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
This link takes you to the last of a 7 episode podcast Michael Lewis has done on the role of experts
podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/against-the-rules-with-michael-lewis/id1455379351
The whole series is highly recommended but I especially like this quote in which he attempts to sum up the series
“Life eventually humbles us all. What I love about experts, the best of them anyway, is that they get to their humility early, they have to, it’s part of who they are, it’s necessary for what they are doing. They set out to get to the bottom of something that has no bottom, and so they are reminded, constantly, of what they don’t know. They move through the world focussed not on what they know but on what they might find out.”
In that spirit, let me know what I am missing
Tony – From the Outside
I recently flagged a speech by Sam Woods (a senior official at the UK Prudential Regulation Authority) which floated some interesting ideas for what he describes as a “radically simpler, radically usable” version of the multi-layered capital buffers currently specified by the BCBS capital accord. At the time I was relying on a short summary of the speech published in the Bank Policy Institute’s “Insights” newsletter. Having now had a chance to read the speech in full I would say that there is a lot to like in what he proposes but also some ideas that I am not so sure about.
Mr Woods starts in the right place with the acknowledgment that “… the capital regime is fiendishly complex”. Complexity is rarely (if ever?) desirable so the obvious question is to identify the elements which can be removed or simplified without compromising the capacity to achieve the underlying economic objectives of the regime.
While the capital regime is fiendishly complex, its underlying economic goals are fairly simple: ensure that the banking sector has enough capital to absorb losses, preserve financial stability and support the economy through stresses.
… my guiding principle has been: any element of the framework that isn’t actually necessary to achieve those underlying goals should be removed. …
With that mind, my simple framework revolves around a single, releasable buffer of common equity, sitting above a low minimum requirement. This would be radically different from the current regime: no Pillar 2 buffers; no CCoBs, CCyBs, O-SII buffer and G-SiB buffers; no more AT1.
In practice, Mr Woods translates this simple design principle into 7 elements:
1. A single capital buffer, calibrated to reflect both microprudential and macroprudential risks.
2. A low minimum capital requirement, to maximise the size of the buffer.
3. A ‘ladder of intervention’ based on judgement for firms who enter their buffer – no mechanical triggers and thresholds.
4. The entire buffer potentially releasable in a stress.
5. All requirements met with common equity.
6. A mix of risk-weighted and leverage-based requirements.
7. Stress testing at the centre of how we set capital levels.
There is little debate that common equity should be the foundation of any capital requirement. As Mr Woods puts it
Common equity is the quintessential loss-absorbing instrument and is easy to understand.
The problem with Additional Tier 1, he argues, is that these instruments …
… introduce complexity, uncertainty and additional “trigger points” in a stress and so have no place in our stripped-down concept …
I am a huge fan of simplifying things but I think it would be a retrograde step to remove Additional Tier 1 and other “bail-in” style instruments from the capital adequacy framework. This is partly because the “skin in the game” argument for common equity is not as strong or universal as its proponents seem to believe.
The “skin in the game” argument is on solid foundations where an organisation has too little capital and shareholders confronted with a material risk of failure, but limited downside (because they have only a small amount of capital invested), have an incentive to take large risks with uncertain payoffs. That is clearly undesirable but it is not a fair description of the risk reward payoff confronting bank shareholders who have already committed substantial increased common equity in response to the new benchmarks of what it takes to be deemed a strong bank.
I am not sure that any amount of capital will change the kinds of human behaviour that see banks mistakenly take on outsize, failure inducing, risk exposures because they think that they have found some unique new insight into risk or have simply forgotten the lessons of the past. The value add of Additional Tier 1 and similar “bail-in” instruments is that they enable the bank to be recapitalised with a material injection of common equity while imposing a material cost (via dilution) on the shareholders that allowed the failure of risk management to metastasise. The application of this ex post cost as the price of failure is I think likely to be a far more powerful force of market discipline than applying the same amount of capital before the fact to banks both good and bad.
In addition to the potential role AT1 play when banks get into trouble, AT1 investors also have a much greater incentive to monitor (and constrain) excessive risk taking than the common equity holders do because they don’t get any upside from this kind of business activity. AT1 investors obviously do not get the kinds of voting rights that common shareholders do but they do have the power to refuse to provide the funds that banks need to meet their bail-in capital requirements. This veto power is I think vastly underappreciated in the current design of the capital framework.
