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
Interesting post on the Bank Underground blog by Bank of England staff Joel Suss and Henry Treitel.
This extract summarises their findings
“Our paper makes important contributions, not least of which is practical: bank supervisors can utilise our findings to anticipate firm weaknesses and take appropriate mitigating action ahead of time.
However, the job is not done. For one, we are missing important data which is relevant for anticipating distress. For example, we haven’t included anything that speaks directly to the quality of a firm’s management and governance, nor have we included any information on organisational culture.
Moreover, our period of study only covers 2006 to 2012 – a notoriously rocky time in the banking sector. A wider swathe of data, including both good times and bad, would help us be more confident that our models will perform well in the future.
So while prediction, especially about the future, remains tough, our research demonstrates the ability and improved clarity of machine learning methodologies. Bank supervisors, armed with high-performing and transparent predictive models, are likely to be better prepared to step-in and take action to ensure the safety and soundness of the financial system.”
This is the question that Sir Paul Tucker poses in a BIS Working Paper titled “Is the financial system sufficiently resilient: a research programme and policy agenda” (BIS WP790) and answers in the negative. Tucker’s current role as Chair of the Systemic Risk Council and his experience as Deputy Governor at the Bank of England from 2009 to 2013 suggests that, whether you agree or disagree, it is worth reading what he has to say.
Tucker is quick to acknowledge that his assessment is “… intended to jolt the reader” and recognises that he risks “… overstating weaknesses given the huge improvements in the regulatory regime since 2007/08”. The paper sets out why Tucker believes the financial system is not as resilient as claimed, together with his proposed research and policy agenda for achieving a financial system that is sufficiently resilient.
Some of what he writes is familiar ground but three themes I found especially interesting were:
Financial stability is of course one of those topics that only true die hard bank capital tragics delve into. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) demonstrated, however, that financial stability and the resilience of the banking system is also one of those topics that impacts every day life if the technocrats get it wrong. I have made some more detailed notes on the paper here for the technically inclined while this post will attempt (and likely fail) to make the issues raised accessible for those who don’t want to read BIS working papers.
Of the three themes listed above, “information insensitivity” is the one that I would call out in particular. It is admittedly a bit clunky as a catch phrase but I do believe it is worth investing the time to understand what it means and what it implies for how the financial system should be regulated and supervised. I have touched on the concept in a couple of previous posts (here, here, and here) and, as I worked through this post, I also found some interesting overlaps with the idea introduced by the Australian Financial System Inquiry that systemically important banks should be required to be “unquestionably strong”.
Tucker’s assessment is that Basel III has made the financial system a lot safer than it was but less resilient than claimed. This is because the original calibration of the higher capital requirements under Basel III did not allow for the way in which any subsequent reduction in interest rates means that monetary policy has less scope to help mitigate economic downturns. All other things being equal, any future stress will have a larger impact on the financial system because monetary policy will have less capacity to stimulate the economy.
We could quibble over details:
But his bigger point sounds intuitively right, all other things being equal, low interest rates mean that central banks will have much less scope to stimulate the economy via monetary policy. It follows that the financial system is systemically riskier at this point in time than historical experience with economic downturns might suggest.
One response is common equity and lots of it. That is what is advocated by some academic commentators , influential former central bankers such as Adair Turner and Mervyn King, and most recently by the RBNZ (with respect to the quantum and the form of capital.
Tucker argues that the increased equity requirements agreed under Basel III are necessary, but not sufficient. His point here is broader than the need to allow for changes in monetary policy discussed above. His concern is what does it take to achieve the desired level of resilience in a financial system that has fractional reserve banking at its core.
”Maintaining a resilient system cannot sanely rely on crushing the probability of distress via prophylactic regulation and supervision: a strategy that confronts the Gods in its technocratic arrogance. Instead, low barriers to entry, credible resolution regimes and crisis-management tools must combine to ensure that the system can keep going through distress. That is different from arguing that equity requirements (E) can be relaxed if resolution plans become sufficiently credible. Rather, it amounts to saying that E would need to be much higher than now if resolution is not credible.”
“Is the Financial system sufficiently resilient: a research programme and policy agenda” BIS WP 790, p 23
That is Tucker’s personal view expressed in the conclusion to the paper but he also advocates that “unelected technicians need to frame the question [of target resilience] in a digestible way for politicians and public debate“. It is especially important that the non-technical people understand the extent to which there may be trade-offs in the choice of how resilient the financial system should be. Is there, for example, a trade-off between resilience and the dynamism of the financial system that drives its capacity to support innovation, competition and growth? Do the resource misallocations associated with credit and property price booms damage the long run growth of the economy? And so on …
Turner offers a first pass at how this problem might be presented to a non-technical audience:
Staying with crisp oversimplification, I think the problem can be put as follows:
• Economists and policymakers do not know much about this. Models and empirics are needed.
