Market Discipline – From the outside

Banking requires mystery

Matt Levine, like me, loves discussing stable-coin business models. In a recent opinion column he concludes that there is at least some prima facie evidence that transparency is not rewarded. At least not in the short run.

I have covered this ground in previous posts but at a time when the banking industry is seemingly demonstrating a perennial incapacity to learn from past mistakes, it is worth examining again the lessons to be drawn on the role of information and transparency in banking.

So starting with the basics …

Most of the leading crypto stablecoins have a pretty simple model: You give some stablecoin issuer $1, the issuer keeps the dollar and gives you back a dollar-denominated stablecoin, and the issuer promises to redeem the stablecoin for a dollar when you want. Meanwhile, the issuer has to hang on to the dollar.

Next he dives down a bit into the mechanics of how you might go about this. Matt identifies two basic models …

1.The issuer can try to work nicely with US regulators, get various licenses, and park its money in some combination of Treasury bills, other safe liquid assets, and accounts at regulated US banks.

2. The issuer can be a total mystery! The money is somewhere! Probably! But you’ll never find out where.

In practice Matt argues we have two examples of these different strategies …

USDC, the stablecoin of Circle, is probably the leading example of the first option. USDT, the stablecoin of Tether, is probably the leading example of the second option.

Matt, like me, is a traditional finance guy who struggles with the crypto trust model…

Me, I am a guy from traditional finance, and I’ve always been a bit puzzled that everyone in crypto trusts Tether so completely. You could put your money in a stablecoin that transparently keeps it in regulated banks, or you could put your money in Tether, which is very cagy and sometimes gets up to absolutely wild stuff with the money. Why choose Tether?

But over the recent weekend (11-12 Mar 2023) of banking turmoil USDC’s transparent strategy saw USDC depegged while USDT did not. The interesting question here is whether Tether is being rewarded for better portfolio risk management choices or something else was going on.

Matt sums up …

One possible understanding of this situation is that Circle made some bad credit decisions with its portfolio (putting billions of dollars into a rickety US bank), while Tether made excellent credit decisions with its portfolio (putting billions of dollars into whatever it is putting billions of dollars into). And, by extension, the traditional regulated US banking system isn’t that safe, and Tether’s more complicated exposures are actually better than keeping the money in the bank.

Another possible understanding, though, is that banking requires mystery! My point, in the first section of this column, was that too much transparency can add to the fragility of a bank, that the Fed is providing a valuable service by ignoring banks’ mark-to-market losses. Circle does not provide that service. Circle keeps its money in a bank with financial statements, and that bank fails, and Circle dutifully puts out a statement saying “whoops we had $3.3 billion in the failed bank,” and people naturally panic and USDC depegs. You have no idea where Tether keeps its money, so you have no idea if anything went wrong. This has generally struck me as bad, but it might have some advantages.

Tony – From the Outside

Red flags in financial services

Nice podcast from Odd Lots discussing the Wirecard fraud. Lots of insights but my favourite is to be wary when you see a financial services company exhibit high growth while maintaining profitability.

There may be exceptions to the rule but that is not how the financial services market normally works.

podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096

Tony — From the Outside

Self regulation in DeFi

This article in Wired offers a useful summary of how some motivated individuals are attempting to use the transparency of the system to control bad actors.

It is short and worth reading in conjunction with this paper titled “Statement on DeFi Risks, Regulations, and Opportunities Commissioner Caroline A. Crenshaw that sets out a US regulator’s perspective on the question of how DeFi should be regulated. This extract from the paper covers the main thrust of her argument in favours of formal regulation

While DeFi has produced impressive alternative methods of composing, recording, and processing transactions, it has not rewritten all of economics or human nature. Certain truths apply with as much force in DeFi as they do in traditional finance:
– Unless required, there will be projects that do not invest in compliance or adequate internal controls;
– when the potential financial rewards are great enough, some individuals will victimize others, and the likelihood of this occurring tends to increase as the likelihood of getting caught and severity of potential sanctions decrease; and
– absent mandatory disclosure requirements,[10] information asymmetries will likely advantage rich investors and insiders at the expense of the smallest investors and those with the least access to information.
Accordingly, DeFi participants’ current “buyer beware” approach is not an adequate foundation on which to build reimagined financial markets. Without a common set of conduct expectations, and a functional system to enforce those principles, markets tend toward corruption, marked by fraud, self-dealing, cartel-like activity, and information asymmetries. Over time that reduces investor confidence and investor participation.
Conversely, well-regulated markets tend to flourish
“Statement of DeFi Risks, Regulations and Opportunities” by Commissioner Caroline A Crenshaw, The International Journal of Blockchain Law, Vol. 1, Nov. 2021.

