Regulation – Page 6 – From the outside

Climate change – a central banking perspective

A BIS paper titled “Green Swan 2 – Climate change and Covid-19: reflections on efficiency versus resilience” initially caught my attention because of the reference to the tension between efficiency versus resilience. This tension is, for me at least, one of the issues that has tended to be ignored in the pursuit of growth and optimised solutions. The papers mainly deal with the challenges that climate change creates for central banks but I think there are also some insights to be drawn on what it means for bank capital management.

A core argument in the paper is that challenges like climate change and pandemics ….

“… require us to rethink the trade-offs between efficiency and resilience of our socio-economic systems … one way to address this issue is to think about buffers or some necessary degree of redundancy for absorbing such large shocks. Countries build FX reserves, banks maintain capital buffers as required by regulators, and so on. Perhaps similar “buffers” could be used in other areas of our societies. For example, could it be time to reassess our production systems, which are meant to be lean and less costly for maximum efficiency?”

The paper draws on a (much longer and more technical) BIS research paper titled “The green swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change”. Both papers contain the usual caveat that the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of their respective institutions. With that warning noted, this post draws on both papers to make some observations about what the papers say, and what this means for bank capital management.

There is a lot of content in the combined papers but the points that resonated the most with me were

Climate change shares some of the features of a Black Swan event but is better thought of a distinct type of risk which the authors label a “Green Swan”.
Green swan problems are created in part by choices we have made regarding the value of efficiency over resilience – part of the solution lies in rethinking these choices but this will not be easy.
Climate change is a “collective action” problem which cannot be addressed by individual actors (including banks) operating independently – market based solutions like a carbon price may also be insufficient to bring about a solution that does not involve an unacceptable level of financial disruption.
Scenario analysis (including stress testing) appears to be one of the better tools for dealing with climate change and similar types of risk – but it needs to be used differently (by both the supervised and the supervisors) from the way it is applied to conventional risks.

I am not an expert on climate change modelling, but Chapter 3 of the second paper also has what looks to be a useful overview of the models used to analyse climate change and how the outputs of these models are used to generate economic impacts.

Black, white and green swans

Climate change clearly operates in the domain of radical uncertainty. As such it shares some common elements with “black swan” events; in particular the fact that conventional risk models and analysis are not well suited to measuring and managing the potential adverse impacts. It is equally important however to understand the ways in which climate change differs from a classic black swan event. There is a longer list but the ones that I found most relevant were:

Predictability – Black Swans are, by definition, not predictable whereas the potential for adverse Climate Change outcomes is well understood even if not universally accepted. The point is that understanding the potential for adverse impact means we have a choice about what to do about it.
Impact – Black Swan events can have substantial impacts but the system can recover (e.g. the GFC has left a lasting impact but economic activity did recover once the losses were absorbed). The impacts of climate change, in contrast, may be irreversible and have the potential to result in people dying in large numbers.

Given the conceptual differences, the authors classify Climate Change as a distinct form which they label a “Green Swan”. To the best of my knowledge, this may be the first time the term has been used in this way. That said, the general point they are making seems to be quite similar to what other authors have labelled as “Grey Rhinos” or “Black Elephants” (the latter an obvious allusion to the “elephant in the room”, a large risk that is visible to everyone but no one wants to address).

A typology of swans

Categorising climate risk

The papers distinguish two main channels through which climate change can affect financial stability – physical risks and transition risks.

Physical risks are defined as

… “those risks that arise from the interaction of climate-related hazards […] with the vulnerability of exposure to human and natural systems” (Batten et al (2016)). They represent the economic costs and financial losses due to increasing frequency and severity of climate-related weather events (eg storms, floods or heat waves) and the effects of long-term changes in climate patterns (eg ocean acidification, rising sea levels or changes in precipitation). The losses incurred by firms across different financial portfolios (eg loans, equities, bonds) can make them more fragile.

Transition risks are defined as those

“… associated with the uncertain financial impacts that could result from a rapid low-carbon transition, including policy changes, reputational impacts, technological breakthroughs or limitations, and shifts in market preferences and social norms.

