Instability – From the outside

Margin calls …

… seem to be on the increase.

This post by Marc Rubinstein offers a short but detailed summary of what has been going on, why and what it means for markets. Read the whole post but one of the key issues for me is increased procyclicality…

The drawback of a heavily collateralized market, though, is its tendency to inject procyclicality into the system. Periods of market turbulence can drive sharply higher collateral requirements, which can prompt more turbulence if that leads to forced selling – such as we saw in the UK last week.
Marc Rubinstein, “Net Interest” Blog – 8 October 2022

Tony – From the Outside

Predicting phase transitions

I am not sure the modelling methodology described in this article is quite as good as the title suggests…

“Chaos Researchers Can Now Predict Perilous Points of No Return”

… but it would be very interesting if it lives up to the claims made in the article. It is a quick read and the subject matter seems worth keeping an eye on.

Here are two short extracts to give you a flavour of the claims made

A custom-built machine learning algorithm can predict when a complex system is about to switch to a wildly different mode of behavior.

In a series of recent papers, researchers have shown that machine learning algorithms can predict tipping-point transitions in archetypal examples of such “nonstationary” systems, as well as features of their behavior after they’ve tipped. The surprisingly powerful new techniques could one day find applications in climate science, ecology, epidemiology and many other fields.

Tony – From the Outside

“The Origin of Financial Crises” by George Cooper

There are a lot of books on the topic of financial crises but this one, written in 2008, stand the test of time. At the very least, it offers a useful introduction to Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis. There is also an interesting discussion of the alternative approaches adopted by central banks to the problem of financial stability.

George Cooper argues that our financial system is inherently unstable and that this tendency is accentuated by a combination of factors

The belief that market forces will tend to produce optimal allocations of capital, and
Monetary policy that seeks to smooth (and ideally eliminate) business cycle fluctuations in economic activity

Cooper draws heavily on Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) which he argues offers much better insight into the operation of the financial system than the the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) which tended to be the more influential driver of economic policy in the years preceding the Global Financial Crisis.

Cooper uses these competing theories to explore what makes prices within financial markets move. The EMH maintains that the forces of supply and demand will cause markets to move towards equilibrium and hence that we must look to external forces to understand unexpected shocks and crises. Minsky’s FIH, in contrast, argues that financial markets can be driven by internal forces into cycles of credit expansion and asset inflation followed by credit contraction and asset deflation.

Cooper identifies the following ways in which financial systems can become unstable

Markets characterised by supply constraints tend to experience price inflation which for a period of time can drive further increases in demand
Monetary policy which is oriented towards mitigating (and in some cases pre-empting) economic downturns can also amplify market instability (i.e. the Greenspan put makes the market less resilient in the long run)
Credit creation by private sector banks contributes to money supply growth; this in turn can facilitate growth in demand but there is no mechanism that automatically makes this growth consistent with the economy’s sustainable growth path

The point about some asset markets being prone to instability is particularly pertinent for banks that focus on residential property lending. Classical economic theory holds that increased prices should lead to increased supply and reduced demand but this simple equilibrium model does not necessarily work for property markets. Property buyers more often reason that they need to meet the market because it will only get more expensive if they wait. Many of them will have already seen this happen and regret not meeting the market price previously as they contemplate paying more to get a property that is not as nice as ones they underbid on. The capacity of home builders to respond to the price signal is frequently constrained by a myriad of factors and there is a long lead time when they do respond.

The argument Cooper makes rings very true for Australia and is very similar to the one that Adair Turner made in his book titled ”Between debt and the devil”. Cooper’s (and Minsky’s) argument that the pursuit of stability is not a desirable objective and that the system benefits from a modest amount of stress is similar to the argument made by Nassim Taleb in “Antifragility”.

Cooper also discusses the different philosophies that central banks bring to the challenge of managing financial stability. The dominant view is one that focuses on the risk that sees the management of inflation risk as a dominant concern while placing greater trust in the capacity of the market to self correct any instability. The European Central Bank, in contrast, seems to have placed less faith in the market and perhaps been closer to Minsky.

Some quotes from the book will give a sense of the ideas being discussed:

“Through its role in asset price cycles and profit generation, credit formation (borrowing money for either consumption or investment) lies at the heart of the financial market’s fundamental instability”.

