselves
BIS WP 790 , Pages 15-16

If jurisdictions choose to stick with contractual or statutory subordination, Tucker proposes that they need to pay close attention to the creditor hierarchy, especially where the resolution process is constrained by the requirement that no creditor should be worse off than would have been the case in bankruptcy. Any areas of ambiguity should be clarified ex ante and, if necessary, the granularity of the creditor hierarchy expanded to ensure that the treatment of creditors in resolution is what is fair, expected and intended.

Tucker sums up the policy implications of this part of his paper as follows ...

“The policy conclusion of this part of the discussion, then, is that in order to deliver information insensitivity for some of the liabilities of operating banks and dealers, policymakers should:
a) move towards requiring that all short-term liabilities be covered by assets eligible at the central bank; and, given that that alone cannot banish bankruptcy,
b) be more prescriptive about corporate structures and creditor hierarchies since they matter hugely in bankruptcy and resolution.”
BIS WP 790, Page 16

Summing up …

Tucker positions his paper as “… a plea to policymakers to work with researchers to re-examine whether enough has been done to make the financial system resilient“.
His position is that “… the financial system is much more resilient than before the crisis but … less resilient than claimed by policymakers”
Tucker’s assessment “… is partly due to shifts in the macroeconomic environment” which reduce the capacity of monetary and fiscal policy stimulus but also an in principle view that “maintaining a resilient system cannot sanely rely on crushing the probability of distress via prophylactic regulation and supervision: a strategy that confronts the Gods in its technocratic arrogance“.
Tucker argues that the desired degree of resilience is more likely to be found in a combination of “… low barriers to entry, credible resolution regimes and crisis management tools …[that] … ensure the system can keep going through distress”.
Tucker also advocates putting the central insights of some theoretical work on “informational insensitivity” to practical use in the following way:
- move towards requiring all banking-type intermediaries to cover all short-term liabilities with assets eligible for discount at the Window
- insist upon structural subordination of bailinable bonds so that the liabilities of operating subsidiaries are more nearly informationally insensitive
- be more prescriptive about the permitted creditor hierarchy of operating intermediaries
- establish frameworks for overseeing and regulating collateralised money market, with more active use made of setting minimum haircut requirements to ensure that widely used money market instruments are safe in nearly all circumstancesarticulating restrictive principles for market-maker of last resort operations
Given the massive costs (economic, social, cultural) associated with financial crises, err on the side of maintaining resilience
To the extent that financial resilience continues to rely on the regulation and supervision of capital adequacy, ensure transparency regarding the target level of resilience and the extent to which discretionary policy actions impact that level of resilience

I am deeply touched if you actually read this far. The topic of crisis management and resolution capability is irredeemably technical but also important to get right.

Tony