Tony – From the Outside

Why the real economy needs a prudential authority too

Isabella Kaminska (FT Alphaville) offers an interesting perspective on ways in which prudential initiatives in the areas of capital, liquidity and bail-in that have strengthened the banking sector post GFC might be applied to the “real economy”.

The global financial crisis taught us that laissez-faire finance, when left to its own devices, tends to encourage extreme fragility by under capitalising the system for efficiency’s sake and making it far more systemically interdependent.
Pre-2008, banks operated on the thinnest of capital layers while taking extreme liquidity risk due to the presumption that wholesale liquidity markets would always be open and available to them. It was in this way that they saved on capital and liquidity costs and increased their return on equity.
Regulatory responses to the crisis understandably focused on boosting resilience by hiking capital buffers, liquidity ratios and also by introducing new types of loss absorbing structures. While it’s still too early to claim regulatory efforts were a definitive success, it does seem by and large the measures have worked to stymie a greater financial crisis this time around.
But what the 2008 crisis response may have overlooked is that bolstering banks to protect the economy means very little if the underlying real economy remains as thinly spread and interconnected as the financial sector always used to be.

The assessment that these banking initiatives “means very little” is possibly overstating the case. The problems we are facing today would be an order of magnitude greater if the banking system was not able to plays its part in the solution.

The core point, however, I think is absolutely on the money, the focus on efficiency comes at the expense of resilience. More importantly, a free market system, populated by economic agents pursuing their own interests shaped by a focus on relatively short term time horizons, does not seem to be well adapted for dealing with this problem on its own. The lessons prudential regulators learned about the limits of efficient markets and market discipline also apply in the real world.

Isabella looks at the way prudential capital and liquidity requirements operate in banking and draws analogies in the real economy. With respect to liquidity, she notes for example,

“… the just-in-time supply chain system can be viewed as the real economy’s version of a fractional reserve system, with reserves substitutable for inventories.
Meanwhile, the real economy’s presumption that additional inventories can be sourced from third party wholesale suppliers at a price as and when demand dictates, is equivalent to the banking sector’s presumption that liquidity can always be sourced from wholesale markets.
Though there is obviously one important difference.
Unlike the banking sector, the real economy has no lender of last resort that can magically conjure up more intensive care beds or toilet paper at the stroke of a keyboard when runs on such resources manifest unexpectedly.

So what are our options? Companies could increase their inventories (analogous to holding more liquid assets) or build excess capacity (analogous to building up a capital buffer) but it is very difficult for companies acting independently to do this if their competitors choose the short term cost efficient play and undercut them on price. The Prisoner’s Dilemma trumps market discipline and playing the long game.

Isabella frames the problem as follows:

short-term supply shortages can only be responded to with real world manufacturing capability, which itself is constrained by physical availability To that extent crisis responses can only really take two forms: 1) immediate investment in the build-up of new manufacturing capacity that can address the specific system shortages or, 2) the temporary reallocation of existing resources (with some adaptation cost) to new production purposes.
The problem with the first option is that it is not necessarily time efficient. Not every country has the capability to build two new hospitals from scratch in just 10 days. Nor the capacity to create unexpected supply just-in-time to deal with the problem.
New investment may not be economically optimal either. What happens to those hospitals when the crisis abates? Do they stand empty and idle? Do they get repurposed? Who will fund their maintenance and upkeep if they go unused? And at what cost to other vital services and goods?

Isabella’s proposal …

That leaves the reallocation of existing assets as the only sensible and economically efficient mitigatory response to surge-demand related crises like pandemic flu. But it’s clear that on that front we can be smarter about how we anticipate and prepare for such reallocation shocks. An obvious thing to do is to take a leaf out of banking regulators’ books, especially with regards to bail-inable capital, capital ratios and liquidity profiles.

Isabella offers two examples to illustrate her argument; one is power companies and the other is the health system.

She notes that power utilities manage demand-surge or supply-shock risk with interruptible contracts to industrial clients. She argues that these contracts equate to a type of bail-inable capital buffer, since the contracts allow utilities to temporarily suspend services to clients (at their cost) if and when critical needs are triggered elsewhere and supplies must be diverted.

I think she has a good point about the value of real options but I am less sure that bail-in is the right analogy. Bail-in is a permanent adjustment to the capital structure in which debt is converted to equity or written off. Preferably the former in order to maintain the loss hierarchy that would otherwise apply in liquidation. A contract that enables a temporary adjustment to expenses is a valuable option but not really a bail-in style option.