“Hyman Minsky said that “stability creates instability” referring to our tendency to build up an unsustainable stock of debt in times of plenty only for that debt to then destroy the times of plenty”

“For a system as inherently unstable as the financial markets, we should not seek to achieve perfect stability; arguably it is this objective that has led to today’s problems. A more sustainable strategy would involve permitting, and at times encouraging, greater short-term cyclicality, using smaller, more-frequent downturns to purge the system of excesses”

“Credit creation is the foundation of the wealth-generation process; it is also the cause of financial instability. We should not let the merits of the former blind us to the risks of the latter.”

I have made some more detailed notes on the book here.

Tony

Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis – Applications in Stress Testing?

One of the issues that we keep coming back to in stress testing is whether, 1) the financial system is inherently prone to instability and crisis or 2) the system naturally tends towards equilibrium and instability is due to external shocks. Any stress scenario that we design, or that we are asked to model, will fall somewhere along this spectrum though I suspect most scenarios tend to be based on exogenous shocks. This touches on a long standing area of economic debate and hence not something that we can expect to resolve any time soon. I think it however useful to consider the question when conducting stress testing and evaluate the outcomes.

From roughly the early 1980’s until the GFC in 2008, the dominant economic paradigm has arguably been that market forces, coupled with monetary and fiscal policy built on a sound understanding of how the economy works, meant that the business cycle was dead and that the primary challenge of policy was to engineer efficient capital allocations that maximised growth. The GFC obviously highlighted shortcomings with the conventional economic approach and drew attention to an alternative approach developed by Hyman Minsky which he labelled the Financial Instability Hypothesis.

Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH)

Minsky focused on borrowing and lending with varying margins of safety as a fundamental property of all capitalist economies and identified three forms

“Hedge” financing under which cash flow covers the repayment of principal and interest
“Speculative” financing under which cash flow covers interest but the principal repayments must be continually refinanced
“Ponzi” financing under which cash flow is insufficient to cover either interest or principal and the borrower is betting that appreciation in the value of the asset being financed will be sufficient to repay loan principal plus capitalised interest and generate a profit

The terms that Minsky uses do not strictly conform to modern usage but his basic idea is clear; increasingly speculative lending tends to be associated with increasing fragility of borrowers and the financial system as a whole. Ponzi financing is particularly problematic because the system is vulnerable to external shocks that can result in restricted access to finance or which cause asset devaluation cycle as borrowers to sell their assets in order to reduce their leverage. The downward pressure on assets prices associated with the deleveraging process then puts further pressure on the capacity to repay the loans and so on.

The term “Minsky moment” has been used to describe the inflexion point where debt levels become unsustainable and asset prices fall as investors seek to deleverage. Investor psychology is obviously one of the primary drivers in this three stage cycle; investor optimism translates to a willingness to borrow and to pay more for assets, the higher asset valuations in turn allow lenders to lend more against set loan to valuation caps. Lenders can also be caught up in the mood of optimism and take on more risk (e.g. via higher Loan Valuation Ratio limits or higher debt service coverage ratios). Minsky stated that “the fundamental assertion of the financial instability hypothesis is that the financial structure evolves from being robust to being fragile over a period in which the economy does well” (Financial Crises: Systemic or Idiosyncratic by Hyman Minsky, April 1991, p16).

It should also be noted that a Minsky moment does not require an external shock, a simple change in investor outlook or risk tolerance could be sufficient to trigger the reversal. Minsky observed that the tendency of the endogenous process he described to lead to systemic fragility and instability is constrained by institutions and interventions that he described as “thwarting systems” (“Market Processes and Thwarting Systems” by P. Ferri and H. Minsky, November 1991, p2). However Minsky’s FIH also assumes that there is a longer term cycle in which these constraints are gradually wound back allowing more and more risk to accumulate in the system over successive business cycles.

What Minsky describes is similar to the idea of a long term “financial cycle” (25 years plus) being distinct from the shorter duration “business cycle” (typically 7-10 years) – refer this post “The financial cycle and macroeconomics: What have we learnt?” for more detail. An important feature of this longer term financial cycle is a process that gradually transforms the business institutions, decision-making conventions, and structures of market governance, including regulation, which contribute to the stability of capitalist economies.

The transformation process can be broken down into two components

winding back of regulation and
increased risk taking

which in combination increase both the supply of and demand for risk. The process of regulatory relaxation can take a number of forms:

One dimension is regulatory capture; whereby the institutions designed to regulate and reduce excessive risk-taking are captured and weakened
A second dimension is regulatory relapse; reduced regulation may be justified on the rationale that things are changed and regulation is no longer needed but there is often an ideological foundation typically based on economic theory (e.g. the “Great Moderation” or market discipline underpinning self-regulation).
A third dimension is regulatory escape; whereby the supply of risk is increased through financial innovation that escapes the regulatory net because the new financial products and practices were not conceived of when existing regulation was written.