• Plausibly, as BIS research suggests, credit and property price booms lead resource misallocation booms? Does that damage long-run growth?
• Even if it does, might those effects be offset by net benefits from greater entrepreneurship during booms?
• Would tough resilience policies constrain capital markets in ways that impede the allocation of resources to risky projects and so growth?
If there is a long-run trade off, then where people are averse to boom-bust ‘cycles’, resilience will be higher and growth lower. By contrast, jurisdictions that care more about growth and dynamism will err on the side of setting the resilience standard too low.
BIS WP790, Page 5
He acknowledges there are no easy answers but asking the right questions is obviously a good place to start.
In addition to helping frame the broader parameters of the problem for public debate, central bankers also need to decide what their roles and responsibilities in the financial system should be. Enter the idea of a Money-Credit Constitution (MCC). I have to confess that this was a new bit of jargon for me and I had to do a bit of research to be sure that I knew what Tucker means by it. The concept digs down into the technical aspects of central banking but it also highlights the extent to which unelected technocrats have been delegated a great deal of power by the electorate. I interpret Tucker’s use of the term “constitution”as an allusion to the need for the terms on which this power is exercised to be defined and more broadly understood.
A Money-Credit Constitution defined:
“By that I mean rules of the game for both banking and central banking designed to ensure broad monetary stability, understood as having two components: stability in the value of central bank money in terms of goods and services, and also stability of private-banking-system deposit money in terms of central bank money.”
Chapter 1: How can central banks deliver credible commitment and be “Emergency Institutions”? by John Tucker in “Central Bank Governance and Oversight Reform, edited by Cochrane and Taylor (2016)
The jargon initially obscured the idea (for me at least) but some practical examples helped clarify what he was getting at. Tucker defines the 19th and early 20th century MCC as comprising; the Gold Standard, reserve requirements for private banks and the Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) function provided by the central bank. The rules of the game (or MCC) have of course evolved over time. In the two to three decades preceding the 2008 GFC, the rules of the game incorporated central bank independence, inflation targeting and a belief in market efficiency/discipline. Key elements of that consensus were found to be woefully inadequate and we are in the process of building a new set of rules.
Tucker proposes that a MCC that is fit for the purpose of achieving an efficient and resilient financial system should have five key components:
– a target for inflation (or some other nominal magnitude);
– a requirement for banking intermediaries to hold reserves (or assets readily exchanged for reserves) that increases with a firm’s leverage and/or the degree of liquidity mismatch between its assets and liabilities;
– a liquidity-reinsurance regime for fundamentally solvent banking intermediaries;
– a resolution regime for bankrupt banks and other financial firms; and
– constraints on how far the central bank is free to pursue its mandate and structure its balance sheet, given that a monetary authority by definition has latent fiscal capabilities.
BIS WP, Page 9
In one sense, the chosen resilience strategy for the financial system is simply determined by the combination of the capital and liquidity requirements imposed on private banks. We are using the term capital here in its broadest sense to incorporate not just common equity but also the various forms of hybrid equity and subordinated debt that can be converted into equity without disrupting the financial system.
But Tucker argues that there is a bigger question of strategy that must be addressed; that is
“whether to place the regime’s weight on regulatory requirements that impose intrinsic resilience on bank balance sheets or on credible crisis management that delivers safety ex post. It is a choice with very different implications for transparency.”
BIS WP 790; Page 11
The first strategy is essentially an extension of what we have already been doing for some time; a combination of capital and liquidity requirements that limits the risk of financial crisis to some pre-determined acceptable level.
“… authorities set a regulatory minimum they think will be adequate in most circumstances and supervise intermediaries to check whether they are exposed to outsized risks.
BIS WP 790, Page 11
Capital and liquidity requirements were increased under Basel III but there was nothing fundamentally new in this part of the Basel III package. Tucker argues that the standard of resilience adopted should be explicit rather than implicit but he still doubts that this strategy is robust. His primary concern seems to be the risk that the standard of resilience is gradually diluted by a series of small concessions that only the technocrats understand.
“How did we know that firms are really satisfying the standard: is it enough that they say so? And how do we know that the authorities themselves have not quietly diluted or abandoned the standard?”
BIS WP 790; Page 11
Tucker has ideas for how this risk of regulatory capture might be controlled:
each year central bank staff (not policymakers) should publish a complete statement of all relaxations and tightenings of regulatory and supervisory policy (including in stress testing models, rules, idiosyncratic requirements, and so on)
the integrity of such assessments should be subject to external audit of some kind (possibly by the central auditor for the state).
