Are banks a special kind of company (or at least different)?

This is a big topic, and somewhat irredeemably technical, but I have come to believe that there are some unique features of banks that make them quite different from other companies. Notwithstanding the technical challenges, I think it is important to understand these distinguishing features if we are to have a sensible debate about the optimum financing structure for a bank and the kinds of returns that shareholders should expect on the capital they contribute to that structure.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Australian debate about optimum capital has been resolved by the “unquestionably strong” benchmark that APRA has set and which all of the major banks have committed to meet. However, agreeing what kind of return is acceptable on unquestionably strong capital remains contentious and we have only just begun to consider how the introduction of a Total Loss Absorbing Capital (TLAC) requirement will impact these considerations.

The three distinctive features of banks I want to explore are:

  • The way in which net new lending by banks can create new bank deposits which in turn are treated as a form of money in the financial system (i.e. one of the unique things banks do is create a form of money);
  • The reality that a large bank cannot be allowed to fail in the conventional way (i.e. bankruptcy followed by reorganisation or liquidation) that other companies and even countries can (and frequently do); and
  • The extent to which bank losses seem to follow a power law distribution and what this means for measuring the expected loss of a bank across the credit cycle.

It should be noted at the outset that Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig (who are frequently cited as authorities on the issues of bank capital discussed in this post) disagree with most if not all of the arguments I intend to lay out. So, if they are right, then I am wrong. Consequently, I intend to first lay out my understanding of why they disagree and hopefully address the objections they raise. They have published a number of papers and a book on the topic but I will refer to one titled “The Parade of the Bankers’ New Clothes Continues: 31 Flawed Claims Debunked” as the primary source of the counter arguments that I will be attempting to rebut. They are of course Professors whereas I bring a lowly masters degree and some practical experience to the debate. Each reader will need to decide for themselves which analysis and arguments they find more compelling.

Given the size of the topic and the technical nature of the issues, I also propose to approach this over a series of posts starting with the relationship between bank lending and deposit creation. Subsequent posts will build on this foundation and consider the other distinctive features I have identified before drawing all of the pieces together by exploring some practical implications.

Do banks create “money”? If so, how does that impact the economics of bank funding?

The Bank of England (BoE) released a good paper on the first part of this question titled “Money creation in the modern economy” .  The BoE paper does require some banking knowledge but I think demonstrates reasonably clearly that the majority of bank deposits are created by the act of a bank making a new loan, while the repayment of bank loans conversely reduces the pool of deposits. The related but more important question for the purposes of this discussion is whether you believe that bank deposits are a form of money.

Admati and Hellwig identify the argument that “banks are special because they create money” as Flawed Claim #5 on the grounds that treating deposits as money is an abuse of the word “money”. They are not disputing the fact that monetary economists combine cash with demand deposits in one of the definitions of money. As I understand it, the essence of their argument is that deposits are still a debt of the issuing bank while “real” money does not need to be repaid to anyone.

It is true that deposits are a bank debt and that some deposits are repayable on demand. However, I believe the bigger issues bearing on the economics of bank financing stem from the arguments Admati and Hellwig advance to debunk what they label as Flawed Claim #4 that “The key insights from corporate finance about the economics of funding, including those of Modigliani and Miller, are not relevant for banks because banks are different from other companies“.

Their argument appears to focus on using Modigliani and Miller (“M&M”) as an “analytical approach” in which the cost (contractual or expected) of the various forms of financing are connected by a universal law of risk and reward. Their argument is that this universal law (analogous to the fundamental laws of physics) demands that using more or less equity (relative to debt) must translate to a lower or higher risk of insolvency and that rational debt investors will respond by adjusting the risk premium they demand.

I have no issue with the analytical approach or the premise that funding costs should be related to risk. What happens however when one of the primary forms of debt funding is largely protected from the risk of insolvency? In the case of the major Australian banks, deposits account for over half of a bank’s total funding but are largely isolated from the risk of insolvency by a number of features. One is the Banking Act that confers a preferred claim in favour of Australian depositors over the Australian assets of the bank. The other is government guaranteed deposit insurance coverage capped at $250,000 per person per bank. The rationale for these acts of apparent government generosity is a contentious subject in itself but, for the purposes of this post, my working hypothesis is that the preferred claim and deposit insurance are a consequence of the fact that the community treats bank demand deposits as a form of money.

