Modigliani & Miller – From the outside

A (the?) main move in finance

Matt Levine’s Money Stuff column (Bloomberg Opinion) had a great piece today which, while nominally focussed on the enduring question of “Looking for Tether’s Money”, is worth reading for the neat summary he offers of how finance turns risky assets into safe assets. The column is behind a paywall but you can access it for free by signing up for his daily newsletter.

This particular piece of the magic of finance is of course achieved by dividing up claims on risky assets into tranches with differing levels of seniority. In Matt’s words…

Most of what happens in finance is some form of this move. And the reason for that is basically that some people want to own safe things, because they have money that they don’t want to lose, and other people want to own risky things, because they have money that they want to turn into more money. If you have something that is moderately risky, someone will buy it, but if you slice it into things that are super safe and things that are super risky, more people might buy them. Financial theory suggests that this is impossible but virtually all of financial practice disagrees.
Money Stuff, Matt Levine Bloomberg, 7 October 2021

Matt also offers a neat description of how this works in banking

A bank makes a bunch of loans in exchange for senior claims on businesses, houses, etc. Then it pools those loans together on its balance sheet and issues a bunch of different claims on them. The most senior claims, classically, are “bank deposits”; the most junior claims are “equity” or “capital.” Some people want to own a bank; they think that First Bank of X is good at running its business and will grow its assets and improve its margins and its stock will be worth more in the future, so they buy equity (shares of stock) of the bank. Other people, though, just want to keep their money safe; they put their deposits in the First Bank of X because they are confident that a dollar deposited in an account there will always be worth a dollar.
The fundamental reason for this confidence is that bank deposits are senior claims (deposits) on a pool of senior claims (loans) on a diversified set of good assets (businesses, houses). (In modern banking there are other reasons — deposit insurance, etc. — but this is the fundamental reason.) But notice that this is magic: At one end of the process you have risky businesses, at the other end of the process you have perfectly safe dollars. Again, this is due in part to deposit insurance and regulation and lenders of last resort, but it is due mainly to the magic of composing senior claims on senior claims. You use seniority to turn risky things into safe things

He then applies these principles to the alternative financial world that has been created around crypto assets to explore how the same factors drive both the need/demand for stablecoins and the ways in which crypto finance can meet the demand for safe assets (well “safer” at least).

The one part of his explanation I would take issue with is that he could have delved deeper into the question of whether crypto users require stablecoins to exhibit the same level of risk free exchangeability that we expect of bank deposits in the conventional financial world.

Matt writes…

The people who live in Bitcoin world are people like anyone else. Some of them (quite a lot of them by all accounts) want lots of risk: They are there to gamble; their goal is to increase their money as much as possible. Bitcoin is volatile, but levered Bitcoin is even more volatile, and volatility is what they want.
Others want no risk. They want to put their money into a thing worth a dollar, and be sure that no matter what they’ll get their dollar back. But they don’t want to do that in a bank account or whatever, because they want their dollar to live in crypto world. What they want is a “stablecoin”: A thing that lives on the blockchain, is easily exchangeable for Bitcoin (or other crypto assets) using the tools and exchanges and brokerages and processes of crypto world, but is always worth a dollar

The label “stable” is a relative term so it is not obvious to me that people operating in the crypto financial asset world all necessarily want the absolute certainty of a coin that always trade at par value to the underlying fiat currency. Maybe they do but maybe some are happy with something that is stable enough to do the job of allowing them to do the exchanges they want to do in risky crypto assets. Certainly they already face other costs like gas fees when they trade so maybe something that trades within an acceptable range of par value is good enough?

What it comes down to is first defining exactly what kind of promise the stablecoin backer is making before we start down the path of defining exactly how that promise should be regulated. I do think that the future of stablecoins is likely to be more regulated and that is likely to be a net positive outcome. The term “stablecoin” however encompasses a wide variety of structures and intended uses. The right kind of regulation will be designed with these differences in mind. That said, some of the stablecoin issuers have not done themselves any favours in the loose ways in which they have defined their promise.

Matt’s column is well worth reading if you can access it but the brief outline above flags some of the key ideas and the issues that I took away. The ways in which seniority in the loss hierarchy creates safety (or what Gary Gorton refers to as “information insensitivity”) is I think the key insight. I frequently encounter papers and articles discussing the role of bank deposits as the primary form of money in developed economies. These nearly always mention prudential regulation, supervision and deposit insurance but the role of deposit preference is often overlooked. For anyone looking to dig a bit deeper, I did a post here offering an Australian perspective on how this works.

Tony – From the Outside

Bank funding costs and capital structure – what I missed

A recent post looked at a Bank of England paper that offered evidence that the cost of higher capital requirements will be mitigated by a reduction in leverage risk which translates into lower borrowing costs and a decline in the required return equity. My post set out some reasons why I struggled with this finding.

My argument was that,

in banking systems where the senior debt rating of banks assumed to be Too Big To Fail is supported by an implied assumption of government support (such as Australia),
increasing the level of subordinated debt could reduce the value of that implied support,
however, senior debt itself does not seem to be any less risky (the senior debt rating does not improve), and
the subordinated debt should in theory be more risky if it reduces the value of the assumption of government support.