BIS WP 790, Page 12
… but this is still a second best approach in his assessment; he argues that we can do better and the idea of making certain assets “informationally insensitive” is the organising principle driving the alternative strategies he lays out.
Tucker identifies two approaches to crisis management both based around the objective of ensuring that the value of certain agreed liabilities, issued by a defined and pre-determined set of financial intermediaries, is insensitive to information about the financial condition of these intermediaries:
Central bankers, as the suppliers of emergency liquidity assistance, could make short term liabilities informationally insensitive by requiring banks to hold reserves or eligible collateral against all runnable liabilities. Banks would be required to cover “x”% of short term liabilities with reserves and/or eligible collateral. The key policy choices then become
What Tucker is outlining here is a variation on a proposal that Mervyn King set out in his book “The End of Alchemy” which I covered in a previous post. These haircuts operate broadly analogously to the existing risk-weighted equity requirements. Given the focus on emergency requirements, they would be based on stress testing and incorporate systemic risk surcharges.
Tucker is not however completely convinced by this approach:
“… a policy of completely covering short-term labilities with central bank-eligible assets would leave uninsured short-term liabilities safe only when a bank was sound. They would not be safe when a bank was fundamentally unsound.
That is because central banks should not (and in many jurisdictions cannot legally) lend to banks that have negative net assets (since LOLR assistance would allow some short-term creditors to escape whole at the expense of equally ranked longer-term creditors). This is the MCC’s financial-stability counterpart to the “no monetary financing” precept for price stability.
Since only insured-deposit liabilities, not covered but uninsured liabilities, are then safe ex post, uninsured liability holders have incentives to run before the shutters come down, making their claims information sensitive after all.
More generally, the lower E, the more frequently banks will fail when the central bank is, perforce, on the sidelines. This would appear to take us back, then, to the regulation and supervision of capital adequacy, but in a way that helps to keep our minds on delivering safety ex post and so information insensitivity ex ante.”
BIS WP 790, Page 14
Tucker argues that the objective of resolution policy can be interpreted as making the operational liabilities of banks, dealers and other intermediaries “informationally insensitive”. He defines “operational liabilities” as “… those liabilities that are intrinsically bound to the provision of a service (eg large deposit balances, derivative transactions) or the receipt of a service (eg trade creditors) rather than liabilities that reflect a purely risk-based financial investment by the creditor and a source of funding/leverage for the bank or dealer”
Tucker proposes that this separation of operational liabilities from purely financial liabilities can be “… made feasible through a combination of bail-in powers for the authorities and, crucially, restructuring large and complex financial groups to have pure holding companies that issue the bonds to be bailed-in” (emphasis added).
Tucker sets out his argument for structural subordination as follows.
“…provided that the ailing operating companies (opcos) can be recapitalised through a conversion of debt issued to holdco …., the opcos never default and so do not go into a bankruptcy or resolution process. While there might be run once the cause of the distress is revealed, the central bank can lend to the recapitalised opco …
This turns on creditors and counterparties of opcos caring only about the sufficiency of the bonds issued to the holdco; they do not especially care about any subsequent resolution of the holding company. That is not achieved, however, where the bonds to be bailed in … are not structurally subordinated. In that respect, some major jurisdictions seem to have fallen short:
Many European countries have opted not to adopt structural subordination, but instead have gone for statutory subordination (eg Germany) or contractual subordination (eg France).
In consequence, a failing opco will go into resolution
This entails uncertainty for opco liability holders given the risk of legal challenge etc
Therefore, opco liabilities under those regimes will not be as informationally insensitive as would have been possible.
BIS WP 790, Page 15
While structural subordination is Tucker’s preferred approach, his main point is that the solution adopted should render operational liabilities informationally insensitive:
“….the choice between structural, statutory and contractual subordination should be seen not narrowly in terms of simply being able to write down and/or convert deeply subordinated debt into equity, but rather more broadly in terms of rendering the liabilities of operating intermediaries informationally insensitive. The information that investors and creditors need is not the minutiae of the banking business but the corporate finance structure that enables resolution without opcos formally defaulting or going into a resolution process themselves
BIS WP 790 , Pages 15-16
If jurisdictions choose to stick with contractual or statutory subordination, Tucker proposes that they need to pay close attention to the creditor hierarchy, especially where the resolution process is constrained by the requirement that no creditor should be worse off than would have been the case in bankruptcy. Any areas of ambiguity should be clarified ex ante and, if necessary, the granularity of the creditor hierarchy expanded to ensure that the treatment of creditors in resolution is what is fair, expected and intended.
Tucker sums up the policy implications of this part of his paper as follows ...