Consequently, the risk that an Australian depositor will face a loss of principal in the already remote event of insolvency is arguably de minimis and the way that demand deposits are priced and the way they are used as a substitute for cash reflects this risk analysis. There remains a related, though separate, risk that a bank may face a liquidity problem but depositors (to the extent they even think about this) will assume that central bank Lender of Last Resort liquidity support covers this.

Admati and Hellwig do not, to the best of my knowledge, consider the implications of these features of bank funding. In their defence, I don’t imagine that the Australian banking system was front of mind when they wrote their papers but depositor preference and deposit insurance are not unique Australian innovations. However, once you consider these factors, the conclusion I draw is that the cost of a substantial share of a bank’s debt financing is relatively (if not completely) insensitive to changes in the amount of equity the bank employs in its financing structure.

One consequence is that the higher levels of common equity that Australian banks employ now, compared to the position prior to the GFC, has not resulted in any decline in the cost of deposit funding in the way that M&M say that it should. In fact, the more conservative funding and liquidity requirements introduced under Basel III have required all banks to compete more aggressively for the forms of deposit funding that are deemed by the prudential requirements to be most stable thereby driving up the cost.

The point here is not whether these changes were desirable or not (for the record I have no fundamental issue with the Unquestionably Strong capital benchmark nor with more conservative funding and liquidity requirements). The point is that the cost of deposit funding, in Australian banking at least, has not declined in the way that Admati and Hellwig’s analytical approach and universal law demands that it should.

Summing up, it is possible that other forms of funding have declined in cost as Admati and Hellwig claim should happen, but there is both an analytical rationale and hard evidence that this does not appear to be the case, for Australian bank deposits at least.

The next post will consider the other main (non equity) components of a bank funding structure and explore how their risk/cost has evolved in response both to the lessons that investors and rating agencies took away from the GFC and to the changes in bank regulation introduced by Basel III. A subsequent post will review issues associated with measuring the Expected Loss and hence the true “Through the Cycle” profitability of a bank before I attempt to bring all of the pieces together.

There is a lot of ground to cover yet. At this stage, I have simply attempted to lay out a case for why the cost of bank deposits in Australia has not obeyed the universal analytical law posited by Admati and Hellwig as the logical consequence of a bank holding more equity in its financing structure but if you disagree tell me what I am missing …

Tony

Post script: The arguments I have laid out above could be paraphrased as “banks deposits differ from other kinds of debt because banks themselves create deposits by lending” which Admati and Hellwig specifically enumerate as Flawed Claim #6. I don’t think their rebuttal of this argument adds much to what is discussed above but for the sake of completeness I have copied below the relevant extract from their paper where they set out why they believe this specific claim is flawed. Read on if you want more detail or have a particular interest in this topic but I think the main elements of the debate are already covered above. If you think there is something here that is not covered above then let me know.

Flawed Claim 6: Bank deposits differ from other kinds of debt because banks create deposits by lending.

What is wrong with this claim? This claim is often made in opposition to a “loanable funds” view of banks as intermediaries that collect deposits in order to fund their loans. Moreover, this “money creation through lending” is said to be the way money from the central bank gets into the economy.19 The claim rests on a confusion between stocks and flows. Indeed, if a commercial bank makes a loan to a nonfinancial firm or to a private household it provides its borrowers with a claim on a deposit account. Whereas this fact provides a link between the flow of new lending and the flow of new deposits, it is hardly relevant for the bank’s funding policy, which concerns the stocks of different kinds of debt and equity that it has outstanding, which must cover the stocks of claims on borrowers and other assets that the bank holds.

A nonfinancial firm or household that receives a loan from a bank will typically use the associated claim on a deposit account for payments to third parties. The recipients of these payments may want to put some of the money they get into deposits, but they may instead prefer to move the money out of the banking system altogether, e.g., to a money market fund or a stock investment fund. 20

From the perspective of the individual bank, the fact that lending goes along with deposit creation does not change the fact that the bank owes its depositors the full amount they deposited. The key difference between deposits and other kinds of debt is not that deposits are “like money” or that deposits may be created by lending, but rather that the bank provides depositors with services such as payments through checks and credit cards or ATM machines that make funds available continuously. The demand for deposits depends on these services, as well as the interest that the bank may offer, and it may also depend on the risk of the bank becoming insolvent or defaulting.21