Fortunately, I also qualified my observations with the caveat that it was possible that I was missing something. Recent issuance of Tier 2 debt by some Australian banks offers some more empirical evidence that does seem to suggest that the cost of senior debt can decline in response to the issuance of more junior securities and that the cost of subordinated debt does not seem to be responding in the way that the theory suggests.

My original argument was I think partly correct. The prospect of the large Australian banks substantially increasing the relative share of Tier 2 debt in their liability structure has not resulted in any improvement in the AA- senior debt rating of the banks subject to this Total Loss Absorbing Capital requirement. So senior debt does not seem to be any less risky.

What I missed was the impact of the supply demand dynamic in a low interest rate environment where safe assets are in very short supply.

The senior debt in my thesis is no less risky but the debt market appears to be factoring in the fact that the pool of AA- senior debt is likely to shrink relative to what was previously expected. Investors who have been struggling for some time to find relatively safe assets with a decent yield weigh up the options. A decent yield on safe assets like they used to get in the old days would obviously be preferable but that is not on offer so they pay up to get a share of what is on offer.

The subordinated debt issued by these banks might be more risky in theory to the extent that bail-in is now more credible but if you do the analysis and conclude that the bank is well managed and low risk then you discount the risk of being bailed-in and take the yield. Again the ultra low yield on very safe assets and the shortage of better options means that you probably bid strongly to get a share of the yield on offer.

Summing up. The impacts on borrowing costs described here may look the same as what would be expected if the Modigliani-Miller effect was in play but the underlying driver appears to be something else.

It remains possible that I am still missing something but hopefully this post moves me a bit closer to a correct understanding of how capital structure impacts bank funding costs …

Tony

A BCBS review of the costs and benefits of higher bank capital requirements

The economic rational for higher bank capital requirements that have been implemented under Basel III is built to a large extent on an analytical model developed by the BCBS that was published in a study released in 2010. The BCBS has just (June 2019) released a paper by one of its working groups which reviews the original analysis in the light of subsequent studies into the optimal capital question. The 2019 Review concludes that the higher capital requirements recommended by the original study have been supported by these subsequent studies and, if anything, the optimal level of capital may be higher than that identified in the original analysis.

Consistent with the Basel Committee’s original assessment, this paper finds that the net macroeconomic benefits of capital requirements are positive over a wide range of capital levels. Under certain assumptions, the literature finds that the net benefits of higher capital requirements may have been understated in the original Committee assessment. Put differently, the range of estimates for the theoretically-optimal level of capital requirements … is likely either similar or higher than was originally estimated by the Basel Committee.
The costs and benefits of bank capital – a review of the literature; BCBS Working Paper (June 2019)

For anyone who is interested in really understanding this question as opposed to simply looking for evidence to support a preconceived bias or vested interest, it is worth digging a bit deeper into what the paper says. A good place to start is Table 1 from the 2019 Review (copied below) which compares the assumptions, estimates and conclusions of these studies:

Pay attention to the fine print

All of these studies share a common analytical model which measures Net benefits as a function of:

Reduced Crisis Probability x Crisis Cost – Output Drag (loan spreads).

So the extent of any net benefit depends on the extent to which:

More capital actually reduces the probability of a crisis and/or its economic impact,
The economic impact of a financial crisis is a permanent or temporary adjustment to the long term growth trajectory of the economy – a permanent effect supports the case for higher capital, and
The cost of bank debt declines in response to higher capital – in technical terms the extent of the Modigliani Miller (MM) offset, with a larger offset supporting the case for higher capital.

The authors of the 2019 Review also acknowledge that interpretation of the results of the studies is complicated by the fact that different studies use different measures of capital adequacy. Some of the studies provide optimal capital estimates in risk weighted ratios, others in leverage ratios. The authors of the 2019 Review have attempted to convert the leverage ratios to a risk weighted equivalent but that process will inevitably be an imperfect science. The definition of capital also differs (TCE, Tier 1 & CET1).

The authors acknowledge that full standardisation of capital ratios is very complex and lies beyond the scope of their review and nominate this as an area where further research would be beneficial. In the interim (and at the risk of stating the obvious) the results and conclusions of this 2019 Review and the individual studies it references should be used with care. The studies dating from 2017, for example, seem to support a higher value for the optimal capital range compared to the 2010 benchmark. The problem is that it is not clear how these higher nominal ratio results should be interpreted in the light of increases in capital deductions and average risk weights such as we have seen play out in Australia.

The remainder of this post will attempt to dig a bit deeper into some of the components of the net benefit model employed in these types of studies.

Stability benefits – reduced probability of a crisis

The original 2010 BCBS study concluded that increasing Tangible Common Equity from 7% to 10% would reduce the probability of a financial crisis by 1.6 percentage points.

The general principle is that a financial crisis is a special class of economic downturn in which the severity and duration is exacerbated by a collapse in confidence in the banking system due to widespread doubts about the solvency of one or more banks which results in a contraction in the supply of credit.