“The policy conclusion of this part of the discussion, then, is that in order to deliver information insensitivity for some of the liabilities of operating banks and dealers, policymakers should:
a) move towards requiring that all short-term liabilities be covered by assets eligible at the central bank; and, given that that alone cannot banish bankruptcy,
b) be more prescriptive about corporate structures and creditor hierarchies since they matter hugely in bankruptcy and resolution.”
BIS WP 790, Page 16
I am deeply touched if you actually read this far. The topic of crisis management and resolution capability is irredeemably technical but also important to get right.
Tony
This post will focus on stress testing in response to some recent papers the RBNZ released (July 2018) describing both its approach to stress testing and the outcomes from the 2017 stress test of the major banks and a speech by Wayne Byres (APRA) which offered some detail of the Australian side of the joint stress testing undertaken by APRA and the RBNZ. I intend to make some observations related to this specific stress testing exercise but also some broader points about the ways that stress testing is currently conducted. The overriding point is that the cyclical scenarios employed to calibrate capital buffers seem to focus on “what” happened with less consideration given to “why” the historical episodes of financial stress the scenarios mimic were so severe.
There will be technical detail in this post but the question, simply put, is to what extent do really bad things happen to good banking systems? Paraphrased in more technical language, are we calibrating for scenarios based on the impact of some random exogenous shock on a sound banking system, or does the scenario implicitly assume some systemic endogenous factors at play that made the financial system less resilient in the lead up to the shock? Endogenous factors may be embedded in the balance sheets of the banks (e.g. poor credit quality amplified by excessive credit growth) or perhaps they are a feature of the economic system (e.g. a fixed exchange rate regime such as confronted many European economies during the GFC) that may or may not be universally relevant. I am focusing on the RBNZ stress test to explore these points mostly because they offered the most detail but I believe their approach is very similar to APRA’s and the observations apply generally to macro economic stress testing.
No prizes for guessing that I will be arguing that the kinds of really severe downturns typically used to calibrate capital buffers are usually associated with conditions where endogenous forces within the banking system are a key element in explaining the extent of the asset price declines and weak recoveries and that the severity of some historical scenarios was arguably exacerbated by unhelpful exchange rate, monetary or fiscal policy settings. This is not to say that we should not be using very severe downturns to calibrate the resilience of capital buffers. My argument is simply that recognising this factor will help make more sense of how to reconcile the supervisory approach with internal stress testing and how best to respond to the consequences of such scenarios.
The RBNZ characterises its approach to be at the less intensive end of the spectrum of supervisory practice so “stress tests are used to provide insights into the adequacy of bank capital buffers and can highlight vulnerabilities at the bank wide level or in its various loan portfolios” but “… the use of individual bank results in setting capital buffers and promoting market discipline is relatively limited“. The RBNZ stress tests fall into three categories 1) cyclical scenarios, 2) exploratory stress tests and 3) targeted tests.
This post will focus on the cyclical scenario which was the focus of the RBNZ’s 2017 stress test and the place where the question of what happened and why it happened is most at risk of getting lost amongst the desire to make the test tough, coupled with the often daunting task of just running the test and getting some results.
The RBNZ states that the aim of a cyclical scenario is to help “… understand the resilience of participating banks to a macroeconomic downturn” so these scenarios “… mimic some of the worst downturns in advanced economies since World War 2, and typically feature sharp declines in economic activity and property prices, and stressed funding markets”. The repetition of the benchmark cyclical downturn scenario over time also allows the RBNZ “to track the resilience of the financial system over time (although the scenario will
It is hard to argue with calibrating the resilience of the banking system to a very high standard of safety. That said, the concern I have with cyclical scenarios drawn from worst case historical events is that the approach tends to skip over the question of why the downturn of such severity occurred.
The RBNZ commentary does recognise the “… need to take account of the nature of the specific stress scenario” and for the cyclical scenario to “evolve based on new research and insights, such as the extent of over-valuation evident in property markets” and the possibility that “domestic monetary policy and a falling exchange rate would provide a significant buffer … that was unavailable during many of these stress episodes in countries without floating exchange rates“. “Exploratory” and “Targeted” stress testing may also be focussed on the endogenous risks embedded in the banking system without explicitly using that terminology.
So if the RBNZ, and APRA, are implicitly aware of the endogenous/exogenous risk distinction, then maybe I am just being pedantic but I would argue that greater clarity on this aspect of stress testing helps in a number of areas:
There is not a lot of detail on individual bank outcomes. In the combined scenario, individual bank CET1 ratios declined to between 6.4% to 7.4% versus the 6.9% aggregate result. The individual buffer ratios fell to between 1.2 and 1.4% at their low points (no aggregate minimum buffer was reported).