The suggestion that bank lending is the only source of deposit creation is plainly false.22 Deposits are created when people bring cash to the bank, and they are destroyed when people withdraw cash. In this case, the reduction in deposits – like any reduction in funding – goes along with a reduction in the bank’s assets, i.e., a shortening of its balance sheet, but this reduction affects the bank’s cash reserves rather than its lending. The impact of such withdrawals on banks and entire banking systems are well known from the Great Depression or from the recent experience of Greece. In Greece in the spring and summer of 2015, depositors also were worried about the prospect that in the event of the country’s exit from the euro, their denomination of their deposits would be changed, whereas a stack of bills under a matrass would not be affected.

APRA’s proposed revisions to capital requirements for residential mortgages

… there is a lot to like in what APRA have proposed but also some issues that would benefit from further thought

Many readers will be aware that APRA released a Discussion Paper (DP) last week titled “Revisions to the capital framework for authorised deposit-taking institutions”.   The paper sets out APRA’s proposed changes to ADI capital requirements defined by the Internal Ratings Based Approach (IRB) and Standardised Approach to Credit Risk, Interest Rate Risk in the Banking Book (IRRBB) and Operational Risk. The focus of this post will be the proposals impacting credit risk capital requirements for residential mortgage lending. This post presupposes that the reader is familiar with the detail of what APRA has proposed. For those of you who have not yet got around to reading the whole paper I have added a short summary of the proposals below (see “APRA’s proposals – in more detail”).

My gut reaction is that there is a lot to like in what APRA have proposed but there are also issues that deserve further consideration in order to address the risk of unintended consequence and to better deliver on the objectives of consistency, transparency and competitive neutrality.

Proposals which make sense to me:

  • The increased risk sensitivity of the proposed standardised RWs for residential mortgages is, I believe, a material enhancement of the capital adequacy framework
  • There are arguments (and indeed evidence) for why investor property loans can be as low risk as owner occupier loans (most of the  time) but APRA’s desire to address the systemic tail risk of this form of lending is I think an understandable policy objective for a prudential regulator to pursue
  • Continuing to pursue higher IRB RW via changes to the correlation factor also looks to be a better approach than the 20% floor on LGD currently applied and thankfully also up for revision
  • Applying a higher correlation factor to low PD loans also makes intuitive sense, especially if your primary concern is the systemic risk associated with the residential mortgage lending that dominates the balance sheets of your banking system
  • In addition, the potential for the correlation adjustment to reduce the sensitivity of residential mortgage RWA to the economic cycle (and hence reduce the risk of pro-cyclical stress on capital ratios) is particularly welcome though I believe there is much more to do on this general issue
  • The support for Lender’s Mortgage Insurance (LMI) is also welcome

Areas where I believe the proposed revised capital framework could be improved (or at least benefit from some more thought):

  • The discussion of relative standardised and IRB RW does not address the fact IRB banks are required to hold additional capital to cover any shortfall between loan loss provisions and Regulatory Expected Loss (REL)
  • Residential mortgage portfolios subject to the standardised approach should be subject to a minimum average RW in the same way that IRB portfolios are currently constrained by the 25% floor
  • Applying a fixed scalar to Credit RWA can be problematic as the composition of the loan portfolio continues to evolve

The discussion of comparative IRB and Standardised RW you typically encounter seems to assume that the two approaches are identical in every aspect bar the RW but people working at the coal face know that the nominal RW advantage the IRB banks have has been partly offset by a higher exposure measure the RW are applied to. It appears that APRA’s proposed revisions will partly address this inconsistency by requiring banks using the Standardised Approach to apply a 100% Credit Conversion Factor (CCF) to undrawn loan limits.  IRB banks are also required to take a Common Equity Tier 1 deductions for the shortfall between their loan loss provisions and REL. The proposed revisions do nothing to address this area of inconsistency and in fact the Discussion Paper does not even acknowledge the issue.