It follows that higher capital reduces the odds that any given level of loss can threaten the actual or perceived solvency of the banking system. So far so good, but I think it is helpful at this point to distinguish the core losses that flow from the underlying problem (e.g. poor credit origination or risk management) versus the added losses that arise when credit supply freezes in response to concerns about the solvency or liquidity of the banking system.

Higher capital (and liquidity) requirements can help to mitigate the risk of those second round losses but they do not in any way reduce the economic costs of the initial poor lending or risk management. The studies however seem to use the total losses experienced in historical financial crises to calculate the net benefit rather than specific output losses that can be attributed to credit shortages and any related drop in employment and/or the confidence of business and consumers. That poses the risk that the studies may be over estimating the potential benefits of higher capital.

This is not saying that higher capital requirements are a waste of time but the modelling of optimal capital requirements must still understand the limitations of what capital can and cannot change. There is, for example, evidence that macro prudential policy tools may be more effective tools for managing the risk of systemic failures of credit risk management as opposed to relying on the market discipline of equity investors being required to commit more “skin in the game“.

Cost of a banking crisis

The 2019 Review notes that

“recent refinements associated with identifying crises is promising. Such refinements have the potential to affect estimates of the short- and long-run costs of crises as well as our understanding of how pre-crisis financial conditions affect these costs. Moreover, the identification of crises is important for estimating the relationship between banking system capitalisation and the probability of a crisis, which is likely to depend on real drivers (eg changes in employment) as well as financial drivers (eg bank capital).

We considered above the possibility that there may be fundamental limitations on the extent to which capital alone can impact the probability, severity and duration of a financial crisis. The 2019 Review also acknowledges that there is an ongoing debate, far from settled, regarding the extent to which a financial crisis has a permanent or temporary effect on the long run growth trajectory of an economy. This seemingly technical point has a very significant impact on the point at which these studies conclude that the costs of higher capital outweigh the benefits.

The high range estimates of the optimal capital requirement in these studies typically assume that the impacts are permanent. This is big topic in itself but Michael Redell’s blog did a post that goes into this question in some detail and is worth reading.

Banking funding costs – the MM offset

The original BCBS study assumed zero offset (i.e. no decline in lending rates in response to deleveraging). This assumption increase the modelled impact of higher capital and, all other things equal, reduces the optimal capital level. The later studies noted in the BCBS 2019 Review have tended to assume higher levels of MM offset and the 2019 Review concludes that the “… assumption of a zero offset likely overstated the costs of higher capital nonbank loan rates”. For the time being the 2019 Review proposes that “a fair reading of the literature would suggest the middle of the 0 and 100% extremes” and calls for more research to “… help ground the Modigliani-Miller offset used in estimating optimal bank capital ratios”.

Employing a higher MM offset supports a higher optimal capital ratio but I am not convinced that even the 50% “split the difference” compromise is the right call. I am not disputing the general principle that risk and leverage are related. My concern is that the application of this general principle does not recognise the way in which some distinguishing features of bank balance sheets impact bank financing costs and the risk reward equations faced by different groups of bank stakeholders. I have done a few posts previously (here and here) that explore this question in more depth.

Bottom line – the BCBS itself is well aware of most of the issues with optimal capital studies discussed in this post – so be wary of anyone making definitive statements about what these studies tell us.

The above conclusion is however subject to a number of important considerations. First, estimates of optimal capital are sensitive to a number of assumptions and design choices. For example, the literature differs in judgments made about the permanence of crisis effects as well as assumptions about the efficacy of post crisis reforms – such as liquidity regulations and bank resolution regimes – in reducing the probability and costs of future banking crisis. In some cases, these judgements can offset the upward tendency in the range of optimal capital.
Second, differences in (net) benefit estimates can reflect different conditioning assumptions such as starting levels of capital or default thresholds (the capital ratio at which firms are assumed to fail) when estimating the impact of capital in reducing crisis probabilities.2
Finally, the estimates are based on capital ratios that are measured in different units. For example, some studies provide optimal capital estimates in risk-weighted ratios, others in leverage ratios. And, across the risk-weighted ratio estimates, the definition of capital and risk-weighted assets (RWAs) can also differ (eg tangible common equity (TCE) or Tier 1 or common equity tier 1 (CET1) capital; Basel II RWAs vs Basel III measures of RWAs). A full standardisation of the different estimates across studies to allow for all of these considerations is not possible on the basis of the information available and lies beyond the scope of this paper.
This paper also suggests a set of issues which warrant further monitoring and research. This includes the link between capital and the cost and probability of crises, accounting for the effects of liquidity regulations, resolution regimes and counter-cyclical capital buffers, and the impact of regulation on loan quantities.
The costs and benefits of bank capital – a review of the literature; BCBS Working Paper (June 2019)

Summing up

I would recommend this 2019 Literature Review to anyone interested in the question of how to determine the optimal capital requirements for banks. The topic is complex and important and also one where I am acutely aware that I may be missing something. I repeat the warning above about anyone (including me) making definitive statements based on these types of studies.

That said, the Review does appear to offer support for the steps the BCBS has taken thus far to increase capital and liquidity requirements. There are also elements of the paper that might be used to support the argument that bank capital requirements should be higher again. This is the area where I think the fine print offers a more nuanced perspective.