Any efforts at simplification could be more usefully directed to the AT1 instruments themselves. I suspect that some of the complexity can be attributed to efforts to make the instruments look and act like common equity. Far better I think to clearly define their role as one of providing “bail-in” capital to be used only in rare circumstances and for material amounts and define their terms and conditions to meet that simple objective.
There seems, for example, to be an inordinate amount of prudential concern applied to the need to ensure that distributions on these instruments are subject to the same restrictions as common equity when the reality is that the amounts have a relatively immaterial impact on the capital of the bank and that the real value of the instruments lie in the capacity to convert their principal into common equity. For anyone unfamiliar with the way that these instruments facilitate and assign loss absorption under bail-in I had a go at a deeper dive on the topic here.
I am not an expert on the Bank of England’s application of the Basel capital accord but I for one have always found their Pillar 2B methodology a bit confusing (and I like to think that I do mostly understand capital adequacy). The problem for me is that Pillar 2B seems to be trying to answer much the same question as a well constructed stress testing model applied to calibration of the capital buffer. So eliminating the Pillar 2B element seems like a step towards a simpler, more transparent approach with less potential for duplication and confusion.
I am less convinced that a “single capital buffer” is a good idea but this is not a vote for the status quo. The basic structure of a …
… seems sound and intuitive to me.
What I would change is the way that the Countercyclical Capital Conservation Buffer (CCyB) is calibrated. This part of the prudential capital buffer framework has been used too little to date and has tended to be applied in an overly mechanistic fashion. This is where I would embrace Mr Woods’ proposal that stress testing become much more central to the calibration of the CCyB and more explicitly tied to the risk appetite of the entity conducting the process.
I wrote a long post back in 2019 where I set out my thoughts on why every bank needs a cyclical capital buffer. I argued then that using stress testing to calibrate the cyclical component of the target capital structure offered an intuitive way of translating the risk appetite reflected in all the various risk limits into a capital adequacy counterpart. Perhaps more importantly,
I have also seen a suggestion by Douglas Elliott (Oliver Wyman) that a portion of the existing CCB be transferred into a larger CCyB which I think is worth considering if we ever get the chance to revisit the way the overall prudential buffers are designed. This makes more sense to me than fiddling with the minimum capital requirement.
As part of this process I would also be inclined to revisit the design of the Capital Conservation Ratio (CCR) applied as CET1 capital falls below specified quartiles of the Capital Conservation Buffer. This is another element of the Basel Capital Accord that is well intentioned (banks should respond to declining capital by retaining an increasing share of their profits) that in practice tends to be much more complicated in practice than it needs to be.
Sadly, explaining exactly why the CCR is problematic as currently implemented would double the word count of this post (and probably still be unintelligible to anyone who has not had to translate the rules into a spreadsheet) so I will leave that question alone for today.
Mr Woods has done us all a service by raising the question of whether the capital buffer framework delivered by the Basel Capital Accord could be simplified while improving its capacity to achieve its primary prudential and economic objectives. I don’t agree with all of the elements of the alternative he puts up for discussion but that is not really the point. The important point is to realise that the capital buffer framework we have today is not as useful as it could be and that really matters for helping ensure (as best we can) that we do not find ourselves back in a situation where government finds that bailing out the banks is its least worst option.
I have offered my thoughts on things we could do better but the ball really sits with the Basel Committee to reopen the discussion on this area of the capital adequacy framework. That will not happen until a broader understanding of the problems discussed above emerges so all credit to Mr Woods for attempting to restart that discussion.
As always let me know what I am missing …
Tony – From the Outside
I came across this proposal via the Bank Policy Institute’s weekly “Insights” email update
I have not read the speech yet but the summary offered by the BPI suggests that the proposal is worth reviewing in part because it highlights that a key part of the Basel III framework remains a work in progress
Here is the BPI’s summary
Prudential Regulatory Authority chief Sam Woods suggested making the U.K.’s bank capital framework simpler and more flexible. In a speech this week, Woods said regulators should make capital buffers more usable – in other words, entice banks to dip into them to lend during stressful times. The suggested framework, which Woods compared to a concept car and dubbed the “Basel Bufferati,” would be “radically simpler, radically usable, and a million miles away from the current debate but which might prove instructive over the longer term.” It centers on “a single, releasable buffer of common equity, sitting above a low minimum requirement.” It would also replace automatic thresholds with a “ladder of intervention” and feature a mix of risk-weighted and leverage-based requirements. The buffer would be determined using the results of the stress tests that would sit on top of standardized risk weights, which is a concept similar to the current U.S. regime. Therefore, “a lot of the sophistication which currently resides in modelling risk-weights would move into stress testing.”