Residential mortgage portfolios subject to the standardised approach should be subject to a minimum average RW in the same way that IRB portfolios are constrained. The majority of new residential mortgages are originated at relatively high LVR (most at 70% plus and a significant share at 80% plus), but the average LVR will be much lower as principal is repaid (and even more so if you allow for the appreciation of property values).  The introduction of a 20% RW bucket for standardised banks poses the question whether these banks will have an advantage in targeting the refinancing of seasoned loans with low LVR’s. The IRB banks would seek to retain these customers but they will still be constrained by the 25% average RW mandated by the FSI while the standardised banks face no comparable constraint.

This is unlikely to be an issue in the short term but one of the enduring lessons learned during my time “on the inside” is that banks (not just the big ones) are very good at identifying arbitrages and responding to incentives. It is widely recognised that housing loans have become the largest asset on Australian bank balance sheets (The Royal Commission issued a background paper that cited 42% of assets as at September 2017) but the share was significantly less when I started in banking. There has been a collection of complex drivers at play here (a topic for another post) but the relatively low RW has not harmed the growth of this kind of lending. Consequently, it is dangerous to assume that the status quo will persist if incentives exist to drive a different outcome.

This competitive imbalance could be addressed quite simply if the standardised banks were also subject to a requirement that their average RW was also no lower than 25% (or some alternative floor ratio that adjusted for the differences in exposure and REL noted above).

Another lesson learned “on the inside” is that fixed scalars look simple but are often not. They work fine when the portfolio of assets they are scaling up is stable but will gradually generate a different outcome to what was intended as the composition of the loan book evolves over time. I don’t have an easy solution to this problem but, if you must use them, it helps to recognise the potential for unintended consequence at the start.

Read on below if you have not read the Discussion Paper or want more detail on the revisions APRA has proposed and how these changes are proposed to be reconciled with the FSI recommendation. This is my first real post so feedback would be much appreciated.

Above all, tell me what I am missing … 

Tony

Note: The original version of this post published 22 February 2018 stated that inconsistent measurement of the exposures at default between the standardised and IRB approaches  was not addressed by APRA’s proposed revisions. I believe now that the proposed application of a 100% CCF in the Standardised Approach would in fact address one of the areas of inconsistency. The treatment of Regulatory Expected Loss remains an issue however. The post was revised on 24 February to clarify these points.

APRA’s proposals – in more detail

Good quality loans fully secured by mortgages on occupied residential property (either rented or occupied by the borrower) have been assigned concessionary risk weights (RW) ever since risk weighted capital adequacy ratios were introduced under Basel I (1988). The most concessionary risk weight was initially set at 50% and reduced to 35% in the Basel II Standardised Approach (2006).

APRA currently applies the concessionary 35% RW to standard eligible mortgages with Loan Valuation Ratios (LVR) of 80% or better (or up to 90% LVR if covered by Lender’s Mortgage Insurance) while the best case scenario for a non-standard mortgage is a 50% RW. Progressively higher RW (50/75/100) are applied for higher risk residential mortgages.

Under the Standardised Approach, APRA proposes:

  • The classification of a Standard Eligible Mortgage will distinguish between lowest risk “Owner-occupied P&I” and a higher risk “Other residential mortgages” category which is intended to be conceptually similar to the “material dependence” concept employed by Basel III to distinguish loans where repayment depends materially on the cash flows generated by the property securing the loan
  • 6 RW bands for each of these two types of residential mortgage (compared to 5 bands currently)
  • Standard Eligible Mortgages with lower LVR loans to be assigned lower RW but these loans must also meet defined serviceability, marketability and valuation criteria to qualify for the concessionary RW
  • The higher RW applied to “Other residential mortgages” may take the form of a fixed risk-weight schedule (per the indicative RW in Table 3 of the Discussion Paper) but might also be implemented via a multiplier, applied to the RW for owner-occupied P&I loans, which might vary over time “… depending on prevailing prudential or financial stability objectives or concerns”
  • Relatively lower capital requirements to continue to apply where loans are covered by LMI but its preferred approach is to apply a RW loading to loans with LVR in excess of 80% that are not insured (i.e. the indicative RW in Table 3 assume that LMI covers the high LVR loans)
  • Non-Standard residential mortgages should no longer benefit from any RW concession and be assigned a flat 100% RW irrespective of LVR and LMI

While the IRB requirements impacting residential mortgages are largely unchanged under Basel III, APRA proposes the following changes to the Australian IRB Approach to reflect local requirements and conditions:

