Tag: Banks are different

The elasticity of credit

One of the arguments for buying Bitcoin is that, in contrast to fiat currencies that are at mercy of the Central Bank money printer, its value is underpinned by the fixed and immutable supply of coins built into the code. Some cryptocurrencies take this a step further by engineering a systematic burning of their coin.

I worry about inflation as much as the next person, perhaps more so since I am old enough to have actually lived in an inflationary time. I think a fixed or shrinking supply is great for an asset class but it is less obvious that it is a desirable feature of a money system.

Crypto true believers have probably stopped reading at this point but to understand why a fixed supply might be problematic I can recommend a short speech by Claudio Borio. The speech dates back to 2018 but I think it continues to offer a useful perspective on the value of an elastic money supply alongside broader comments about the nature of money and its role in the economy.

Borio was at the time the Head of the BIS Monetary and Economic Department but the views expressed were his personal perspective covering points that he believed to be well known and generally accepted, alongside others more speculative and controversial.

I did a post back in March 2019 that offers an overview of the speech but recently encountered a post by J.W. Mason which reminded me how useful and insightful it was.

The specific insight I want to focus on here is the extent to which a well functioning monetary system relies on the capacity of credit extended in the system to expand and contract in response to both short term settlement demands and the longer term demands driven by economic growth.

One of the major challenges with the insight Borio offers is that most of us find the idea that money is really just a highly developed form of debt to be deeply unsatisfying if not outright scary. Borio explicitly highlights “the risk of overestimating the distinction between credit (debt) and money” arguing that “…we can think of money as an especially trustworthy type of debt”

Put differently, we can think of money as an especially trustworthy type of debt. In the case of bank deposits, trust is supported by central bank liquidity, including as lender of last resort, by the regulatory and supervisory framework and varieties of deposit insurance; in that of central bank reserves and cash, by the sovereign’s power to tax; and in both cases, by legal arrangements, way beyond legal tender laws, and enshrined in market practice.

Borio: Page 9

I did a post here that explains in more detail an Australian perspective on the process by which unsecured loans to highly leveraged companies (aka “bank deposits”) are transformed into (mostly) risk free assets that represent the bulk of what we use as money.

Borio outlines how the central banks’ elastic supply of the means of payment is essential to ensure that (i) transactions are settled in the interbank market and (ii) the interest rate is controlled …

“To smooth out interbank settlement, the provision of central bank credit is key. The need for an elastic supply to settle transactions is most visible in the huge amounts of intraday credit central banks supply to support real-time gross settlement systems – a key way of managing risks in those systems (Borio (1995)).”

Borio: Page 5

… but also recognises the problem with too much elasticity

While the elasticity of money creation oils the wheels of the payment system on a day to day basis, it can be problematic over long run scenarios where too much elasticity can lead to financial instability. Some degree of elasticity is important to keep the wheels of the economy turning but too much can be a problem because the marginal credit growth starts to be used for less productive or outright speculative investment.

This is a big topic which means there is a risk that I am missing something. That said, the value of an elastic supply of credit looks to me like a key insight to understanding how a well functioning monetary system should be designed.

The speech covers a lot more ground than this and is well worth reading together with the post by J.W. Mason I referenced above which steps through the insights. Don’t just take my word for it, Mason introduces his assessment with the statement that he was “…not sure when I last saw such a high density of insight-per-word in a discussion of money and finance, let alone in a speech by a central banker”.

Tony – From the Outside

Stablecoin regulation

The question of whether, or alternatively how, stablecoins should be regulated is getting a lot of attention at the moment. My bias (and yes maybe I am just too institutionalised after four decades in banking) is that regulation is probably desirable for anything that functions as a form of money. We can also observe that some stablecoin issuers seem to be engaging pro actively with the question of how best to do this. There is of course a much wider debate about the regulation of digital assets but this post will confine itself to the questions associated with the rise of a new generation of money like digital instruments which are collectively referred to as stablecoins.

My last post linked to a useful summary that Bennett Tomlin published laying out what is currently playing out in the USA on the stablecoin regulation front. Tomlin concluded that the future of stablecoins appeared to lie in some form of bank like regulation. J.P. Koning has also collated a nice summary of the range of regulatory strategies adopted by stablecoin issuers to date.