Tony – From the Outside
The RBNZ just released the results of the stress testing conducted by itself and a selection of the larger NZ banks to test resilience to the risks posed by COVID 19.
The extract below summarises the process the RBNZ followed and its key conclusions:
COVID-19 stress test consisted of two parts. First, a desktop stress test where the Reserve Bank estimated the impact on profitability and capital for nine of New Zealand’s largest banks to the impact of two severe but plausible scenarios. Second, the Reserve Bank coordinated a process in which the five largest banks used their own models to estimate the effect on their banks for the same scenarios.
The pessimistic baseline scenario can be characterised as a one-in-50 to one-in-75 year event with the unemployment rate rising to 13.4 percent and a 37 percent fall in property prices. In the very severe scenario, the unemployment rate reaches 17.7 percent and house prices fall 50 percent. It should be noted that these scenarios are hypothetical and are significantly more severe than the Reserve Banks’ baseline scenario.
The overall conclusion from the Reserve Bank’s modelling is that banks could draw on their existing capital buffers and continue lending to support lending in the economy during a downturn of the severity of the pessimistic baseline scenario. However, in the more severe scenario, banks capital fell below the regulatory minimums and would require significant mitigating actions including capital injections to continue lending. This reinforces the need for strong capital buffers to provide resilience against severe but unlikely events.
The results of this stress test supports decisions that were made as part of the Capital Review to increase bank capital levels. The findings will help to inform Reserve Bank decisions on the timing of the implementation of the Capital Review, and any changes to current dividend restrictions.
“Outcome from a COVID-19 stress test of New Zealand banks”, RBNZ Bulletin Vol 83, No 3 September 2020
I have only skimmed the paper thus far but there is one detail I think worth highlighting for anyone not familiar with the detail of how bank capital adequacy is measured – specifically the impact of Risk Weighted Assets on the decline in capital ratios.
The RBNZ includes two useful charts which decompose the aggregate changes in CET1 capital ratio by year two of the scenario.
In the “Pessimistic Baseline Scenario”(PBS), the aggregate CET1 ratio declines 3.7 percentage points to 7.7 percent. This is above both the regulatory minimum and the threshold for mandatory conversion of Additional Tier 1 Capital. What I found interesting was that RWA growth contributed 2.2 percentage points to the net decline.
The RBNZ quite reasonably points out that banks will amplify the downturn if they restrict the supply of credit to the economy but I think it is also reasonable to assume that the overall level of loan outstandings is not growing and may well be shrinking due to the decline in economic activity. So a substantial portion of the decline in the aggregate CET1 ratio is due to the increase in average risk weights as credit quality declines. The C ET1 ratio is being impacted not only by the increase in impairment expenses reducing the numerator, there is a substantial added decline due to the way that risk weighted assets are measured
In the “Very Severe Scenario”(VSS), the aggregate CET1 ratio declines 5.6 percentage points to 5.8 percent. The first point to note here is that CET1 only remains above the 4.5% prudential minimum by virtue of the conversion of 1.6 percentage points of Additional Tier 1 Capital. Assuming 100% of AT1 was converted, this also implies that the Tier 1 ratio is below the 6.0% prudential minimum.
These outcomes provide food for thought but I few points I think wroth considering further before accepting the headline results at face value:
As always, it is entirely possible that I am missing something but I feel that the answer to bank resilience is not just a higher capital ratio. A deeper understanding of the pro cyclicality embedded in the system will I think allow us to build a better capital adequacy framework. As yet I don’t see this topic getting the attention it deserves.
Tony – From the Outside
The ever reliable Matt Levine discusses the latest stress test results for the US banks. In particular the disconnect between the severity of the assumptions in the hypothetical scenario and the actual results observed to date. He notes that it is still early and plenty of room for the actual outcomes to catch up with the hypothetical. However, one of the issues with stress testing is the way you model the way people (and governments) respond to stress.