  • Increased capital requirements for investment and interest-only exposures; to be implemented via a higher correlation factor for these loans
  • The (currently fixed) correlation factor applied to residential mortgages to be amended to depend on probability of default (PD); reflecting empirical evidence that “… the default risk of lower PD exposures is more dependent on the economic cycle  and can consequently increase at a relatively higher rate in a downturn”
  • A reduction in the minimum Loss Given Default (LGD) from 20% to 10% (subject to APRA approval of the LGD model); in order to facilitate “… better alignment of LGD estimates to key drivers of loss such as LVR and LMI”
  • Capital requirements for non-standard mortgages use the standardised approach; increasing consistency between the IRB an standardised approaches

APRA’s proposals seek to strike a balance between risk sensitivity and simplicity but must also take account of the FSI recommendations that ADI capital levels be unquestionably strong while also narrowing the difference between standardised and IRB RWs for residential mortgages. APRA is undertaking a Quantitative Impact Study (QIS) to better understand the impact of its proposals but the DP flagged that APRA does not expect the changes to correlation factors to meet its objectives for increased capital for residential mortgage exposures.

APRA could just further ramp up the correlation factor to generate the target IRB RW (which I assume continues to be 25%) but the DP notes that this would create undesirable inconsistencies with the correlation factors applied to other asset classes. Consequently, the DP indicates that the target increase in IRB RWA will likely be pursued via

  • A fixed multiplier (scalar) applied to total Credit RWA (i.e. althoughBasel III removes the 1.06 Credit RWA scalar, APRA is considering retaining a scalar with a value yet to be determined); and
  • If necessary, by applying additional specific RWA scalars for residential (and commercial) property.

These scalars will be subject to consultation with the industry and APRA has committed to review the 10.5% CET1 benchmark for unquestionably strong capital should the net result of the proposed revisions result in an overall increase in RWA’s relative to current methodologies.

Why this blog?

making sense of what I have learned about banks with a focus on bank capital management.

Late in 2017 I decided to take some time out from work (the paid kind to be precise). My banking career has spanned a variety of roles working in a large Australian bank but the unifying theme for much of that time was a focus on bank capital management. This is a surprisingly rich topic (yes honestly) and one that I am not done with yet. Accordingly, I want to devote some of my time out to an attempt to make sense of what I have learned and apply that knowledge to topical banking issues. It was suggested that I write a book but I have opted for a blog format in part because it will hopefully allow for a two way dialogue with like minded bank capital tragics.

An alternative title for this blog was “The education of a banker; a work in progress” which sought to convey the idea that I believe I have learned quite a lot about banking over the past four decades but the plan is to keep learning. Some of the perspectives I offer are to, the best of my knowledge, based on very firm foundations while others are ones which reasonable people can disagree upon or outright speculative. To the best of my ability, all of the views expressed will be “lightly held” in the sense that I am just as interested in identifying reasons why they might be wrong as I am in affirmation.

I settled on “From the Outside” based on an informal survey of a group of like minded people with who I have already devoted many emails and coffee catchups debating the issues I intend to explore.  The title highlights that I bring a perspective forged working inside a bank over many years but now looking at the questions from the outside. Each reader will need decide for themselves whether I achieve a balanced view or have become irredeemably institutionalised. I will seek to correct what I believe to be unfounded criticisms of banks (for the record, I don’t think the current ROE major Australian banks are targeting is excessive) while at the same time there are other areas where I believe Australian banks need to do better (engaging with long time customers in a way that recognises their loyalty would be a great place to start).

The focus of the blog will no doubt evolve over time (and hopefully in response to feedback) but the initial plan is to explore a sequence of big picture themes in parallel with topical issues that arise from time to time. I also plan to share my thoughts on books and papers I have read that I think readers might find worth following up.

The big picture themes will likely encompass questions like the ways in which banks are different from other companies and the implications this has for thinking about questions like their cost of equity, optimal capital structure, risk appetite, risk culture, prudential regulation etc. Topical issues would encompass discussion papers, academic research, opinion pieces, prudential regulation and anything else that intersected with banking, finance and economics.

I am currently working my way through APRA’s Feb 2018 discussion paper on Revisions to the capital framework for ADI’s.  I think there is a lot to like in the proposals APRA has set out but also some gaps and possible unintended consequences that are worth exploring.

… and so it begins

Tony

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