The fact that the major banks can maintain significant buffers above minimum capital requirements during quite severe stress scenarios offers a degree of comfort, especially when you factor in the absence of mitigating responses. Minor quibble here, but it is worth noting that the aggregate data the RBNZ uses to discuss the stress testing results does not map neatly to the minimum requirements and capital buffers applied at the individual bank level. A 5.4 ppt buffer over the 4.5% CET1 buffer equates to 9.9%, not 10.3%. Looking at Figure 1 in the “outcomes” paper also shows that there was a narrower range in the CCB at its low point than there was for the CET1 ratio so part of the CCB decline observed in the stress test may be attributable to shortfalls at either the Tier 1 or Total Capital Ratio levels rather than CET1. Small point, but it does matter when interpreting what the results mean for the target capital structure and how to respond.
The RBNZ is clearly correct to question the reliability of mitigating actions and the potential for some actions, such as tightening of lending standards, to generate negative feedback effects on asset prices and economic activity. However, it is equally open to question whether the market confidence that banks rely on to fund themselves and otherwise conduct business would remain resilient in the face of a three-year continuous decline in capital ratios. So I do not think we can take too much confidence in the pre mitigation outcomes alone; the mitigating responses matter just as much.
I have always thought of the capital buffer as simply “buying time” for management to recognise the problem and craft a response that addresses the core problems in the business while creating positive momentum in capital formation. The critical question in stress testing is how much time will the markets grant before they start to hold back from dealing with your bank. Markets do not necessarily expect a magic bullet, but they do expect to see positive momentum and a coherent narrative. It would also be useful to distinguish between a core set of actions that could reasonably be relied on and other actions that are less reliable or come at a higher cost to the business.
It is hard to comment on the specific mitigating actions since the paper only reports an aggregate benefit of 1.1 ppts over the 3 years but I can make the following general observations:
I also struggled with the statement in Section 5 of the RBNZ paper that “Banks expected strong growth in retail deposits, in line with their experience during the Global Financial Crisis.”
I may well be missing something here so I am very happy to hear the other side to any of the observations I have offered above. I am big believer in the value of stress testing which is why I think it is so important to get it right.
Tony
One of the issues that we keep coming back to in stress testing is whether, 1) the financial system is inherently prone to instability and crisis or 2) the system naturally tends towards equilibrium and instability is due to external shocks. Any stress scenario that we design, or that we are asked to model, will fall somewhere along this spectrum though I suspect most scenarios tend to be based on exogenous shocks. This touches on a long standing area of economic debate and hence not something that we can expect to resolve any time soon. I think it however useful to consider the question when conducting stress testing and evaluate the outcomes.
From roughly the early 1980’s until the GFC in 2008, the dominant economic paradigm has arguably been that market forces, coupled with monetary and fiscal policy built on a sound understanding of how the economy works, meant that the business cycle was dead and that the primary challenge of policy was to engineer efficient capital allocations that maximised growth. The GFC obviously highlighted shortcomings with the conventional economic approach and drew attention to an alternative approach developed by Hyman Minsky which he labelled the Financial Instability Hypothesis.
Minsky focused on borrowing and lending with varying margins of safety as a fundamental property of all capitalist economies and identified three forms
The terms that Minsky uses do not strictly conform to modern usage but his basic idea is clear; increasingly speculative lending tends to be associated with increasing fragility of borrowers and the financial system as a whole. Ponzi financing is particularly problematic because the system is vulnerable to external shocks that can result in restricted access to finance or which cause asset devaluation cycle as borrowers to sell their assets in order to reduce their leverage. The downward pressure on assets prices associated with the deleveraging process then puts further pressure on the capacity to repay the loans and so on.
The term “Minsky moment” has been used to describe the inflexion point where debt levels become unsustainable and asset prices fall as investors seek to deleverage. Investor psychology is obviously one of the primary drivers in this three stage cycle; investor optimism translates to a willingness to borrow and to pay more for assets, the higher asset valuations in turn allow lenders to lend more against set loan to valuation caps. Lenders can also be caught up in the mood of optimism and take on more risk (e.g. via higher Loan Valuation Ratio limits or higher debt service coverage ratios). Minsky stated that “the fundamental assertion of the financial instability hypothesis is that the financial structure evolves from being robust to being fragile over a period in which the economy does well” (Financial Crises: Systemic or Idiosyncratic by Hyman Minsky, April 1991, p16).
It should also be noted that a Minsky moment does not require an external shock, a simple change in investor outlook or risk tolerance could be sufficient to trigger the reversal. Minsky observed that the tendency of the endogenous process he described to lead to systemic fragility and instability is constrained by institutions and interventions that he described as “thwarting systems” (“Market Processes and Thwarting Systems” by P. Ferri and H. Minsky, November 1991, p2). However Minsky’s FIH also assumes that there is a longer term cycle in which these constraints are gradually wound back allowing more and more risk to accumulate in the system over successive business cycles.