What she is identifying in this power utility example is more a company buying real options from its customers that reduces operating leverage by enabling the company to reduce the supply of service when it becomes expensive to supply. Companies that have high operating leverage have high fixed costs versus revenue and will, all other things being equal, tend to need to run more conservative financial leverage than companies with low operating leverage. So reduced operating leverage is a substitute for needing to hold more capital.

Isabella then explores the ways in which the liquidity, capital and bail-in analogies might be applied in healthcare. I can quibble with some of the analogies she draws to prudential capital and liquidity requirements. As an example of a capital requirement being applied to health care she proposes that …

“… governments could mandate makers of non-perishable emergency goods (such as medicines, toilet paper, face masks, hand sanitiser) to always keep two-weeks’ worth of additional supply on hand. And companies could also be mandated to maintain some share of total supply chain production capability entirely domestically, making them more resilient to globalised shocks”

Two weeks supply looks more like a liquidity buffer than a capital buffer but that does not make the ideas any the less worth considering as a way of making the real economy more resilient. The banking system had its crisis during the GFC and the real economy is being tested this time around. There are arguments about whether the changes to banking went far enough but it is clearly a lot better placed to play its part in this crisis than it was in the last. The question Isabella poses is what kinds of structural change will be required to make the real economy more resilient in the face of the next crisis.

Another example of FT Alphaville being a reliable source of ideas and information to help you think more deeply about the world.

Tony (From the Outside)

Deposit insurance and moral hazard

Depositors tend to be a protected species

It is generally agreed that bank deposits have a privileged position in the financial system. There are exceptions to the rule such as NZ which, not only eschews deposit insurance, but also the practice of granting deposits a preferred (or super senior) claim on the assets of the bank. NZ also has a unique approach to bank resolution which clearly includes imposing losses on bank deposits as part of the recapitalisation process. Deposit insurance is under review in NZ but it is less clear if that review contemplates revisiting the question of deposit preference.

The more common practice is for deposits to rank at, or near, the top of the queue in their claim on the assets of the issuing bank. This preferred claim is often supported by some form of limited deposit insurance (increasingly so post the Global Financial Crisis of 2008). An assessment of the full benefit has to consider the cost of providing the payment infrastructure that bank depositors require but the issuing bank benefits from the capacity to raise funds at relatively low interest rates. The capacity to raise funding in the form of deposits also tends to mean that the issuing banks will be heavily regulated which adds another layer of cost.

The question is whether depositors should be protected

I am aware of two main arguments for protecting depositors:

One is to protect the savings of financially unsophisticated individuals and small businesses.
The other major benefit relates to the short-term, on-demand, nature of deposits that makes them convenient for settling transactions but can also lead to a ‘bank run’.

The fact is that retail depositors are simply not well equipped to evaluate the solvency and liquidity of a bank. Given that even the professionals can fail to detect problems in banks, it is not clear why people who will tend to lie at the unsophisticated end of the spectrum should be expected to do any better. However, the unsophisticated investor argument by itself is probably not sufficient. We allow these individuals to invest in the shares of banks and other risky investments so what is special about deposits.

The more fundamental issue is that, by virtue of the way in which they function as a form of money, bank deposits should not be analysed as “investments”. To function as money the par value of bank deposits must be unquestioned and effectively a matter of faith or trust. Deposit insurance and deposit preference are the tools we use to underwrite the safety and liquidity of bank deposits and this is essential if bank deposits are to function as money. We know the economy needs money to facilitate economic activity so if bank deposits don’t perform this function then you need something else that does. Whatever the alternative form of money decided on, you are still left with the core issue of how to make it safe and liquid.

Quote
“The capacity of a financial instrument like a bank deposit to be accepted and used as money depends on the ability of uninformed agents to trade it without fear of loss; i.e. the extent to which the value of the instrument is insulated from any adverse information about the counterparty”
Gary Gorton and George Pennacchi “Financial Intermediaries and Liquidity Creation”

I recognise that fintech solutions are increasingly offering alternative payment mechanisms that offer some of the functions of money but to date these still ultimately rely on a bank with a settlement account at the central bank to function. This post on Alphaville is worth reading if you are interested in this area of financial innovation. The short version is that fintechs have not been able to create new money in the way banks do but this might be changing.

But what about moral hazard?

There is an argument that depositors should not be a protected class because insulation from risk creates moral hazard.