Tony

Bank funding costs and capital structure

Here is another paper for anyone interested in the optimal bank capital structure debate. It is a Bank of England Staff Working Paper titled “Bank funding costs and capital structure” by Andrew Gimber and Aniruddha Rajan.

The authors summarise their paper as follows:

“If bail-in is credible, risk premia on bank securities should decrease as funding sources junior to and alongside them in the creditor hierarchy increase. Other things equal, we find that when banks have more equity and less subordinated debt they have lower risk premia on both. When banks have more subordinated and less senior unsecured debt, senior unsecured risk premia are lower. For percentage point changes to an average balance sheet, these reductions would offset about two thirds of the higher cost of equity relative to subordinated debt and one third of the spread between subordinated and senior unsecured debt.”
Abstract

The paper adds support to the argument that the cost of higher capital requirements will be mitigated by a reduction in leverage risk which translates into lower borrowing costs and a decline in the required return on equity. In the jargon of the corporate finance wonks, the paper supports a Modigliani Miller (MM) offset.

I need to dig a bit deeper into the results but I am struggling with the finding that increasing the level of subordinated debt at the expense of senior debt results in a reduction in the cost of senior debt. In the interests of full disclosure, I recognise that this may simply reflect the fact that my experience and knowledge base is mostly limited to the Australian and New Zealand banking systems but here goes. As always, it is also possible that I am simply missing something.

The problem for me in these results

We are not debating here the principle that risk (and hence required return) increases as you move through the loss hierarchy. This is a common challenge thrown out at anyone who questions the thesis that risk should decline as you reduce leverage. My concern is that MM did not anticipate a financing structure in which the risk of certain liabilities is mitigated by the existence of an assumption that the public sector will support any bank that is deemed Too Big To Fail (TBTF).

I am not seeking to defend the right of banks to benefit from this implied subsidy. I fully support the efforts being made to eliminate this market distortion. However, so far as I can determine, the reality is that increasing the level of subordinated debt and/or equity may reduce the value of the implied TBTF assumption but senior debt itself does not seem to be any less risky so far as senior debt investors are concerned. So why should they adjust their required return?

This seems to be what we are observing in the response of the debt ratings of the major Australian banks to proposals that they be required to maintain increased levels of subordinated debt to comply with Basel III’s Total Loss Absorbing Capital (TLAC) requirement.

My second concern is not specific to the Bank of England paper but worth mentioning since we are on the topic. One of the MM predictions tested in this study is that “the risk premium on a funding source should fall as that funding source expands at the expense of a more senior one” with the study finding evidence that this is true. This proposition (now supported by another study with empirical data) is often used to argue that it really does not matter how much equity a bank is required to hold because the cost of equity will decline to compensate (the “Big Equity” argument).

What is missing, I think, is any consideration of what is the lower boundary for the return that an equity investor requires to even consider taking the junior position in the financing structure in what is ultimately one of the most cyclically exposed areas of an economy. My last post looked at a study of the returns on both risky and safe assets over a period of 145 years which suggested that risky assets have on average generated a real return of circa 7% p.a.. When you factor in an allowance for inflation you are looking at something in the range of 9%-10% p.a. In addition, there are a range of factors that suggest a bank should be looking to target a Return on Equity of at least 2%-3% over the average “through the cycle” expected return. This includes the way that loan losses are accounted for in the benign part of the cycle and I don’t think that IFRS9 is going to change this.

This is a topic I plan to explore in greater detail in a future post. For the moment, the main point is that there has to be a lower boundary to how much the cost of equity can decline to in response to changes in capital structure but this seems to be largely absent from the Big Equity debate.

I have added a bit of background below for anyone who is not familiar with the detail of how a bank financing structure tends to be more complicated than that of a typical non-financial company.

Tell me what I am missing …

Tony

Appendix: A bit of background for those new to this debate

The extent of this MM offset is one of the more contentious issues in finance that has generated a long and heated debate stretching back over more than half a century. Both sides of the debate agree that there is a hierarchy of risk in a company financing structure. Common equity is unambiguously at the high end of this risk hierarchy and hence should expect to earn the highest return. Layers in the hierarchy, and hence the relative protection from solvency risk, are introduced by creating levels of seniority/subordination amongst the various funding sources.

An industrial company could just have debt and equity in which case the MM offset is much easier to analyse (though still contentious). Bank financing structures, in contrast, introduce a variety of issues that render the debate even more complicated and contentious:

Prudential capital requirements introduce at least three layers of subordination/seniority via the distinction between minimum capital requirements for Common Equity Tier 1, Additional Tier 1 and Tier 2 capital
The transition to a “bail-in” regime potentially introduces another level of subordination/seniority in the form of an additional requirement for certain (typically large and systemically important) banks to hold Non-Preferred Senior debt (or something functionally equivalent)
Next comes senior unsecured debt that is one of the workhorses of the bank financing structure (which in turn may be short or long term)
In certain cases a bank may also issue covered bonds which are secured against a pool of assets (to keep things simple, I will skip over securitisation financing)
Banks are also distinguished by their capacity to borrow money in the form of bank deposits which also serve as a means of payment in the economy (and hence as a form of money)
Bank deposits often have the benefit of deposit insurance and/or a preferred super senior claim on the assets of the bank

Apart from the formal protections afforded by the seniority of their claim, certain liabilities (typically the senior unsecured) can also benefit from an implied assumption that the government will likely bail a bank out because it is Too Big To Fail (TBTF). Eliminating this implied subsidy is a key objective of the changes to bank capital requirements being progressively implemented under Basel III.