Borrowers also take on more risk for a variety of reasons:

First, financial innovation provides new products that allow borrowers to take on more debt or which embed higher leverage inside the same nominal value of debt.
Second, market participants are also subject to gradual memory loss that increases their willingness to take on risk

The changing taste for risk is also evident in cultural developments which can help explain the propensity for investors to buy shares or property. A greater proportion of the population currently invest in shares than was the case for their parents or grandparents. These individual investors are actively engaged in share investing in a way that would be unimaginable for the generations that preceded them. Owning your own home and ideally an investment property as well is an important objective for many Australians but less important in say Germany.

These changes in risk appetite can also weaken market discipline based constraints against excessive risk-taking. A book titled “The Origin of Financial Crises” by George Cooper (April 2008) is worth reading if you are interested in the ideas outlined above. A collection of Minsky’s papers can also be found here if you are interested in exploring his thinking more deeply.

I have been doing a bit of research lately both on the question of what exactly does Expected Loss “expect” and on the ways in which cycle downturns are defined. I may be missing something, but I find this distinction between endogenous and exogenous factors largely missing from the discussion papers that I have found so far and from stress testing itself. I would greatly appreciate some suggestions if anyone has come across any good material on the issue.

Tony

The financial cycle and macroeconomics: What have we learnt? BIS Working Paper

Claudio Borio at the BIS wrote an interesting paper exploring the “financial cycle”. This post seeks to summarise the key points of the paper and draw out some implications for bank stress testing (the original paper can be found here). The paper was published in December 2012, so its discussion of the implications for macroeconomic modelling may be dated but I believe it continues to have some useful insights for the challenges banks face in dealing with adverse economic conditions and the boundary between risk and uncertainty.

Key observations Borio makes regarding the Financial Cycle

The concept of a “business cycle”, in the sense of there being a regular occurrence of peaks and troughs in business activity, is widely known but the concept of a “financial cycle” is a distinct variation on this theme that is possibly less well understood. Borio states that there is no consensus definition but he uses the term to

“denote self-reinforcing interactions between perceptions of value and risk, attitudes towards risk and financing constraints, which translate into booms followed by busts. These interactions can amplify economic fluctuations and possibly lead to serious financial distress and economic disruption”.

This definition is closely related to the concept of “procyclicality” in the financial system and should not be confused with a generic description of cycles in economic activity and asset prices. Borio does not use these words but I have seen the term “balance sheet recession” employed to describe much the same phenomenon as Borio’s financial cycle.

Borio identifies five features that describe the Financial Cycle

It is best captured by the joint behaviour of credit and property prices – these variables tend to closely co-vary, especially at low frequencies, reflecting the importance of credit in the financing of construction and the purchase of property.
It is much longer, and has a much larger amplitude, than the traditional business cycle – the business cycle involves frequencies from 1 to 8 years whereas the average length of the financial cycle is longer; Borio cites a cycle length of 16 years in a study of seven industrialised economies and I have seen other studies indicating a longer cycle (with more severe impacts).
It is closely associated with systemic banking crises which tend to occur close to its peak.
It permits the identification of the risks of future financial crises in real time and with a good lead – Borio states that the most promising leading indicators of financial crises are based on simultaneous positive deviations of the ratio of private sector credit-to-GDP and asset prices, especially property prices, from historical norms.
And it is highly dependent of the financial, monetary and real-economy policy regimes in place (e.g. financial liberalisation under Basel II, monetary policy focussed primarily on inflation targeting and globalisation in the real economy).

Macro economic modelling

Borio also argues that the conventional models used to analyse the economy are deficient because they do not capture the dynamics of the financial cycle. These extracts capture the main points of his critique:

“The notion… of financial booms followed by busts, actually predates the much more common and influential one of the business cycle …. But for most of the postwar period it fell out of favour. It featured, more or less prominently, only in the accounts of economists outside the mainstream (eg, Minsky (1982) and Kindleberger (2000)). Indeed, financial factors in general progressively disappeared from macroeconomists’ radar screen. Finance came to be seen effectively as a veil – a factor that, as a first approximation, could be ignored when seeking to understand business fluctuations … And when included at all, it would at most enhance the persistence of the impact of economic shocks that buffet the economy, delaying slightly its natural return to the steady state …”

“Economists are now trying hard to incorporate financial factors into standard macroeconomic models. However, the prevailing, in fact almost exclusive, strategy is a conservative one. It is to graft additional so-called financial “frictions” on otherwise fully well behaved equilibrium macroeconomic models, built on real-business-cycle foundations and augmented with nominal rigidities. The approach is firmly anchored in the New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) paradigm.”