While government deposit insurance has proven very successful in protecting banks from runs, it does so at a cost because it leads to moral hazard (Santos, 2000, p. 8). By offering a guarantee that depositors are not subject to loss, the provider of deposit insurance bears the risk that they would otherwise have borne.
According to Dr Sam Wylie (2009, p. 7) from the Melbourne Business School:
“The Government eliminates the adverse selection problem of depositors by insuring them against default by the bank. In doing so the Government creates a moral hazard problem for itself. The deposit insurance gives banks an incentive to make higher risk loans that have commensurately higher interest payments. Why?, because they are then betting with taxpayer’s money. If the riskier loans are repaid the owners of the bank get the benefit. If not, and the bank’s assets cannot cover liabilities, then the Government must make up the shortfall”
Reconciling Prudential Regulation with Competition, Pegasus Economics, May 2019 (p17)

A financial system that creates moral hazard is clearly undesirable but, for the reasons set out above, it is less clear to me that bank depositors are the right set of stakeholders to take on the responsibility of imposing market discipline on banks. There is a very real problem here but requiring depositors to take on this task is not the answer.

The paper by Gorton and Pennacchi that I referred to above notes that there is a variety of ways to make bank deposits liquid (i.e. insensitive to adverse information about the bank) but they argue for solutions where depositors have a sufficiently deep and senior claim on the assets of the bank that any volatility in their value is of no concern. This of course is what deposit insurance and giving deposits a preferred claim in the bank loss hierarchy does. Combining deposit insurance with a preferred claim on a bank’s assets also means that the government can underwrite deposit insurance with very little risk of loss.

It is also important I think to recognise that deposit preference moves the risk to other parts of the balance sheet that are arguably better suited to the task of exercising market discipline. The quote above from Pegasus Economics focussed on deposit insurance and I think has a fair point if the effect is simply to move risk from depositors to the government. That is part of the reason why I think that deposit preference, combined with how the deposit insurance is funded, are also key elements of the answer.

Designing a banking system that addresses the role of bank deposits as the primary form of money without the moral hazard problem

I have argued that the discussion of moral hazard is much more productive when the risk of failure is directed at stakeholders who have the expertise to monitor bank balance sheets, the capacity to absorb the risk and who are compensated for undertaking this responsibility. If depositors are not well suited to the market discipline task then who should bear the responsibility?

Senior unsecured debt
Non preferred senior debt (Tier 3 capital?)
Subordinated debt (i.e. Tier 2 capital)
Additional Tier 1 (AT1)
Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1)

There is a tension between liquidity and risk. Any security that is risky may be liquid during normal market conditions but this “liquidity” cannot be relied on under adverse conditions. Senior debt can in principle be a risky asset but most big banks will also aim to be able to issue senior debt on the best terms they can achieve to maximise liquidity. In practice, this means that big banks will probably aim for a Long Term Senior Debt Rating that is safely above the “investment grade” threshold. Investment grade ratings offer not just the capacity top issue at relatively low credit spreads but also, and possibly more importantly, access to a deeper and more reliable pool of funding.

Cheaper funding is nice to have but reliable access to funding is a life and death issue for banks when they have to continually roll over maturing debt to keep the wheels of their business turning. This is also the space where banks can access the pools of really long term funding that are essential to meet the liquidity and long term funding requirements that have been introduced under Basel III.

The best source of market discipline probably lies in the space between senior debt and common equity

I imagine that not every one will agree with me on this but I do not see common equity as a great source of market discipline on banks. Common equity is clearly a risky asset but the fact that shareholders benefit from taking risk is also a reason why they are inclined to give greater weight to the upside than to the downside when considering risk reward choices. As a consequence, I am not a fan of the “big equity” approach to bank capital requirements.

In my view, the best place to look for market discipline and the control of moral hazard in banking lies in securities that fill the gap between senior unsecured debt and common equity; i.e. non-preferred senior debt, subordinated debt and Additional Tier 1. I also see value in having multiple layers of loss absorption as opposed to one big homogeneous layer of loss absorption. This is partly because it can be more cost effective to find different groups of investors with different risk appetites. Possibly more important is that multiple layers offer both the banks and supervisors more flexibility in the size and impact of the way these instruments are used to recapitalise the bank.

Summing up …

I have held off putting this post up because I wanted the time to think through the issues and ensure (to the best of my ability) that I was not missing something. There remains the very real possibility that I am still missing something. That said, I do believe that understanding the role that bank deposits play as the primary form of money is fundamental to any complete discussion of the questions of deposit insurance, deposit preference and moral hazard in banking.

Tony