Dan Awrey proposes another model for stablecoin regulation

Against that background, a paper titled “Bad Money” by Dan Awrey (Law Professor at Cornell Law School) offers another perspective. One of the chief virtues of his paper (refer Section III.B) is that it offers a comprehensive overview of the existing state regulatory framework that governs the operation of many of the stablecoins operating as “Money Service Businesses” (MSB). The way forward is up for debate but I think that Awrey offers a convincing case for why the state based regulatory model is not part of the solution.

This survey of state MSB laws paints a bleak picture. MSBs do not benefit from the robust prudential regulation, deposit guarantee schemes, lender of last resort facilities, or special resolution regimes enjoyed by conventional deposit-taking banks. Nor are they subject to the same type of tight investment restrictions or favorable regulatory or accounting treatment as MMFs. Most importantly, the regulatory frameworks to which these institutions actually are subject are extremely heterogeneous and often fail to provide customers with a fundamentally credible promise to hold, transfer, or return customer funds on demand.

Awrey, Dan, Bad Money (February 5, 202o). 106.1 Cornell Law Review 1 (2020); Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No 20-38
Awrey also rejects the banking regulation model …

… PayPal, Libra, and the new breed of aspiring monetary institutions simply do not look like banks. MSBs are essentially financial intermediaries: aggregating funds from their customers and then using these funds to make investments. They do not “create” money in the same way that banks do when they extend loans to their customers; nor is there compelling evidence to suggest that their portfolios are concentrated in the type of longer term, risky, and illiquid loans that have historically been the staple of conventional deposit-taking banks

… and looks to Money Market Funds (MMFs) as the right starting point for a MSB regulatory framework that could encompass stablecoins

So what existing financial institutions, if any, do these new monetary institutions actually resemble? The answer is MMFs. While MSBs technically do not qualify as MMFs, they nevertheless share a number of important institutional and functional similarities. As a preliminary matter, both MSBs and MMFs issue monetary liabilities: accepting funds from customers in exchange for a contractual promise to return these funds at a fixed value on demand. Both MSBs and MMFs then use the proceeds raised through the issuance of these monetary liabilities to invest in a range of financial instruments. This combination of monetary and intermediation functions exposes MSBs and MMFs to the same fundamental risk: that any material decrease in the market value of their investment portfolios will expose them to potential liquidity problems, that these liquidity problems will escalate into more fundamental bank-ruptcy problems, and that—faced with bankruptcy—they will be unable to honor their contractual commitments. Finally, in terms of mitigating this risk, neither MSBs nor MMFs have ex ante access to the lender of last resort facilities, deposit guarantee schemes, or special resolution regimes available to conventional deposit-taking banks.

In theory, therefore, the regulatory framework that currently governs MMFs might provide us with some useful insights into how better regulation can transform the monetary liabilities of MSBs into good money.

Awrey’s preferred model is to restructure the OCC to create three distinct categories of financial institution …

The first category would remain conventional deposit-taking banks. The second category—let’s call them monetary institutions—would include firms such as PayPal that issued monetary liabilities but did not otherwise “create” money and were prohibited from investing in longer-term, risky, or illiquid loans or other financial instruments. Conversely, the third category—lending institutions—would be permitted to make loans and invest in risky financial instruments but expressly prohibited from financing these investments through the issuance of monetary liabilities

Stablecoins would fall under the second category (Monetary Institutions) in his proposed tripartite licensing regime and the regulations to be applied to them would be based on the regulatory model currently applied to Money Market Funds (MMF).

Awrey, Dan, Bad Money (February 5, 2020). 106.1 Cornell Law Review 1 (2020); Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No 20-38
What does Awrey’s paper contribute to the stablecoin regulation debate?
  • Awrey frames the case for stablecoin regulation around the experience of the Free Banking Era
  • This is not new in itself (see Gorton for example) but, rather than framing this as a lawless Wild West which is the conventional narrative, Awrey highlights the fact that these so called “free banks” were in fact subject to State government regulations
  • The problem with the Free Banking model, in his analysis, is that differences in the State based regulations created differences in the credit worthiness of the bank notes issued under the different approaches which impacted the value of the notes (this is not the only factor but it is the most relevant one for the purposes of the lessons to be applied to stablecoin regulation)

Finally, the value of bank notes depended on the strength of the regulatory frameworks that governed note issuing banks. Notes issued by banks in New York, or that were members of the Suffolk Banking system, for example, tended to change hands closer to face value than those of banks located in states where the regulatory regimes offered noteholders lower levels of protection against issuer default. Even amongst free banking states, the value of bank notes could differ on the basis of subtle but important differences between the relevant requirements to post government bonds as security against the issuance of notes bank notes.