What Minsky describes is similar to the idea of a long term “financial cycle” (25 years plus) being distinct from the shorter duration “business cycle” (typically 7-10 years) – refer this post “The financial cycle and macroeconomics: What have we learnt?” for more detail. An important feature of this longer term financial cycle is a process that gradually transforms the business institutions, decision-making conventions, and structures of market governance, including regulation, which contribute to the stability of capitalist economies.
The transformation process can be broken down into two components
which in combination increase both the supply of and demand for risk. The process of regulatory relaxation can take a number of forms:
Borrowers also take on more risk for a variety of reasons:
The changing taste for risk is also evident in cultural developments which can help explain the propensity for investors to buy shares or property. A greater proportion of the population currently invest in shares than was the case for their parents or grandparents. These individual investors are actively engaged in share investing in a way that would be unimaginable for the generations that preceded them. Owning your own home and ideally an investment property as well is an important objective for many Australians but less important in say Germany.
These changes in risk appetite can also weaken market discipline based constraints against excessive risk-taking. A book titled “The Origin of Financial Crises” by George Cooper (April 2008) is worth reading if you are interested in the ideas outlined above. A collection of Minsky’s papers can also be found here if you are interested in exploring his thinking more deeply.
I have been doing a bit of research lately both on the question of what exactly does Expected Loss “expect” and on the ways in which cycle downturns are defined. I may be missing something, but I find this distinction between endogenous and exogenous factors largely missing from the discussion papers that I have found so far and from stress testing itself. I would greatly appreciate some suggestions if anyone has come across any good material on the issue.
Tony
Claudio Borio at the BIS wrote an interesting paper exploring the “financial cycle”. This post seeks to summarise the key points of the paper and draw out some implications for bank stress testing (the original paper can be found here). The paper was published in December 2012, so its discussion of the implications for macroeconomic modelling may be dated but I believe it continues to have some useful insights for the challenges banks face in dealing with adverse economic conditions and the boundary between risk and uncertainty.
The concept of a “business cycle”, in the sense of there being a regular occurrence of peaks and troughs in business activity, is widely known but the concept of a “financial cycle” is a distinct variation on this theme that is possibly less well understood. Borio states that there is no consensus definition but he uses the term to
“denote self-reinforcing interactions between perceptions of value and risk, attitudes towards risk and financing constraints, which translate into booms followed by busts. These interactions can amplify economic fluctuations and possibly lead to serious financial distress and economic disruption”.
This definition is closely related to the concept of “procyclicality” in the financial system and should not be confused with a generic description of cycles in economic activity and asset prices. Borio does not use these words but I have seen the term “balance sheet recession” employed to describe much the same phenomenon as Borio’s financial cycle.
Borio identifies five features that describe the Financial Cycle
Borio also argues that the conventional models used to analyse the economy are deficient because they do not capture the dynamics of the financial cycle. These extracts capture the main points of his critique:
“The notion… of financial booms followed by busts, actually predates the much more common and influential one of the business cycle …. But for most of the postwar period it fell out of favour. It featured, more or less prominently, only in the accounts of economists outside the mainstream (eg, Minsky (1982) and Kindleberger (2000)). Indeed, financial factors in general progressively disappeared from macroeconomists’ radar screen. Finance came to be seen effectively as a veil – a factor that, as a first approximation, could be ignored when seeking to understand business fluctuations … And when included at all, it would at most enhance the persistence of the impact of economic shocks that buffet the economy, delaying slightly its natural return to the steady state …”
“Economists are now trying hard to incorporate financial factors into standard macroeconomic models. However, the prevailing, in fact almost exclusive, strategy is a conservative one. It is to graft additional so-called financial “frictions” on otherwise fully well behaved equilibrium macroeconomic models, built on real-business-cycle foundations and augmented with nominal rigidities. The approach is firmly anchored in the New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) paradigm.”
“The purpose of this essay is to summarise what we think we have learnt about the financial cycle over the last ten years or so in order to identify the most promising way forward…. The main thesis is that …it is simply not possible to understand business fluctuations and their policy challenges without understanding the financial cycle”
There is an interesting discussion of the public policy (i.e. prudential, fiscal, monetary) associated with recognising the role of the financial cycle but I will focus on what implications this may have for bank management in general and stress testing in particular.
The observation that financial crises are based on simultaneous positive deviations of the ratio of private sector credit-to-GDP and asset prices, especially property prices, from historical norms covers much the same ground as the Basel Committee’s Countercyclical Capital Buffer (CCyB) and is something banks would already monitor as part of the ICAAP. The interesting question the paper poses for me is the extent to which stress testing (and ICAAP) should focus on a “financial cycle” style disruption as opposed to a business cycle event. Even more interesting is the question of whether the higher severity of the financial cycle is simply an exogenous random variable or an endogenous factor that can be attributed to excessive credit growth.