As Matt puts it …
But another important answer is that, when a crisis actually happens, people do something about it. They react, and try to make it better. In the case of the coronavirus crisis, the Fed and the U.S. government tried to mitigate the effect of a real disaster on economic and financial conditions. Unemployment is really high, but some of the consequences are mitigated by stimulus payments and increased unemployment benefits. Asset prices fell sharply, but then rose sharply as the Fed backstopped markets. Financing markets seized up, and then the Fed fixed them.
The banks themselves also acted to make things better, at least for themselves. One thing that often happens in a financial crisis is that banks’ trading desks make a killing trading for clients in turbulent markets, which helps to make up for some of the money they lose on bad loans. And in fact many banks had blowout first quarters in their trading divisions: Clients wanted to trade and would pay a lot for liquidity, and banks took their money.
In a hypothetical stress test, you can’t really account for any of this. If you’re a bank, and the Fed asks you to model how you’d handle a huge financial crisis, you can’t really write down “I would simply make a ton of money trading derivatives.” It is too cute, too optimistic. But in reality, lots of banks just went and did that.
Similarly, you obviously can’t write down “I would simply rely on the Fed to backstop asset prices and liquidity.” That is super cheating. Much of the purpose of the stress tests is to make it so the Fed doesn’t have to bail out the banking system; the point is to demonstrate that the banks can survive a financial crisis on their own without government support. But in reality, having a functioning financial system is better than not having that, so the Fed did intervene; keeping people in their homes is better than foreclosing on them, so the government supported incomes. So the banks are doing much better than you might expect with 13.3% unemployment.
So it is likely that the Fed’s stress test is both not harsh enough, in its economic scenario, and too harsh, in its assumption about how that scenario will affect banks.
Notwithstanding the potential for people to respond to and mitigate stress, there is still plenty of room for reality to catch up with and exceed the hypothetical scenario. Back to Matt…
But the fact that the stress test imagines an economic crisis that is much nicer than reality is still a little embarrassing, and the Fed can’t really say “everything is fine even in the terrible downside case of 10% unemployment, the banks are doing great.” So it also produced some new stress-test results (well, not quite a full stress test but a “sensitivity analysis”) assuming various scenarios about the recovery from the Covid crisis (“a rapid V-shaped recovery,” “a slower, more U-shaped recovery,” and “a W-shaped double dip recession”). The banks are much less well capitalized in those scenarios than they are either (1) now or (2) in the original stress tests, though mostly still okay, and the Fed is asking the banks to reconsider stress and capital based on current reality. Also stop share buybacks:
Worth reading
Tony – From the Outside
A BIS paper titled “Green Swan 2 – Climate change and Covid-19: reflections on efficiency versus resilience” initially caught my attention because of the reference to the tension between efficiency versus resilience. This tension is, for me at least, one of the issues that has tended to be ignored in the pursuit of growth and optimised solutions. The papers mainly deal with the challenges that climate change creates for central banks but I think there are also some insights to be drawn on what it means for bank capital management.
A core argument in the paper is that challenges like climate change and pandemics ….
“… require us to rethink the trade-offs between efficiency and resilience of our socio-economic systems … one way to address this issue is to think about buffers or some necessary degree of redundancy for absorbing such large shocks. Countries build FX reserves, banks maintain capital buffers as required by regulators, and so on. Perhaps similar “buffers” could be used in other areas of our societies. For example, could it be time to reassess our production systems, which are meant to be lean and less costly for maximum efficiency?”
The paper draws on a (much longer and more technical) BIS research paper titled “The green swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change”. Both papers contain the usual caveat that the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of their respective institutions. With that warning noted, this post draws on both papers to make some observations about what the papers say, and what this means for bank capital management.
There is a lot of content in the combined papers but the points that resonated the most with me were
I am not an expert on climate change modelling, but Chapter 3 of the second paper also has what looks to be a useful overview of the models used to analyse climate change and how the outputs of these models are used to generate economic impacts.
Climate change clearly operates in the domain of radical uncertainty. As such it shares some common elements with “black swan” events; in particular the fact that conventional risk models and analysis are not well suited to measuring and managing the potential adverse impacts. It is equally important however to understand the ways in which climate change differs from a classic black swan event. There is a longer list but the ones that I found most relevant were:
Given the conceptual differences, the authors classify Climate Change as a distinct form which they label a “Green Swan”. To the best of my knowledge, this may be the first time the term has been used in this way. That said, the general point they are making seems to be quite similar to what other authors have labelled as “Grey Rhinos” or “Black Elephants” (the latter an obvious allusion to the “elephant in the room”, a large risk that is visible to everyone but no one wants to address).