“The purpose of this essay is to summarise what we think we have learnt about the financial cycle over the last ten years or so in order to identify the most promising way forward…. The main thesis is that …it is simply not possible to understand business fluctuations and their policy challenges without understanding the financial cycle”

There is an interesting discussion of the public policy (i.e. prudential, fiscal, monetary) associated with recognising the role of the financial cycle but I will focus on what implications this may have for bank management in general and stress testing in particular.

Insights and questions we can derive from the paper

The observation that financial crises are based on simultaneous positive deviations of the ratio of private sector credit-to-GDP and asset prices, especially property prices, from historical norms covers much the same ground as the Basel Committee’s Countercyclical Capital Buffer (CCyB) and is something banks would already monitor as part of the ICAAP. The interesting question the paper poses for me is the extent to which stress testing (and ICAAP) should focus on a “financial cycle” style disruption as opposed to a business cycle event. Even more interesting is the question of whether the higher severity of the financial cycle is simply an exogenous random variable or an endogenous factor that can be attributed to excessive credit growth.

I think this matters because it has implications for how banks calibrate their overall risk appetite. The severity of the downturns employed in stress testing has in my experience gradually increased over successive iterations. My recollection is that this has partly been a response to prudential stress tests which were more severe in some respects than might have been determined internally. In the absence of any objective absolute measure of what was severe, it probably made sense to turn up the dial on severity in places to align as far as possible the internal benchmark scenarios with prudential benchmarks such as the “Common Scenario” APRA employs.

At the risk of a gross over simplification, I think that banks started the stress testing process looking at both moderate downturns (e.g. 7-10 year frequency and relatively short duration) and severe recessions (say a 25 year cycle though still relatively short duration downturn). Bank supervisors in contrast have tended to focus more on severe recession and financial cycle style severity scenarios with more extended durations. Banks’s have progressively shifted their attention to scenarios that are more closely aligned to the severe recession assumed by supervisors in part because moderate recessions tend to be fairly manageable from a capital management perspective.

Why does the distinction between the business cycle and the financial cycle matter?

Business cycle fluctuations (in stress testing terms a “moderate recession”) are arguably an inherent feature of the economy that occur largely independently of the business strategy and risk appetite choices that banks make. However, Borio’s analysis suggests that the decisions that banks make (in particular the rate of growth in credit relative to growth in GDP and the extent to which the extension of bank credit contributes to inflated asset values) do contribute to the risk (i.e. probability, severity and duration) of a severe financial cycle style recession.

Borio’s analysis also offers a way of thinking about the nature of the recovery from a recession. A moderate business cycle style recession is typically assumed to be short with a relatively quick recovery whereas financial cycle style recessions typically persist for some time. The more drawn out recovery from a financial cycle style recession can be explained by the need for borrowers to deleverage and repair their balance sheets as part of the process of addressing the structural imbalances that caused the downturn.

If the observations above are true, then they suggest a few things to consider:

should banks explore a more dynamic approach to risk appetite limits that incorporated the metrics identified by Borio (and also used in the calibration of the CCyB) so that the level of risk they are willing to take adjusts for where they believe they are in the state of the cycle (and which kind of cycle we are in)
how should banks think about these more severe financial cycle losses? Their measure of Expected Loss should clearly incorporate the losses expected from business cycle style moderate recessions occurring once every 7-10 years but it is less clear that the kinds of more severe and drawn out losses expected under a Severe Recession or Financial Cycle downturn should be part of Expected Loss.

A more dynamic approach to risk appetite get us into some interesting game theory puzzles because a decision by one bank to pull back on risk appetite potentially allows competitors to benefit by writing more business and potentially doubly benefiting to the extent that the decision to pull back makes it safer for competitors to write the business without fear of a severe recession (in technical economist speak we have a “collective action” problem). This was similar to the problem APRA faced when it decided to impose “speed limits” on certain types of lending in 2017. The Royal Commission was not especially sympathetic to the strategic bind banks face but I suspect that APRA understand the problem.

How do shareholders think about these business and financial cycle losses? Some investors will adopt a “risk on-risk off” approach in which they attempt to predict the downturn and trade in and out based on that view, other “buy and hold” investors (especially retail) may be unable or unwilling to adopt a trading approach.