Until this process is complete, and the implied balance sheet value of being considered TBTF is eliminated, the response of bank funding costs to changes in leverage will not always follow the simple script defined by the MM capital irrelevancy thesis.

The Bankers’ New Clothes: Arguments for simpler capital and much reduced leverage

It always pays to make sure you expose yourself to the opposite view. This post looks at some of the arguments for simpler and higher bank capital requirements put forward by Professors Admati and Hellwig. They have published a number of papers and a book on the topic but this post refers chiefly to their book “The Bankers’ New Clothes” and to a paper ‘The Parade of the Banker’s New Clothes Continues: 31 Flawed Claims Debunked”. As I understand it, the key elements of their argument are that:

Banks are inherently risky businesses,
Excessive borrowing by banks increases their inherent riskiness, but
Banks are only able to maintain this excessive level of borrowing because
- Flawed risk based capital models underestimate the true capital requirements of the business
- Market discipline also allows excessive borrowing because it is assumed that the government will bail out banks if the situation turns out badly

They identify a variety of ways of dealing with the problem of excessive leverage (controls on bank lending, liquidity requirements and capital requirements) but argue that substantially more common equity is the best solution because:

It directly reduces the probability that a bank will fail (i.e. all other things being equal, more common equity reduces the risk of insolvency),
A higher level of solvency protection has the added benefit of also reducing the risk of illiquidity, and
Contrary to claims by the banking industry, there is no net cost to society in holding more common equity because the dilution in ROE will be offset by a decline in the required return on equity

They concede that there will be some cost associated with unwinding the Too Big To Fail (TBTF) benefit that large banks currently enjoy on both the amount banks can borrow and on the cost of that funding but argue there is still no net cost to society in unwinding this undeserved subsidy. The book, in particular, gets glowing reviews for offering a compelling case for requiring banks to operate with much lower levels of leverage and for pointing out the folly of risk based capital requirements.

There are a number of areas where I find myself in agreement with the points they argue but I can’t make the leap to accept their conclusion that much a higher capital requirement based on a simple leverage ratio calculation is the best solution. I have written this post to help me think through the challenges they offer my beliefs about how banks should be capitalised.

It is useful, I think, to first set out the areas where we (well me at least) might agree in principle with what they say; i.e.

Financial crises clearly do impose significant costs on society and excessive borrowing does tend to make a financial system fragile (the trick is to agree what is “excessive”)
Better regulation and supervision have a role to play in minimising the risk of bank failure (i.e. market discipline alone is probably not enough)
Public policy should consider all costs, not just those of the banking industry
All balance sheets embody a trade-off between enterprise risk, return and leverage (i.e. increasing leverage does increase risk)

It is less clear however that:

The economics of bank financing are subject to exactly the same rules as that which apply to non-financial companies (i.e. rather than asserting that banks should be compared with non-financial companies, it is important to understand how banks are different)
A policy of zero failure for banks is necessarily the right one, or indeed even achievable (i.e. would it be better to engineer ways in which banks can fail without dragging the economy down with them)
Fail safe mechanisms, such as the bail in of pre-positioned liabilities, have no prospect of working as intended
The assertion that “most” of the new regulation intended to make banks safer and easier to resolve has been “rejected, diluted or delayed” is a valid assessment of what has actually happened under Basel III
That liquidity events requiring lender of last resort support from the central bank are always a solvency problem

Drawing on some previous posts dealing with these issues (see here, here and here), I propose to focus on the following questions:

How does the cost of bank financing respond to changes in leverage?
Are the risk based capital requirements as fundamentally flawed as the authors claim?
Are risk management incentives for bankers always better when they are required to hold increasing levels of common equity?
Do the increased loss absorption features of Basel III compliant hybrids (in particular, the power to trigger conversion or bail in of the instruments) offer a way to impose losses on failed banks without disrupting the economy or requiring public support

How does leverage affect the cost of bank financing?

Increasing the proportion of equity funding, the authors argue, reduces the risk that shareholders are exposed to because each dollar of equity they have invested

“ will be affected less intensely by the uncertainty associated with the investments”
“when shareholders bear less risk per dollar invested, the rate of return they require is lower”
“Therefore, taking the costs of equity as fixed and independent of the mix of equity and debt involves a fundamental fallacy”.
Banker’sNew Clothes (p101)

The basic facts they set out are not really contentious; the mix of debt and equity does impact required returns. The authors focus on what happens to common equity but changing leverage impacts both debt and equity. This is very clear in the way that rating agencies consider all of the points nominated by the authors when assigning a debt rating. Reduced equity funding will likely lead to a decline in the senior and subordinated debt ratings and higher costs (plus reduced access to funding in absolute dollar terms) while higher equity will be a positive rating factor.