  • If we want stablecoins to reliably exchange at par value to their underlying fiat currency then he argues we need a national system of regulation applying robust and consistent requirements to all issuers of stablecoin arrangements
  • Awrey then discusses the ways in which regulation currently “enhances the credibility of the monetary liabilities issued by banks and MMFs to set up a discussion of how the credibility of the monetary promises of the new breed of monetary institutions might similarly be enhanced
  • He proposes that the OCC be made accountable for regulating these “monetary institutions” (a term that includes other payment service providers like PayPal) but that the regulations be based on those applied to MMFs other than simply bringing them under the OCC’s existing banking regulations
  • The paper is long (90 pages including appendices) but hopefully the summary above captures the essence of it – for me the key takeaways were to:
    • Firstly to understand the problems with the existing state based MSB regulations that currently seem to be the default regulatory arrangement for a US based stablecoin issuer
    • Secondly the issues he raises (legitimate I think) with pursuing the bank regulation based model that some issuers have turned to
    • Finally, the idea that a MMF based regulatory model is another approach we should be considering
I will wrap up with Awrey’s conclusion …

Money is, always and everywhere, a legal phenomenon. This is not to suggest that money is only a legal phenomenon. Yet it is impossible to deny that the law plays a myriad of important and often poorly understood roles that either enhance or undercut the credibility of the promises that we call money. In the case of banks and MMFs, the law goes to great lengths to transform their monetary liabilities into good money. In the case of proprietary P2P payment platforms, stablecoin issuers, and other aspiring monetary institutions, the anti-quated, fragmented, and heterogenous regulatory frameworks that currently, or might in future, govern them do far, far less to support the credibility of their commitments. This state of affairs—with good money increasingly circulating alongside bad—poses significant dangers for the customers of these new monetary institutions. In time, it may also undermine the in-tegrity and stability of the wider financial system. Together, these dangers provide a compelling rationale for adopting a new approach to the regulation of private money: one that strengthens and harmonizes the regulatory frameworks governing monetary institutions and supports the development of a more level competitive playing field. 

Tony – From the Outside

Banks and money creation

Frances Coppola’s blog offers an interesting extension of the ways in which private banks contribute to the the “creation” of bank deposits which are in turn one of the primary forms of money in most modern economies. This is a very technical issue, and hence of limited interest, but I think it will appeal to anyone who wants to peer under the hood to understand how banking really works. In particular, it offers a better appreciation of the way in which banks play a very unique role in the economy which is broader than just intermediating between borrowers and lenders.

If you have come this far then read the entire post but this extract captures the key point …

It’s now widely accepted, though still not universally, that banks create money when they lend. But it seems to be much less widely known that they also create money when they spend. I don’t just mean when they buy securities, which is rightly regarded as simply another form of lending. I mean when they buy what is now colloquially known as “stuff”. Computers, for example. Or coffee machines.

Imagine that a major bank – JP Morgan, for example – wants to buy a new coffee machine for one of its New York offices …. It orders a top-of-the-range espresso machine worth $10,000 from the Goodlife Coffee Company, and pays for it by electronic funds transfer to the company’s account. At the end of the transaction JP Morgan has a new coffee machine and Goodlife has $10,000 in its deposit account. 

Frances Coppola – JP Morgan’s coffee machine

I am familiar with the way in which bank lending creates money but I had not previously considered the extent to which this general mechanism extended to other ways in which banks disbursed payments.

My one observation is that the analysis could have been taken a bit further to consider the ways in which the money created by the bank lending mechanism is retired. In the example of the purchase of a coffee machine that Coppola uses, I assume that there was quite a lot of bank lending or other credit involved in getting to the point that the Goodlife Coffee Company has a coffee machine in stock that it can sell to JP Morgan. Once the JP Morgan cash reaches Goodlife’s bank account it is logical to assume that some of this debt will need to be repaid such that the net increase in money created by the purchase is less than the gross amount. This cycle repeats as inventory is manufactured and then sold.

As a rule, the overall supply of money will be increasing over time in response to the net increase in private bank lending but I would assume that it will be increasing and decreasing around this trend line as short term working capital loans are created and extinguished. This is a tricky area so I could be missing something but the capacity of the money supply to expand (and contract) in response to the needs of business for working capital feels like an important feature of the banking system we have today and something to consider as we explore new decentralised forms of money.