The dependence of the financial cycle on the fiscal and monetary policy regimes in place and changes in the real-economy also has potential implications for how banks think about the risk of adverse scenarios playing out. Many of the factors that Borio argues have contributed to the financial cycle (i.e. financial liberalisation under Basel II, monetary policy focussed primarily on inflation targeting and globalisation in the real economy) are reversing (regulation of banks is much more restrictive, monetary policy appears to have recognised the limitations of a narrow inflation target focus and the pace of globalisation appears to be slowing in response to a growing concern that its benefits are not shared equitably). I am not sure exactly what these changes mean other than to recognise that they should in principle have some impact. At a minimum it seems that the pace of credit expansion might be slower in the coming decades than it has in the past 30 years.

All in all, I find myself regularly revisiting this paper, referring to it or employing the distinction between the business and financial cycle. I would recommend it to anyone interested in bank capital management.

“Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit and Fixing Global Finance” by Adair Turner (2015)

This book is worth reading, if only because it challenges a number of preconceptions that bankers may have about the value of what they do. The book also benefits from the fact that author was the head of the UK Financial Services Authority during the GFC and thus had a unique inside perspective from which to observe what was wrong with the system. Since leaving the FSA, Turner has reflected deeply on the relationship between money, credit and the real economy and argues that, notwithstanding the scale of change flowing from Basel III, more fundamental change is required to avoid a repeat of the cycle of financial crises.

Overview of the book’s main arguments and conclusions

Turner’s core argument is that increasing financial intensity, represented by credit growing faster than nominal GDP, is a recipe for recurring bouts of financial instability.

Turner builds his argument by first considering the conventional wisdom guiding much of bank prudential regulation prior to GFC, which he summarises as follows:

Increasing financial activity, innovation and “financial deepening” were beneficial forces to be encouraged
More compete and liquid markets were believed to ensure more efficient allocation of capital thereby fostering higher productivity
Financial innovations made it easier to provide credit to households and companies thereby enabling more rapid economic growth
More sophisticated risk measurement and control meanwhile ensured that the increased complexity of the financial system was not achieved at the expense of stability
New systems of originating and distributing credit, rather than holding it on bank balance sheets, were believed to disperse risks into the hands of those best placed to price and manage it

Some elements of Turner’s account of why this conventional wisdom was wrong do not add much to previous analysis of the GFC. He notes, for example, the conflation of the concepts of risk and uncertainty that weakened the risk measurement models the system relied on and concludes that risk based capital requirements should be foregone in favour of a very high leverage ratio requirement. However, in contrast to other commentators who attribute much of the blame to the moral failings of bankers, Turner argues that this is a distraction. While problems with the way that bankers are paid need to be addressed, Turner argues that the fundamental problem is that:

modern financial systems left to themselves inevitably create debt in excessive quantities,
in particular, the system tends to create debt that does not fund new capital investment but rather the purchase of already existing assets, above all real estate.

Turner argues that the expansion of debt funding the purchase or trading of existing assets drives financial booms and busts, while the debt overhang left over by the boom explains why financial recovery from a financial crisis is typically anaemic and protracted. Much of this analysis seems to be similar to ideas developed by Hyman Minsky while the slow pace of recovery in the aftermath of the GFC reflects a theme that Reinhart and Rogoff have observed in their book titled “This time is different” which analyses financial crises over many centuries.

The answer, Turner argues, is to build a less credit intensive growth model. In pursuing this goal, Turner argues that we also need to understand and respond to the implications of three underlying drivers of increasing credit intensity;

the increasing importance of real estate in modern economies,
increasing inequality, and
global current account imbalances.

Turner covers a lot of ground, and I do not necessarily agree with everything in his book, but I do believe his analysis of what is wrong with the system is worth reading.

Let me start with an argument I do not find compelling; i.e. that risk based capital requirements are unreliable because they are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between risk (which can be measured) and uncertainty (which cannot):

Distinguishing between risk and uncertainty is clearly a fundamental part of understanding risk and Turner is not alone in emphasising its importance
I believe that means that we should treat risk based capital requirements with a healthy degree of scepticism and a clear sense of their limitations but that does not render them entirely unreliable especially when we are using them to understand relative differences in risk and to calibrate capital buffers
The obvious problem with non-risk based capital requirements is that they create incentives for banks to take higher risk that may eventually offset the supposed increase in soundness attached to the higher capital
It may be that Turner discounts this concern because he envisages a lower credit growth/intensity economy delivering less overall systemic risk or because he envisages a more active role for the public sector in what kinds of assets banks lend against; i.e. his support for higher capital may stem mostly from the fact that this reduces the capacity of private banks to generate credit growth

While advocating much higher capital, Turner does seem to part company with M&M purists by expressing doubt that equity investors will be willing to accept deleveraged returns. His reasoning is that returns to equity investments need a certain threshold return to be “equity like” while massively deleveraged ROE still contains downside risks that are unacceptable to debt investors.