The papers distinguish two main channels through which climate change can affect financial stability – physical risks and transition risks.
Physical risks are defined as
… “those risks that arise from the interaction of climate-related hazards […] with the vulnerability of exposure to human and natural systems” (Batten et al (2016)). They represent the economic costs and financial losses due to increasing frequency and severity of climate-related weather events (eg storms, floods or heat waves) and the effects of long-term changes in climate patterns (eg ocean acidification, rising sea levels or changes in precipitation). The losses incurred by firms across different financial portfolios (eg loans, equities, bonds) can make them more fragile.
Transition risks are defined as those
“… associated with the uncertain financial impacts that could result from a rapid low-carbon transition, including policy changes, reputational impacts, technological breakthroughs or limitations, and shifts in market preferences and social norms.
A rapid and ambitious transition to lower emissions, for example, would obviously be desirable from the perspective of addressing climate change but might also mean that a large fraction of proven reserves of fossil fuel cannot be extracted, becoming “stranded assets”. The write down of the value of these assets may have potentially systemic consequences for the financial system. This transition might occur in response to policy changes or by virtue of some technological breakthrough (e.g. problem of generating cheap energy by nuclear fusion is solved).
I started this post with a quote from the first (shorter) paper regarding the way in which the Covid 19 had drawn attention to the extent to which the pursuit of efficiency had made our economies more fragile. The paper explores the ways in which the COVID 19 pandemic exhibits many of the same features that we see in the climate change problem and how the global response to the COVID 19 pandemic might offer some insights into how we should respond to climate change.
The paper is a useful reminder of the nature of the problem but I am less confident that it offers a solution that will work without some form of regulation or public sector investment in the desired level of redundancy. The paper cites bank capital buffers introduced post GFC as an example of what to do but this was a regulated outcome that would most likely not be acceptable for non-financial companies in countries that remain committed to free market ideology.
The Economist published an article on this question that offered numerous examples of similar problems that illustrate the propensity of “humanity, at least as represented by the world’s governments … to ignore them until forced to react” .
Thomas Friedman’s article (“How we broke the world”) is also worth reading on this question …
If recent weeks have shown us anything, it’s that the world is not just flat. It’s fragile.
And we’re the ones who made it that way with our own hands. Just look around. Over the past 20 years, we’ve been steadily removing man-made and natural buffers, redundancies, regulations and norms that provide resilience and protection when big systems — be they ecological, geopolitical or financial — get stressed. We’ve been recklessly removing these buffers out of an obsession with short-term efficiency and growth, or without thinking at all.
The New York Times, 30 May 2020
The second paper, in particular, argues that it is important to improve our understanding of the costs of climate change and to ensure that these costs are incorporated into the prices that drive the resources we allocate to dealing with the challenge (e.g. via a carbon price or tax). However one of its key conclusions is that relying on markets to solve the problem is unlikely to be sufficient even with the help of some form of carbon price that reflects a more complete account of the costs of our current carbon based economy.
In short, the development and improvement of forward-looking risk assessment and climate- related regulation will be essential, but they will not suffice to preserve financial stability in the age of climate change: the deep uncertainty involved and the need for structural transformation of the global socioeconomic system mean that no single model or scenario can provide sufficient information to private and public decision-makers. A corollary is that the integration of climate-related risks into prudential regulation and (to the extent possible) into monetary policy would not suffice to trigger a shift capable of hedging the whole system again against green swan events.
The green swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change; Chapter 5 (page 66)
Both papers highlight the limitations of trying to measure and understand climate change using conventional probability based risk management tools. The one area they do see as worth pursuing is using scenario based approaches. This makes sense to me but it is also important to distinguish this kind of analysis from the standard stress testing used to help calibrate capital buffers.
The standard application of stress testing takes a severe but plausible macro economic scenario such as a severe recession and determines what are the likely impacts on capital adequacy ratios. This offers a disciplined way of deciding how much capital surplus is required to support the risk appetite choices a bank has made in pursuit of its business objectives.
A simplistic application of climate based stress testing scenarios might take the same approach; i.e. work out how much the scenario impacts the capital and ensure that the buffer is sufficient to absorb the impact. That I think is not the right conclusion and my read of the BIS papers is that they are not advocating that either. The value of the scenario based modelling is to first get a handle on the size of the problem and how exposed the bank is to it. A capital response may be required but the answer may also be to change the nature of your exposure to the risk. That may involve reduced risk limits but it may also involve active participation in collective action to address the underlying problem. A capital management response may be part of the solution but it is far from the first step.