A rapid and ambitious transition to lower emissions, for example, would obviously be desirable from the perspective of addressing climate change but might also mean that a large fraction of proven reserves of fossil fuel cannot be extracted, becoming “stranded assets”. The write down of the value of these assets may have potentially systemic consequences for the financial system. This transition might occur in response to policy changes or by virtue of some technological breakthrough (e.g. problem of generating cheap energy by nuclear fusion is solved).

Efficiency versus resilience

I started this post with a quote from the first (shorter) paper regarding the way in which the Covid 19 had drawn attention to the extent to which the pursuit of efficiency had made our economies more fragile. The paper explores the ways in which the COVID 19 pandemic exhibits many of the same features that we see in the climate change problem and how the global response to the COVID 19 pandemic might offer some insights into how we should respond to climate change.

The paper is a useful reminder of the nature of the problem but I am less confident that it offers a solution that will work without some form of regulation or public sector investment in the desired level of redundancy. The paper cites bank capital buffers introduced post GFC as an example of what to do but this was a regulated outcome that would most likely not be acceptable for non-financial companies in countries that remain committed to free market ideology.

The Economist published an article on this question that offered numerous examples of similar problems that illustrate the propensity of “humanity, at least as represented by the world’s governments … to ignore them until forced to react” .

Thomas Friedman’s article (“How we broke the world”) is also worth reading on this question …

If recent weeks have shown us anything, it’s that the world is not just flat. It’s fragile.
And we’re the ones who made it that way with our own hands. Just look around. Over the past 20 years, we’ve been steadily removing man-made and natural buffers, redundancies, regulations and norms that provide resilience and protection when big systems — be they ecological, geopolitical or financial — get stressed. We’ve been recklessly removing these buffers out of an obsession with short-term efficiency and growth, or without thinking at all.
The New York Times, 30 May 2020

Managing collective action problems

The second paper, in particular, argues that it is important to improve our understanding of the costs of climate change and to ensure that these costs are incorporated into the prices that drive the resources we allocate to dealing with the challenge (e.g. via a carbon price or tax). However one of its key conclusions is that relying on markets to solve the problem is unlikely to be sufficient even with the help of some form of carbon price that reflects a more complete account of the costs of our current carbon based economy.

In short, the development and improvement of forward-looking risk assessment and climate- related regulation will be essential, but they will not suffice to preserve financial stability in the age of climate change: the deep uncertainty involved and the need for structural transformation of the global socioeconomic system mean that no single model or scenario can provide sufficient information to private and public decision-makers. A corollary is that the integration of climate-related risks into prudential regulation and (to the extent possible) into monetary policy would not suffice to trigger a shift capable of hedging the whole system again against green swan events.
The green swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change; Chapter 5 (page 66)

Using scenario based methodologies to assess climate related risks

Both papers highlight the limitations of trying to measure and understand climate change using conventional probability based risk management tools. The one area they do see as worth pursuing is using scenario based approaches. This makes sense to me but it is also important to distinguish this kind of analysis from the standard stress testing used to help calibrate capital buffers.

The standard application of stress testing takes a severe but plausible macro economic scenario such as a severe recession and determines what are the likely impacts on capital adequacy ratios. This offers a disciplined way of deciding how much capital surplus is required to support the risk appetite choices a bank has made in pursuit of its business objectives.

A simplistic application of climate based stress testing scenarios might take the same approach; i.e. work out how much the scenario impacts the capital and ensure that the buffer is sufficient to absorb the impact. That I think is not the right conclusion and my read of the BIS papers is that they are not advocating that either. The value of the scenario based modelling is to first get a handle on the size of the problem and how exposed the bank is to it. A capital response may be required but the answer may also be to change the nature of your exposure to the risk. That may involve reduced risk limits but it may also involve active participation in collective action to address the underlying problem. A capital management response may be part of the solution but it is far from the first step.