Banks are not immune to these fundamental laws but it is still useful to understand how the outcomes are shaped by the special features of a bank balance sheet. My views here incorporate two of the claims they “debunk” in their paper; specifically

Flawed Claim #4: The key insights from corporate finance about the economics of funding, including those of Modigliani and Miller, are not relevant for banks because banks are different from other companies
Flawed Claim #5: Banks are special because they create money

One of the features that defines a bank is the ability to take deposits. The cost of deposits however tends to be insulated from the effects of leverage. This is a design feature. Bank deposits are a major component of the money supply but need to be insensitive to adverse information about the issuing bank to function as money.

Wanting bank deposits to be information insensitive does not make them so. That is a function of their super senior position in the liability loss hierarchy, supplemented in many, if not most, banking systems by some form of limited deposit insurance (1). I credit a paper by Gary Gorton and George Pennacchi titled “Financial Intermediaries and Liquidity Creation” for crytalising this insight (an earlier post offers a short summary of that paper). Another paper titled “Why Bail-In? And How?” by Joseph Sommer proposes a different rationale for deposits having a super senior position insulated from the risk of insolvency but the implications for the impact of leverage on bank financing costs are much the same.

A large bank also relies on senior unsecured financing. This class of funding is more risky than deposits but still typically investment grade. This again is a design feature. Large banks target an investment grade rating in order to deliver, not only competitive financing costs, but equally (and perhaps more importantly) access to a larger pool of potential funding over a wider range of tenors. The investment grade rating depends of course on there being sufficient loss absorbing capital underwriting that outcome. There is no escaping this law of corporate finance.

The debt rating of large banks is of course also tied up with the issue of banks being treated as Too Big To Fail (TBTF). That is a distortion in the market that needs to be addressed and the answer broadly is more capital though the rating agencies are reasonably agnostic on the form this capital should take in so far as the senior debt rating is concerned. Subject to having enough common equity anchoring the capital structure, more Tier 2 subordinated debt (or Tier 3 bail-in) will work just as well as more common equity for the purposes of reducing the value of implied government support currently embedded in the long term senior debt rating.

Admati and Hellwig are right – there is no free lunch in corporate finance

At this stage, all of this risk has to go somewhere. On that point I completely agree with Admati and Hellwig. There is no free lunch, the rating/risk of the senior tranches of financing depend on having enough of the right kinds of loss absorbing capital standing before them in the loss hierarchy. Where I part company is on the questions of how much capital is enough and what form it should take.

How much capital is (more than) enough?

Admati and Hellwig’s argument for more bank capital has two legs. Firstly, they note that banks are typically much more leveraged than industrial companies and question how can this be given the fundamental law of capital irrelevancy defined by Modigliani and Miller. Secondly, they argue that risk based capital requirements are fundamentally flawed and systematically under estimate how much capital is required.

Why are banks different?

Admati and Hellwig note that banks have less capital than industrial companies and conclude that this must be a result of the market relying on the assumption that banks will be bailed out. The existence of a government support uplift in the senior debt ratings of large banks is I think beyond debate. There is also broad support (even amongst many bankers) that this is not sound public policy and should ideally be unwound.

It is not obvious however that this wholly explains the difference in observed leverage. Rating agency models are relatively transparent in this regard (S&P in particular) and the additional capital required to achieve a rating uplift equivalent to the existing government support factor would still see banks more leveraged than the typical industrial company. Bank balance sheets do seem to be different from those of industrial companies.

Flawed risk models

The other leg to their argument is that risk based capital fundamentally under estimates capital requirements. I am broadly sympathetic to the sceptical view on how to use the outputs of risk models and have been for some time. An article I wrote in 2008, for example, challenged the convention of using a probability of default associated with the target debt rating to precisely calibrate the amount of capital a bank required.

The same basic concept of highly precise, high confidence level capital requirements is embedded in the Internal Ratings Based formula and was part of the reason the model results were misinterpreted and misused. Too many people assigned a degree of precision to the models that was not warranted. That does not mean however that risk models are totally useless.

Professors Admati and Hellwig use simple examples (e.g. how does the risk of loss increase if a personal borrower increases leverage on a home loan) to argue that banks need to hold more capital. While the basic principle is correct (all other things equal, leverage does increase risk), the authors’ discussion does not draw much (or possibly any?) attention to the way that requiring a borrower to have equity to support their borrowing reduces a bank’s exposure to movements in the value of the loan collateral.

In the examples presented, any decline in the value of the assets being financed flows through directly to the value of equity, with the inference that this would be true of a bank also. In practice, low risk weights assigned by banks to certain (low default – well secured) pools of lending reflect the existence of borrower’s equity that will absorb the first loss before the value of the loan itself is called into question.

A capital requirement for residential mortgages (typically one of the lowest risk weights and also most significant asset classes) that looks way too low when you note that house prices can easily decline by 10 or 20%, starts to make more sense when you recognise that that there is (or should be) a substantial pool of borrower equity taking the brunt of the initial decline in the value of collateral. The diversity of borrowers is also an important factor in reducing the credit risk of the exposures (though not necessarily the systemic risk of an overall meltdown in the economy). Where that is not the case (and hence the renewed focus on credit origination standards and macro prudential policy in general), then low risk weights are not justified.