I have only scratched the surface of this topic in this post but the two papers it references are worth reading if you are interested in the question of what climate change, and related Green Swan or Black Elephant problems, mean for the banking system and for central banking. There is a bit more technical detail in the appendix below but it is likely only of interest for people working at the sharp end of trying to measure and manage the problem.
I want to dig deeper into the question of how you use stress testing to assess climate change and related types of risk but that is a topic best left for another post.
Tony – From the outside
Section 3 of the longer paper (“Measuring climate-related risks with scenario-based approaches”) discusses the limitations of the models that are typically used to generate estimates of the ecological and financial impacts of climate change scenarios. There is plenty of material there for climate sceptics but it also assists true believers to understand the limits of what they can actually know and how coming to terms with the radical uncertainty of how climate change plays out shapes the nature of our response.
I have copied some extracts from the chapter below that will give you a flavour of what it has to say. It is pretty technical so be warned …
“… the standard approach to modelling financial risk consisting in extrapolating historical values (eg PD, market prices) is no longer valid in a world that is fundamentally reshaped by climate change (Weitzman (2011), Kunreuther et al (2013)). In other words, green swan events cannot be captured by traditional risk management.
The current situation can be characterised as an “epistemological obstacle” (Bachelard (1938)). The latter refers to how scientific methods and “intellectual habits that were useful and healthy” under certain circumstances, can progressively become problematic and hamper scientific research. Epistemological obstacles do not refer to the difficulty or complexity inherent to the object studied (eg measuring climate-related risks) but to the difficulty related to the need of redefining the problem”
Page 21
nothing less than an epistemological break (Bachelard, 1938) or a “paradigm shift” (Kuhn (1962)) is needed today to overcome this obstacle and more adequately approach climate-relate risks (Pereira da Silva (2019a)).
In fact, precisely an epistemological break may be taking place in the financial sector: recently emerged methodologies aim to assess climate-related risks while relying on the fundamental hypothesis that, given the lack of historical financial data related to climate change and the deep uncertainty involved, new approaches based on the analysis of prospective scenarios are needed. Unlike probabilistic approaches to financial risk management, they seek to set up plausible hypotheses for the future. This can help financial institutions integrate climate-related risks into their strategic and operational procedures (eg for the purpose of asset allocation, credit rating or insurance underwriting) and financial supervisors assess the vulnerability of specific institutions or the financial system as a whole
Climate-economic models and forward-looking risk analysis are important and can still be improved, but they will not suffice to provide all the information required to hedge against “green swan” events.
As a result of these limitations, two main avenues of action have been proposed. We argue that they should be pursued in parallel rather than in an exclusive manner. First, central banks and supervisors could explore different approaches that can better account for the uncertain and nonlinear features of climate-related risks. Three particular research avenues (see Box 5 below) consist in: (i) working with non- equilibrium models; (ii) conducting sensitivity analyses; and (iii) conducting case studies focusing on specific risks and/or transmission channels. Nevertheless, the descriptive and normative power of these alternative approaches remain limited by the sources of deep and radical uncertainty related to climate change discussed above. That is, the catalytic power of scenario-based analysis, even when grounded in approaches such as non-equilibrium models, will not be sufficient to guide decision-making towards a low-carbon transition.
As a result of this, the second avenue from the perspective of maintaining system stability consists in “going beyond models” and in developing more holistic approaches that can better embrace the deep or radical uncertainty of climate change as well as the need for system-wide action (Aglietta and Espagne (2016), Barmes (2019), Chenet et al (2019a), Ryan-Collins (2019), Svartzman et al (2019)).
Pages 42 – 43
Embracing deep or radical uncertainty therefore calls for a second “epistemological break” to shift from a management of risks approach to one that seeks to assure the resilience of complex adaptive systems in the face of such uncertainty (Fath et al (2015), Schoon and van der Leeuw (2015)).38 In this view, the current efforts aimed at measuring, managing and supervising climate-related risks will only make sense if they take place within a much broader evolution involving coordination with monetary and fiscal authorities, as well as broader societal changes such as a better integration of sustainability into financial and economic decision-making.