Conclusion

I have only scratched the surface of this topic in this post but the two papers it references are worth reading if you are interested in the question of what climate change, and related Green Swan or Black Elephant problems, mean for the banking system and for central banking. There is a bit more technical detail in the appendix below but it is likely only of interest for people working at the sharp end of trying to measure and manage the problem.

I want to dig deeper into the question of how you use stress testing to assess climate change and related types of risk but that is a topic best left for another post.

Tony – From the outside

Appendix – Modelling the impacts of climate change

Section 3 of the longer paper (“Measuring climate-related risks with scenario-based approaches”) discusses the limitations of the models that are typically used to generate estimates of the ecological and financial impacts of climate change scenarios. There is plenty of material there for climate sceptics but it also assists true believers to understand the limits of what they can actually know and how coming to terms with the radical uncertainty of how climate change plays out shapes the nature of our response.

I have copied some extracts from the chapter below that will give you a flavour of what it has to say. It is pretty technical so be warned …

“… the standard approach to modelling financial risk consisting in extrapolating historical values (eg PD, market prices) is no longer valid in a world that is fundamentally reshaped by climate change (Weitzman (2011), Kunreuther et al (2013)). In other words, green swan events cannot be captured by traditional risk management.
The current situation can be characterised as an “epistemological obstacle” (Bachelard (1938)). The latter refers to how scientific methods and “intellectual habits that were useful and healthy” under certain circumstances, can progressively become problematic and hamper scientific research. Epistemological obstacles do not refer to the difficulty or complexity inherent to the object studied (eg measuring climate-related risks) but to the difficulty related to the need of redefining the problem”
Page 21

nothing less than an epistemological break (Bachelard, 1938) or a “paradigm shift” (Kuhn (1962)) is needed today to overcome this obstacle and more adequately approach climate-relate risks (Pereira da Silva (2019a)).
In fact, precisely an epistemological break may be taking place in the financial sector: recently emerged methodologies aim to assess climate-related risks while relying on the fundamental hypothesis that, given the lack of historical financial data related to climate change and the deep uncertainty involved, new approaches based on the analysis of prospective scenarios are needed. Unlike probabilistic approaches to financial risk management, they seek to set up plausible hypotheses for the future. This can help financial institutions integrate climate-related risks into their strategic and operational procedures (eg for the purpose of asset allocation, credit rating or insurance underwriting) and financial supervisors assess the vulnerability of specific institutions or the financial system as a whole

Climate-economic models and forward-looking risk analysis are important and can still be improved, but they will not suffice to provide all the information required to hedge against “green swan” events.
As a result of these limitations, two main avenues of action have been proposed. We argue that they should be pursued in parallel rather than in an exclusive manner. First, central banks and supervisors could explore different approaches that can better account for the uncertain and nonlinear features of climate-related risks. Three particular research avenues (see Box 5 below) consist in: (i) working with non- equilibrium models; (ii) conducting sensitivity analyses; and (iii) conducting case studies focusing on specific risks and/or transmission channels. Nevertheless, the descriptive and normative power of these alternative approaches remain limited by the sources of deep and radical uncertainty related to climate change discussed above. That is, the catalytic power of scenario-based analysis, even when grounded in approaches such as non-equilibrium models, will not be sufficient to guide decision-making towards a low-carbon transition.
As a result of this, the second avenue from the perspective of maintaining system stability consists in “going beyond models” and in developing more holistic approaches that can better embrace the deep or radical uncertainty of climate change as well as the need for system-wide action (Aglietta and Espagne (2016), Barmes (2019), Chenet et al (2019a), Ryan-Collins (2019), Svartzman et al (2019)).
Pages 42 – 43

Embracing deep or radical uncertainty therefore calls for a second “epistemological break” to shift from a management of risks approach to one that seeks to assure the resilience of complex adaptive systems in the face of such uncertainty (Fath et al (2015), Schoon and van der Leeuw (2015)).38 In this view, the current efforts aimed at measuring, managing and supervising climate-related risks will only make sense if they take place within a much broader evolution involving coordination with monetary and fiscal authorities, as well as broader societal changes such as a better integration of sustainability into financial and economic decision-making.
Page 48

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)