Tony – From the Outside

Taming wildcat stablecoins …

… is the title of an interesting paper by Gary Gorton and Jeffrey Zhang which argues that:

  • Cryptocurrency, or stablecoins to be more precise, can be viewed as the latest variation in a long history of privately produced money
  • The experience of the United States during the Free Banking Era of the 19th century suggests that ” … privately produced monies are not an effective medium of exchange because they are not always accepted at par and are subject to bank runs”
  • Stablecoins are not as yet a systemic issue but could be, so policymakers need to adjust the regulatory framework now to be ready as these new forms of private money grow and and potentially evolve into something that can’t be ignored
  • Policy responses include regulating stablecoin issuers as banks and issuing a central bank digital currency
So what?

I am not convinced that a central bank digital currency is the solution. I can see a case for greater regulation of stablecoins but you need to be clear about exactly what type of stablecoin requires a policy response. Gorton and Zhang distinguish three categories …

The first includes cryptocurrencies that are not backed by anything, like Bitcoin. We call these “fiat cryptocurrencies.” Their defining feature is that they have no intrinsic value. Second, there are specialized “utility coins,” like the JPMorgan coin that is limited to internal use with large clients. Finally, there are “stablecoins,” which aspire to be used as a form of private money and so are allegedly backed one-for-one with government fiat currency (e.g., U.S. dollars)

I am yet to see a completely satisfactory taxonomy of stablecoins but at a minimum I would break the third category down further to distinguish the ways in which the peg is maintained. The (relatively few?) stablecoins that actually hold high quality USD assets on a 1:1 basis are different from those which hold material amounts of commercial paper in their reserve asset pool and different again from those which employ algorithmic protocols to maintain the peg.

However, you do not necessarily have to agree with their taxonomy, assessments or policy suggestions to get value from the paper – three things I found useful and interesting:

  1. The “no-questions-asked ” principle for anything that functions or aims to function as money
  2. Some technical insights into the economic and legal properties of stablecoins and stablecoin issuers
  3. Lessons to be learned from history, in particular the Free Banking Era of the 19th century
The “no-questions-asked” principle.

Money is conventionally defined in terms of three properties; a store of value, a unit of account and a medium of exchange. Gorton and Zhang argue that “The property that’s most obvious, yet not explicitly presented, is that money also must satisfy the no-questions-asked (“NQA”) principle, which requires the money be accepted in a transaction without due diligence on its value“. They freely admit that they have borrowed this idea from Bengt Holmstrom though I think he actually uses the term “information insensitive” as opposed to the more colloquial NQA principle.

Previous posts on this blog have looked at both Holmstrom’s paper and other work that Gorton has co-authored on the optimal level of information that different types of bank stakeholders require. If I understood Holmstrom correctly, he seemed to extend his thesis on the value of being able to trade on an “information insensitive” basis to argue that “opacity” in the debt market is something to be embraced rather than eliminated. I struggle with embracing opacity in this way but that in no way diminishes the validity of the distinction he draws between the relative value of information in debt and equity markets and its impact on liquidity.

Gorton and Zhang emphasise the importance of deposit insurance in underwriting confidence in and the liquidity of bank deposits as the primary form of private money. I think that is true in the sense that most bank deposit holders do not understand the mechanics of the preferred claim they have on the assets of the bank they have lent to but it seems to me that over-collateralisation is equally as important in underwriting the economics of bank deposits.

If I have not lost you at this point, you can explore this question further via this link to a post I did titled “Bank deposits – turning unsecured loans to highly leveraged companies into (mostly) risk free assets – an Australian perspective“. From my perspective, the idea that any form of money has to be designed to be “information insensitive” or NQA rings very true.

Insights drawn from a technical analysis of stablecoins and stablecoin issuers.

The paper delves in a reasonable amount of detail into the technicalities of whether stablecoins are economically or legally equivalent to demand deposits and the related question of whether stablecoin issuers might be considered to be banks. The distinction between the economic and the legal status is I think especially useful for understanding how banking regulators might engage with the stablecoin challenge.

The over arching point is that stablecoins that look and function like bank demand deposits should face equivalent levels of regulation. That does not necessarily mean exactly the same set of rules but something functionally equivalent.

One practical outcome of this analysis that I had not considered previously is that they deem Tether to be based on an “equity contract” relationship with its users whereas the other stablecoins they analyse are “debt contracts” (see below). The link between Tether and a money market fund and the risk of “breaking the buck” has been widely canvassed but I had not previously seen the issue framed in these legal terms.