Page 48
Matt Levine’s “Money Stuff” column (Bloomberg) offers some interesting commentary on what is happening with bank dividends in the US. Under the sub heading “People are worried about dividends” he writes:
So, again, I am generally pretty impressed by the performance of bank regulation in the current crisis, but this is unfortunate:
US banks’ annual capital plans, due to be submitted to the Federal Reserve on Monday, are expected to include proposals to continue paying dividends, reinforcing comments from prominent bank chief executives in recent days, according to people familiar with the situation.
The bankers, including Goldman Sachs boss David Solomon, Morgan Stanley boss James Gorman and Citigroup chief Mike Corbat, argued that they had the means to continue paying dividends and that cutting them would be “destabilising to investors”.
“We’re in a very different position than what we see in Europe,” said Marty Mosby, a veteran banks analyst at Vining Sparks.
“How we set it up [post-crisis capital requirements] was to be able to not have those dividends collapse [in a crisis]. That’s what creates a financial crisis: when dividends start to be ratcheted lower that shakes confidence.”
What is unfortunate is not so much that U.S. banks want to continue paying dividends; for all I know some of them are so well capitalized and so well equipped to weather this crisis that they will actually make a lot of money and have plentiful profits to pay out to shareholders. What is unfortunate is that their explicit view is that cutting dividends would be destabilizing. Common shareholders are supposed to be the lowest-ranking claimants on a bank’s money. The point of equity capital is that you don’t have to pay it out, that it doesn’t create any cash drain in difficult times. But if your view is “we need to maintain our dividend every quarter or else there will be a run on the bank,” then that means that the dividend is destabilizing; it means that your common stock is really debt; it means that your equity capital is not as good—not as equity-like—as it’s supposed to be.
If you take seriously the claim that banks can’t cut dividends in a generational crisis, for fear of undermining investor confidence, then, fine, I guess, but then the obvious conclusion is that when times are good you can never let banks raise their dividends. Every time a bank raises its dividend, on this theory, it incurs more unavoidable quarterly debt and creates a new drain on its funding, one that can’t be turned off in the bad times for fear of being “destabilising to investors”
Bloomberg Opinion “Money Stuff” 7 April 2020
I get the argument that if banks have the means to pay a dividend then they should be free to make a commercial decision. People may however feel entitled to be skeptical given the ways in which some banks were slow to adjust to the new realities of the GFC. There is also a line where the position some US banks appear to be projecting risks becoming an expectation that the dividend should be stable even under a highly stressed and uncertain outlook. It is not clear if that is exactly what the US banks quoted in his column are saying but that is how Matt Levine frames it and it would clearly be a concern if that is their view. That does seem to a fair description of the view some investors and analysts are expressing.
Jamie Dimon seems to be offering a more nuanced perspective on this question. He has advised JP Morgan shareholders that the Board expects the bank to remain profitable under its base base projections but would consider suspending the dividend under an extremely adverse scenario.
Our 2019 pretax earnings were $48 billion – a huge and powerful earnings stream that enables us to absorb the loss of revenues and the higher credit costs that inevitably follow a crisis. For comparison, the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) results for 2020 that we submitted to the Federal Reserve in 2019 (which assumed outcomes like U.S. unemployment peaking at 10% and the stock market falling 50%) showed a decline in revenue of almost 20% and credit costs of approximately $20 billion more than what we experienced in 2019. We believe we would perform better than this if the Fed’s scenario were to actually occur. But even in the Fed’s scenario, we would be profitable in every quarter. These stress test results also show that following such a meaningful reduction in our revenue (and assuming we continue to pay dividends), our common equity Tier 1 (CET1) ratio would likely hold at a very strong 10%, and we would have in excess of $500 billion of liquid assets.
Additionally, we have run an extremely adverse scenario that assumes an even deeper contraction of gross domestic product, down as much as 35% in the second quarter and lasting through the end of the year, and with U.S. unemployment continuing to increase, peaking at 14% in the fourth quarter. Even under this scenario, the company would still end the year with strong liquidity and a CET1 ratio of approximately 9.5% (common equity Tier 1 capital would still total $170 billion). This scenario is quite severe and, we hope, unlikely. If it were to play out, the Board would likely consider suspending the dividend even though it is a rather small claim on our equity capital base. If the Board suspended the dividend, it would be out of extreme prudence and based upon continued uncertainty over what the next few years will bring.