I recognise that this argument (incorporating the value of the borrower’s equity) does not work for traded assets where the mark to market change in the value of the asset flows directly to the bank’s equity. It does however work for the kinds of assets on bank balance sheets that typically have very low risk weights (i.e. the primary concern of the leverage ratio advocates). It also does not preclude erring on the side of caution when calculating risk weights so long as the model respects the relative riskiness of the various assets impacting the value of equity.

How much also depends on the quality of risk management (and supervision)

The discussion of how much capital a bank requires should also recognise the distinction between how much a well managed bank needs and how much a poorly managed bank needs. In a sense, the authors are proposing that all banks, good and bad, should be made to hold the capital required by bad banks. Their focus on highlighting the risks of banking obscures the fact that prudent banking mitigates the downside and that well managed banks are not necessarily consigned to the extremes of risk the authors present as the norm of banking.

While not expressed in exactly that way, the distinction I am drawing is implicit in Basel III’s Total Loss Absorbing Capital (TLAC) requirements now being put in place. TLAC adds a substantial layer of additional loss absorption on top of already substantially strengthened common equity requirements. The base layer of capital can be thought of as what is required for a well managed, well supervised bank with a sound balance sheet and business model. APRA’s “Unquestionably Strong” benchmark for CET1 is a practical example of what this requirement looks like. The problem of course is that all banks argue they are good banks but the risk remains that they are in fact bad banks and we usually don’t find out the difference until it is too late. The higher TLAC requirement provides for this contingency.

What should count as capital?

I looked at this question in a recent post on the RBNZ’s proposal that virtually all of their TLAC requirement should be comprised of common equity. Admati and Hellwig side with the RBNZ but I believe that a mix of common equity and bail-in capital (along the lines proposed by APRA) is the better solution.

Read my earlier post for the long version, but the essence of my argument is that bail-in capital introduces a better discipline over bank management risk appetite than does holding more common equity. Calibrating common equity requirements to very high standards should always be the foundation of a bank capital structure. Capital buffers in particular should be calibrated to withstand very severe external shocks and to be resilient against some slippage in risk management.

The argument that shareholders’ need to have more “skin in the game” is very valid where the company is undercapitalised. Bail-in capital is not a substitute for getting the basics right. A bank that holds too little common equity, calibrated to an idealised view of both its own capabilities and of the capacity of the external environment to surprise the modellers, will likely find itself suppressing information that does not fit the model. Loss aversion then kicks in and management start taking more risk to win back that which was lost, just as Admati and Hellwig argue.

However, once you have achieved a position that is unquestionably strong, holding more common equity does not necessarily enhance risk management discipline. My experience in banking is that it may in fact be more likely to breed an undesirable sense of complacency or even to create pressure to improve returns. I know that the later is not a a winning strategy in the long run but in the short run the market frequently does not care.

What is the minimum return an equity investor requires?

One of the problems I find with a simplistic application of Modigliani & Miller’s (M&M) capital irrelevancy argument is that it does not seem to consider if there is a minimum threshold return for an equity investment below which the investment is no longer sufficiently attractive to investors who are being asked to take first loss positions in a company; i.e. where is the line between debt and equity where a return is simply not high enough to be attractive to equity investors?

Reframing the question in this way suggests that the debate between the authors and the bankers may be more about whether risk based capital adequacy models (including stress testing) can be trusted than it is about the limitations of M&M in the real world.

Summary

The author’s solution to prudential supervision of banks is a shock and awe approach to capital that seeks to make the risk of insolvency de minimus for good banks and bad. I have done my best to be open to their arguments and indeed do agree with a number of them. My primary concern with the path they advocate is that I do not believe the extra “skin in the game” generates the risk management benefits they claim.

I see more potential in pursuing a capital structure based on

a level of common equity that is robustly calibrated to the needs of a well managed (and well supervised) bank
incorporating a well designed counter cyclical capital buffer,
supplemented with another robust layer of bail-in capital that imposes real costs (and accountability) on the shareholders and management of banks for whom this level of common equity proves insufficent.

The authors argue that the authorities would never use these bail-in powers for fear of further destabilising funding markets. This is a valid area of debate but I believe they conflate the risks of imposing losses on bank depositors with the kinds of risks that professional bond investors have traditionally absorbed over many centuries of banking. The golden era in which the TBTF factor shielded bank bondholders from this risk is coming to the end but this broader investment class of bond holders has dealt with defaults by all kinds of borrowers. I am not sure why banks would be special in this regard if countries can default. The key issue is that the investors enter into the contract with the knowledge that they are at risk and are being paid a risk premium commensurate with the downside (which may not be that large if investors judge the banks to be well managed).

This is a complex topic so please let me know if I have missed something fundamental or have otherwise mis-represented Admati and Hellwig’s thesis. In the interim, I remain mostly unconvinced …

Tony

It is worth noting that NZ has adopted a different path with respect to deposit protection, rejecting both deposit preference and deposit insurance. They also have a unique policy tool (Open Bank Resolution) that allows the RBNZ to impose losses on deposits as part of the resolution process. They are reviewing the case for deposit insurance and I believe should also reconsider deposit preference.