This technical analysis is summarised in two tables (Table 2: Stablecoins and their Contracts as of June 30, 2021 and Table 3: Stablecoins, Redemptions, and Fiat Money as of June 30. 2021) that offer a useful reference point for understanding the mechanics and details of some of the major stablecoins issued to date. In addition, the appendix to the paper offers links to the sources used in the tables.

Lessons to be learned from history

It may have been repeated to the point of cliche but the idea that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana generally gets the credit for this but variations are attributed to Edmund Burke and Sir Winston Churchill) resonates strongly with me. The general argument proposed by Gorton and Zhang is that lots of the ideas being tried out in stablecoin design and DeFi are variations on general principles that were similarly employed in the lightly regulated Free Banking Era but found wanting.

Even if you disagree with the conclusions they draw, the general principle of using economic history to explore what can be learned and what mistakes to avoid remains a useful discipline for any practitioner of the dark arts of banking and money creation.

Summing up in the authors’ own words

The paper is long (41 pages excluding the Appendix) but I will wrap up this post with an extract that gives you the essence of their argument in their own words.

Tony – From the Outside

Conclusion 

The more things change, the more they stay the same. It is still the case that regulation is being outpaced by innovation—thereby creating an uneven playing field—as it is easier and cheaper for more technologically advanced firms to offer similar products and services. 

In this case, it is also true that the problems associated with privately produced money are the same as they were one hundred and fifty years ago. We stress three points from our review of history. First, the use of private bank notes was a failure because they did not satisfy the NQA principle. Second, the U.S. government took control of the monetary system under the National Bank Act and subsequent legislation in order to eliminate the private bank note system in favor of a uniform currency—namely, national bank notes. Third, runs on demand deposits only ended with deposit insurance in 1934. 

Currently, it does not appear that stablecoins are used as money. But, as stablecoins evolve further, the stablecoin world will look increasingly like an unregulated version of the Free Banking Era—a world of wildcat banking. During the Free Banking Era, private bank monies circulated at time-varying discounts based on geography and the perceived risk of the issuing bank. Stablecoin prices are independent of geography but not independent of the perceived risk of their backing assets. If they succeed in differentiating themselves from fiat cryptocurrencies and become used as money, then they will likely trade at time-varying discounts as well. Policymakers have a couple of ways to address this development, and they better get going. 

A bank run in CryptoLand

In my last post I flagged a great article from Marc Rubinstein using MakerDAO to explain some of the principles of Decentralised Finance (DeFi). One of the points I found especially interesting was the parallels that Rubinstein noted between 21st century DeFi and the free banking systems that evolved during the 18th and 19th centuries

I wound up confessing that while I am a long way from claiming any real DeFi expertise, I did believe that it would be useful to reflect on why free banking is no longer the way the conventional banking system operates.

In that spirit, it appears that the IRON stablecoin has the honour of recording the first bank run in cryptoland.

We never thought it would happen, but it just did. We just experienced the world’s first large-scale crypto bank run.

https://ironfinance.medium.com/iron-finance-post-mortem-17-june-2021-6a4e9ccf23f5

No doubt there will be plenty written on this but Matt Levine’s Bloomberg column offers a quick summary of what happened.

The core of an algorithmic stablecoin is that you have some other token that is not meant to be stable, but that is meant to support the stablecoin by being arbitrarily issuable. It doesn’t matter if Titanium is worth $65 or $0.65, as long as you can always issue a few million dollars’ worth of it. But you can’t, not always, and that does matter.

Money Stuff by Matt Levine 18 June 2021

Algorithmic is of course just one approach to stablecoin mechanics. I hope to do a deeper dive into stablecoins in a future post.

Tony – From the Outside

Money and banking in CryptoLand

Marc Rubinstein (Net Interest) recently wrote an interesting post titled “My Adventures in CryptoLand” that I found very helpful in helping me better understand what is going on in this new area of decentralised finance (DeFi). He has followed up with a post titled “Reinventing the Financial System” which explores how MakerDAO is building a “decentralised bank”. I am a bit uncomfortable with applying the term “bank” to the financial entity that MakerDAO is building but I don’t want to derail the discussion with what may be perceived as semantics so I will run wth the term for the purposes of this post.