It is also important to be aware that in both our central case scenario for 2020 results and in our extremely adverse scenario, we are lending – currently or plan to do so – an additional $150 billion for our clients’ needs. Despite this, our capital resources and liquidity are very strong in both models. We have over $500 billion in total liquid assets and an incremental $300+ billion borrowing capacity at the Federal Reserve and Federal Home Loan Banks, if needed, to support these loans, as well as meet our liquidity requirements (these numbers do not include the potential use of some of the Fed’s newly created facilities). We could, of course, make our capital and liquidity buffer better by restricting our activities, but we do not intend to do that – our clients need us.
JP Morgan Chairman and CEO Letter to Shareholders 2019 Annual Report
Stress testing models must of course be treated with caution but what I think this mostly illustrates is that banks are highly cyclical investments. That may seem like a statement of the obvious but there was a narrative post GFC that banks were public utilities and that bank shareholders should expect to earn public utility style returns on their investments.
There is an element of truth in this analogy in so far as banks clearly provide an essential public service. I am also sympathetic to the argument that banking is a form of private/public partnership. This pandemic is however a timely reminder of the limits of the argument that banks are just another low risk utility style of business. Bank shareholders are much more exposed to the cyclical impacts than true utility investments.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have a substantial exposure to bank shares and I for one need a lot more than a single digit return to compensate for the pain that part of my portfolio is currently experiencing. The only upside is that I never bought into the thesis that banks are a low risk utility style investment requiring a commensurately low return.
The higher capital and liquidity requirements built up in response to the lessons of the GFC increase the odds that banks will survive the crisis and be a big part of the solution but banks are, and remain, quintessentially cyclical investments and the return bank investors require should reflect this. I think the lesson here is not to worry about the extent to which dividend cuts would be destabilising to investors but to focus on what kind of return is commensurate with the risk.
APRA expects ADIs and insurers to limit discretionary capital distributions in the months ahead, to ensure that they instead use buffers and maintain capacity to continue to lend and underwrite insurance. This includes prudent reductions in dividends, taking into account the uncertain outlook for the operating environment and the need to preserve capacity to prioritise these critical activities.
Decisions on capital management need to be forward-looking, and in the current environment of significant uncertainty in the outlook, this can be very challenging. APRA is therefore providing Boards with the following additional guidance.2
During at least the next couple of months, APRA expects that all ADIs and insurers will:
– take a forward-looking view on the need to conserve capital and use capacity to support the economy;
– use stress testing to inform these views, and give due consideration to plausible downside scenarios (periodically refreshed and updated as conditions evolve); and
– initiate prudent capital management actions in response, on a pre-emptive basis, to ensure they maintain the confidence and capacity to continue to lend and support their customers.
During this period, APRA expects that ADIs and insurers will seriously consider deferring decisions on the appropriate level of dividends until the outlook is clearer. However, where a Board is confident that they are able to approve a dividend before this, on the basis of robust stress testing results that have been discussed with APRA, this should nevertheless be at a materially reduced level. Dividend payments should be offset to the extent possible through the use of dividend reinvestment plans and other capital management initiatives. APRA also expects that Boards will appropriately limit executive cash bonuses, mindful of the current challenging environment.
“APRA issues guidance to authorised deposit-taking institutions and insurers on capital management”, 7 April 2020
Tony (From the Outside)
This behavior makes one blind to all sorts of things.
The first blind spot … is that it treats uncertain events – items of unknowable incidence and severity – as if they were risks that could be estimated probabilistically.
Epsilon Theory ; “Lack of Imagination” 14 March 2020
One of my recent posts drew attention to an article by John Kay promoting a book he has co-written with Mervyn King on the topic of “radical uncertainty”. Epsilon Theory offers another useful perspective on the ways in which extending probabilistic thinking beyond its zone of validity can cause us to miss the big picture.
The Epsilon Theory post focusses on the Covid 19 fallout currently playing out but is also worth reading for the broader challenges it offers anyone trying to use models and probabilities to manage real world outcomes …
Tony
Nice quote from Matt Levine’s opinion piece on the change in US bank capital requirements
“Everything in bank capital is controversial so this is controversial. Usually the controversy is that some people want higher capital requirements and other people want lower capital requirements. Here, pleasantly, part of the controversy is about whether this is a higher or lower capital requirement.“
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-05/capital-rules-get-less-stressful
From the outside 