I think this matters because it has implications for how banks calibrate their overall risk appetite. The severity of the downturns employed in stress testing has in my experience gradually increased over successive iterations. My recollection is that this has partly been a response to prudential stress tests which were more severe in some respects than might have been determined internally. In the absence of any objective absolute measure of what was severe, it probably made sense to turn up the dial on severity in places to align as far as possible the internal benchmark scenarios with prudential benchmarks such as the “Common Scenario” APRA employs.
At the risk of a gross over simplification, I think that banks started the stress testing process looking at both moderate downturns (e.g. 7-10 year frequency and relatively short duration) and severe recessions (say a 25 year cycle though still relatively short duration downturn). Bank supervisors in contrast have tended to focus more on severe recession and financial cycle style severity scenarios with more extended durations. Banks’s have progressively shifted their attention to scenarios that are more closely aligned to the severe recession assumed by supervisors in part because moderate recessions tend to be fairly manageable from a capital management perspective.
Business cycle fluctuations (in stress testing terms a “moderate recession”) are arguably an inherent feature of the economy that occur largely independently of the business strategy and risk appetite choices that banks make. However, Borio’s analysis suggests that the decisions that banks make (in particular the rate of growth in credit relative to growth in GDP and the extent to which the extension of bank credit contributes to inflated asset values) do contribute to the risk (i.e. probability, severity and duration) of a severe financial cycle style recession.
Borio’s analysis also offers a way of thinking about the nature of the recovery from a recession. A moderate business cycle style recession is typically assumed to be short with a relatively quick recovery whereas financial cycle style recessions typically persist for some time. The more drawn out recovery from a financial cycle style recession can be explained by the need for borrowers to deleverage and repair their balance sheets as part of the process of addressing the structural imbalances that caused the downturn.
If the observations above are true, then they suggest a few things to consider:
A more dynamic approach to risk appetite get us into some interesting game theory puzzles because a decision by one bank to pull back on risk appetite potentially allows competitors to benefit by writing more business and potentially doubly benefiting to the extent that the decision to pull back makes it safer for competitors to write the business without fear of a severe recession (in technical economist speak we have a “collective action” problem). This was similar to the problem APRA faced when it decided to impose “speed limits” on certain types of lending in 2017. The Royal Commission was not especially sympathetic to the strategic bind banks face but I suspect that APRA understand the problem.
How do shareholders think about these business and financial cycle losses? Some investors will adopt a “risk on-risk off” approach in which they attempt to predict the downturn and trade in and out based on that view, other “buy and hold” investors (especially retail) may be unable or unwilling to adopt a trading approach.
The dependence of the financial cycle on the fiscal and monetary policy regimes in place and changes in the real-economy also has potential implications for how banks think about the risk of adverse scenarios playing out. Many of the factors that Borio argues have contributed to the financial cycle (i.e. financial liberalisation under Basel II, monetary policy focussed primarily on inflation targeting and globalisation in the real economy) are reversing (regulation of banks is much more restrictive, monetary policy appears to have recognised the limitations of a narrow inflation target focus and the pace of globalisation appears to be slowing in response to a growing concern that its benefits are not shared equitably). I am not sure exactly what these changes mean other than to recognise that they should in principle have some impact. At a minimum it seems that the pace of credit expansion might be slower in the coming decades than it has in the past 30 years.
All in all, I find myself regularly revisiting this paper, referring to it or employing the distinction between the business and financial cycle. I would recommend it to anyone interested in bank capital management.
This post uses a recent BCBS working paper as a stepping off point for a broader examination of how the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) can help make the banking system more resilient.
This post uses a recent BCBS working paper as a stepping off point for a broader examination of how the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) can help make the banking system more resilient. The BCBS paper is titled “Towards a sectoral application of the countercyclical capital buffer: A literature review – March 2018” (BCBS Review) and its stated aim is to draw relevant insights from the existing literature and use these to shed light on whether a sectoral application of the CCyB would be a useful extension of the existing Basel III framework under which the CCyB is applied at an aggregate country level credit measure. The views expressed in Working Papers like this one are those of their authors and do not represent the official views of the Basel Committee but they do still offer some useful insights into what prudential supervisors are thinking about.
The CCyB became part of the international macro prudential toolkit in 2016 and is intended to ensure that, under adverse conditions, the banking sector in aggregate has sufficient surplus capital on hand required to maintain the flow of credit in the economy without compromising its compliance with prudential requirements.
A key feature in the original BCBS design specification is that the buffer is intended to be deployed in response to high levels of aggregate credit growth (i.e high relative to the sustainable long term trend rates) which their research has identified as an indicator of heightened systemic risk. That does not preclude bank supervisors from deploying the buffer at other times as they see fit, but responding to excess credit growth has been a core part of the rationale underpinning its development.