Turning to the arguments which I think raise very valid concerns and deserve serious attention.

Notwithstanding my skepticism regarding a leverage ratio as the solution, the arguments he makes about the dangers of excessive credit growth resonate very strongly with what I learned during my banking career. Turner is particularly focussed on the downsides of applying excessive debt to the financing of existing assets, real estate in particular. The argument seems to be similar to (if not based on) the work of Hyman Minsky.

Turner’s description of the amount of money that banks can create as being “infinitely elastic” seems an overstatement to me (especially in the Australian context with the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) weighing on the capacity to grow the balance sheet) but the general point he is making about the way that credit fuelled demand for a relatively inelastic supply of desirable residential property tends to result in inflated property values with no real social value rings true.

What banks can do about this remains an open question given that resolving the problem with inelastic supply of property is outside their direct control but it is obviously important to understand the dynamics of the market underpinning their largest asset class and it may help them engage more constructively with public policy debates that seek to address the problem.

Turner’s analysis of the downsides of easy monetary policy (the standard response to economic instability) also rings true. He identifies the fact that lower interest rates tend to result in inflated asset values (residential property in particular given its perceived value as a safe asset) which do not address the fundamental problem of over-indebtedness and may serve to increase economic inequality. His discussion of the impact of monetary policy and easy credit on economic inequality is also interesting. The banks providing the credit in the easy money environment may not necessarily be taking undue risk and prudential supervisors have tools to ensure sound lending standards are maintained if they do believe there is a problem with asset quality. What may happen however is that the wealthier segments of society benefit the most under easy money because they have the surplus cash flow to buy property at inflated values while first homebuyers become squeezed out of the market. Again their capacity to address the problem may be limited but Turner’s analysis prompted me to reflect on what increasing economic inequality might mean for bank business models.

In addition to much higher bank capital requirements, Turner’s specific recommendations for moving towards a less credit intensive economy include:

Government policies related to urban development and the taxation of real estate
Changing tax regimes to reduce the current bias in favour of debt over equity financing (note that Australia is one of the few countries with a dividend imputation system that does reduce the bias to debt over equity)
Broader macro prudential powers for central banks, including the power to impose much larger countercyclical capital requirements
Tough constraints on the ability of the shadow banking system to create credit and money equivalents
Using public policy to produce different allocations of capital than would result from purely market based decisions; in particular, deliberately leaning against the market signal based bias towards real estate and instead favouring other “potentially more socially valuable forms of credit allocation”
Recognising that the traditional easy monetary policy response to an economic downturn (or ultra-easy in the case of a financial crisis such as the GFC) is better than doing nothing but comes at a cost of reigniting the growth in private credit that generated the initial problem, creating incentives for risky financial engineering and exacerbating economic inequality via inflating asset prices.

For those who want to dig deeper, I have gone into a bit more detail here on what Turner has to say about the following topics:

The way in which inefficient and irrational markets leave the financial system prone to booms and busts
The dangers of debt contracts sets out how certain features of these contracts increase the risk of instability and hamper the recovery
Too much of the wrong sort of debt describes features of the real estate market that make it different from other asset classes
Liberalisation, innovation and the credit cycle on steroids recaps on the philosophy that drove the deregulation of financial markets and what Turner believes to be the fundamental flaws with that approach. In particular his conclusion that the amount of credit created and its allocation is “… too important to be left to bankers…”
Private credit and money creation offers an outline of how bank deposits evolved to play an increasing role (the key point being that it was a process of evolution rather than overt public policy design choices)
Credit financed speculation discusses the ways in which credit in modern economies tends to be used to finance the purchase of existing assets, in particular real estate, and the issues that flow from this.
Inequality, credit and more inequality sets out some ways in which the extension of credit can contribute to increasing economic inequality
Capital requirements sets out why Turner believes capital requirements should be significantly increased and why capital requirements (i.e. risk weights) for some asset classes (e.g. real estate) should be be calibrated to reflect the social risk of the activity and not just private risks captured by bank risk models
Turner defence against the argument that his proposals are anti-markets and anti-growth.