How much capital is enough? – The NZ perspective

The RBNZ has delivered the 4th instalment in a Capital Review process that was initiated in March 2017 and has a way to run yet. The latest consultation paper addresses the question “How much capital is enough?”. The banking industry has until 29 March 2019 to respond with their views but the RBNZ proposed answer is:

A Tier 1 capital requirement of 16% of RWA for systemically important banks and 15% of RWA for all other banks
The Tier 1 minimum requirement to remain unchanged at 6% (with AT1 capital continuing to be eligible to contribute a maximum of 1.5 percentage points)
The proposed increased capital requirement to be implemented via an overall prudential capital buffer of 9-10% of RWA comprised entirely of CET1 capital;
- Capital Conservation Buffer 7.5% (currently 2.5%)
- D-SIB Buffer 1.0% (no change)
- Counter-cyclical buffer 1.5% (currently 0%)

The increase in the capital ratio requirement is proposed to be supplemented with a series of initiatives that will increase the RWA of IRB banks:

The RBNZ proposes to 1) remove the option to apply IRB RW to sovereign and bank exposures, 2) increase the IRB scalar (from 1.06 to 1.20) and 3) to introduce an output floor set at 85% of the Standardised RWA on an aggregate portfolio basis
As at March 2018, RWA’s produced by the IRB approach averaged 76% of the Standardised Approach and the RBNZ estimate that the overall impact will be to increase the aggregate RWA to 90% of the outcome generated by the Standardised approach (i.e. the IRB changes, not the output floor, drive the increase in RWA)
Aggregate RWA across the four IRB banks therefore increases by approximately 16%, or $39bn, compared to March 2018 but the exact impact will depend on how IRB banks respond to the higher capital requirements

The RBNZ has also posed the question whether a Tier 2 capital requirement continues to be relevant given the substantial increase in Tier 1 capital.

Some preliminary thoughts …

There is a lot to unpack in this paper so this post will only scratch the surface of the issues it raises …

The overall number that the RBNZ proposes (16%) is not surprising.It looks to be at the lower end of what other prudential regulators are proposing in nominal terms
But is in the same ball park once you allow for the substantial increase in IRB RWA and the fact that it is pretty much entirely CET1 capital
What is really interesting is the fundamentally different approach that the RBNZ has adopted to Tier 2 capital and bail-in versus what APRA (and arguably the rest of the world) has adopted
- The RBNZ proposal that the increased capital requirement take the form of CET1 capital reflects its belief that “contingent convertible instruments” should be excluded from what counts as capital
- Exactly why the RBNZ has adopted this position is a complex post in itself (their paper on the topic can be found here) but the short version (as I understand it) is that they think bail-in capital instruments triggered by non-viability are too complex and probably won’t work anyway.
- Their suggestion that Tier 2 probably does not have a role in the capital structure they have proposed is logical if you accept their premise that Point of Non-Viability (PONV) triggers and bail-in do not work.
The RBNZ highlight a significantly enhanced role for prudential capital buffersI am generally in favour of bigger, more dynamic, capital buffers rather than higher fixed minimum requirements and I have argued previously in favour of the base rate for the counter-cyclical being a positive value (the RBNZ propose 1.5%)
- But the overall size of the total CET1 capital buffer requirement requires some more considered thought about 1) the role of bail-in structures and PONV triggers in the capital regulation toolkit (as noted above) and 2) whether the impacts of the higher common equity requirement will be as benign as the RBNZ analysis suggests
I am also not sure that the indicative capital conservation responses they have outlined (i.e. discretionary distributions limited to 60% of net earnings in the first 250bp of the buffer, falling to 30% in the next 250bp and no distributions thereafter) make sense in practice.
- This is because I doubt there will be any net earnings to distribute if losses are sufficient to reduce CET1 capital by 250bp so the increasing capital conservation requirement is irrelevant.
Last, but possibly most importantly, we need to consider the impact on the Australian parents of the NZ D-SIB banks and how APRA responds. The increase in CET1 capital proposed for the NZ subsidiaries implies that, for any given amount of CET1 capital held by the Level 2 Banking Group, the increased strength of the NZ subsidiaries will be achieved at the expense of the Australian banking entities
- Note however that the impact of the higher capital requirement in NZ will tend to be masked by the technicalities of how bank capital ratios are calculated.
  - It probably won’t impact the Level 2 capital ratios at all since these are a consolidated view of the combined banking group operations of the Group as a whole
  - The Level 1 capital ratios for the Australian banks also treat investments in bank subsidiaries relatively generously (capital invested in unlisted subsidiaries is treated as a 400% risk weighted asset rather than a capital deduction).

Conclusion

Overall, I believe that the RBNZ is well within its rights to expect the banks it supervises to maintain a total level of loss absorbing capital of 16% or more. The enhanced role for capital buffers is also a welcome move.

The issue is whether relying almost entirely on CET1 capital is the right way to achieve this objective. This is however an issue that has been debated for many decades with no clear resolution. It will take some time to fully unpack the RBNZ argument and figure out how best to articulate why I disagree. In the interim, any feedback on the issues I have outlined above would be most welcome.

Tony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony

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

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

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

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

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

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