What is interesting for students of banking is the parallels that Rubinstein notes between MakerDAO and the free banking systems that evolved during the 18th and 19th centuries. Scotland is one of the poster children of this style of banking and we can see a legacy of that system (albeit much more regulated and so not true free banking) in the form of the private bank notes that the three Scottish banks still issue in their own name. He quotes Rune Christensen (founder of MakerDAO) describing the way in which his project accidentally developed a form of fractional reserve banking”

In the very beginning of the project, I remember we didn’t even realise, in the beginning of Maker, that we were essentially just building a protocol that did the same things as fractional reserve banking, did something very similar to how a banking balance sheet works and we were just implementing that as a blockchain protocol. We thought we were doing something completely, totally different from how money usually worked in the traditional sense.” (source)

“Reinventing the Financial System” Marc Rubinstein Net Interest Newsletter, 12 June 2021

This statement should be qualified by the fact that they can only do this (i.e. replicate fractional reserve banking) because the currency of the decentralised bank is a form of money called Dai. Fractional Reserve Banking has proved to be a risky form of financial technology in the conventional banking system which has developed a range of tools to manage that risk (e.g. capital adequacy and liquidity requirements, deposit preference arrangements often coupled with deposit insurance to insulate the “money” part of the bank balance sheet from risk, high levels of supervision and other restrictions on the types of assets a bank can lend against).

MakerDAO has a stabilisation mechanism that employs “smart contracts” that manage the price of Dai by managing its supply and demand. The pros and cons of the various stabilisation mechanisms that underpin stable coins like Dai is a topic for another day.

Rubinstein describes the MakerDAO lending and “money” creation process as follows:

The bank he devised to create his money … works like this:

An investor comes into Maker DAO for a loan. He (yep, usually he) has some collateral he’s happy to keep locked in a vault. Right now, that collateral is usually a crypto asset like Ethereum. For every $100 worth of crypto assets, Maker is typically prepared to lend $66 – the gap adding a buffer of protection against a possible fall in the value of the collateral. Maker accepts the collateral and advances a loan, which it does by issuing its Dai money. 

So what?

At this stage I am not sure where this is headed. It is not clear, for example, if the purpose of this “bank” is simply to create more Dai via trading in crypto-assets or to build something that translate outside CryptoLand. Rubinstein quotes Rune Christensen himself stating that

I don’t think that it will necessarily replace everything… The traditional financial system will actually largely remain the way it is. It will just replace certain parts of it that right now are really bad and really old… those things will be replaced with DeFi and blockchain, but the actual bank itself probably will remain.”

I am a long way from figuring this out but Marc’s post is I think worth reading for anyone who want to understand where these new (or possibly reinvented) forms of finance are heading. To the extent that DeFi is reinventing things that have been tried before, I suspect it would be useful to reflect on why free banking is no longer the way the conventional banking system operates. That is another topic for another day.

Tony – From the Outside

Tether offers a bit more detail on the composition of its reserves

… but Jemima Kelly at FT Alphaville remains a sceptic. I think the FT headline is a bit harsh (“Tether says its reserves are  backed by cash to the tune of . . .  2.9%”). Real banks don’t hold a lot of “cash” either but the securities they hold in their liquid asset portfolios will tend to be a lot better quality than the securities that Tether disclosed.

The role of real banks in the financial system may well be shrinking but the lesson I take from this FT opinion piece is that understanding the difference between these financial innovations and real banks remains a useful insight as we navigate the evolving new financial system.

Let me know what I am missing …

Tony – From the Outside

Digital money – FT Alphaville

FT Alphaville is one of my go to sources for information and insight. The Alphaville post flagged below discusses the discussion paper recently released by the Bank of England on the pros and cons of a Central Bank Digital Currency. It is obviously a technical issue but worth at least scanning if you have any interest in banking and ways in which the concept of “money” may be evolving.

Read on ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/03/12/1584053069000/Digital-stimulus/

Banks may be asked to absorb more than their contractual share of the economic fallout of the Coronavirus

We have already seen signs that the Australian banks recognise that they need to absorb some of the fallout from the economic impact of the Coronavirus. This commentator writing out of the UK makes an interesting argument on how much extra cost banks and landlords should volunteer to absorb.

Richard Murphy on tax, accounting and political economy
— Read on www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/03/04/banks-and-landlords-have-to-pick-up-the-costs-of-the-epidemic-to-come-if-the-the-economy-is-to-have-a-chance-of-surviving/

I am not saying banks should not do this but two themes to reflect on:

1) This can be seen as part of the price of rebuilding trust with the community

2) it reinforces the cyclicality of the risk that bank shareholders are required to absorb which then speaks to what is a fair “Through the Cycle” ROE for that risk

I have long struggled with the “banks are a simple utility ” argument and this reinforces my belief that you need a higher ROE to compensate for this risk

Tony