The BCBS Review notes that the CCyB works in theory but concedes there is, as yet, virtually no empirical evidence that it will work in practice. This is not surprising given that it has only been in place for a very short period of time but still important to remember. The BCBS Review also repeatedly emphasises the point that the CCyB may help to mitigate the credit cycle but that is a potential side benefit, not the main objective. Its primary objective is to ensure that banks have sufficient surplus capital to be able to continue lending during adverse economic conditions where losses will be consuming capital.
The Review argues that the CCyB is a useful addition to the supervisor’s tool kit but is a blunt instrument that impacts all sectors of the economy indiscriminately rather than just targeting the sectors which are the source of systemic concern. It concludes that applying the CCyB at a sectoral level might be more effective for three reasons
The Review also discusses the potential to combine a sectoral CCyB with other macro prudential instruments; in particular the capacity for the two approaches to complement each other;
Quote “Generally, macroprudential instruments that operate through different channels are likely to complement each other. The literature reviewed indicates that a sectoral CCyB could indeed be a useful complement to alternative sectoral macroprudential measures, including borrower-based measures such as LTV, LTI and D(S)TI limits. To the extent that a sectoral CCyB is more effective in increasing banks’ resilience and borrower-based measures are more successful in leaning against the sectoral credit cycle, both objectives could be attained more effectively and efficiently by combining the two types of instruments. Furthermore, there is some evidence that suggests that a sectoral CCyB could have important signalling effects and may therefore act as a substitute for borrower-based measures.”
Notwithstanding repeated emphasis that the main point of the CCyB is to ensure banks can and will continue to support credit growth under adverse conditions, the Review notes that there is not much, if any, hard empirical evidence on how effective a release of the CCyB might be in achieving this. The policy instrument’s place in the macro prudential tool kit seems to depend on the intuition that it should help, backed by some modelling that demonstrates how it would work and a pinch of hope. The details of the modelling are not covered in the Review but I am guessing it adopts a “homo economicus” approach in which the agents act rationally. The relatively thin conceptual foundations underpinning the BCBS version of the CCyB are worth keeping in mind.
The idea of applying the CCyB at a sectoral level seems to make sense. The more targeted approach advocated in the Review should in theory allow regulators to respond to sectoral areas of concern more quickly and precisely than would be the case when the activation trigger is tied to aggregate credit growth. That said, I think the narrow focus of the Review (i.e. should we substitute a sectoral CCyB for the current approach) means that it misses the broader question of how the CCyB might be improved. One alternative approach that I believe has a lot of promise is the CCyB strategy adopted by the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee (FPC).
The FPC published a policy statement in April 2016 explaining that its approach to setting the countercyclical capital buffer is based on five core principles. Many of these are pretty much the same as the standard BCBS policy rationale discussed above but the distinguishing feature is that it “… intends to set the CCyB above zero before the level of risk becomes elevated. In particular, it expects to set a CCyB in the region of 1% when risks are judged to be neither subdued nor elevated.”
This contrasts with the generic CCyB, as originally designed by the BCBS, which sets the default position of the buffer at 0% and only increases it in response to evidence that aggregate credit growth is excessive. This might seem like a small point but I think it is a material improvement on the BCBS’s original concept for two reasons.
Firstly, it directly addresses the problem of failing to detect/predict when systemic risk in the banking system requires prudential intervention. A lot of progress has been made in dealing with this challenge, not the least of which has been to dispense with the idea that central banks had tamed the business cycle. The financial system however retains its capacity to surprise even its most expert and informed observers so I believe it is better to have the foundations of a usable countercyclical capital buffer in place as soon as possible after the post crisis repair phase is concluded rather than trying to predict when it might be required.
The FPC still monitors a range of core indicators for the CCyB grouped into three categories.
However the FPC implicitly accepts that it can’t predict the future so it substitutes a simple, pragmatic and error resilient strategy (put the default CCyB buffer in place ASAP) for the harder problem of trying to predict when it will be needed. This strategy retains the option of increasing the CCyB, is simpler to administer and less prone to error than the BCBS approach. The FPC might still miss the turning point but it has a head start on the problem if it does.
The FPC also integrates its CCyB strategy with its approach to stress testing. Each year the stress tests include a scenario:
“intended to assess the risks to the banking system emanating from the financial cycle – the “annual cyclical scenario”
The severity of this scenario will increase as risks build and decrease after those risks crystallise or abate. The scenario might therefore be most severe during a period of exuberance — for example, when credit and asset prices are growing rapidly and risk premia are compressed. That might well be the point when markets and financial institutions consider risks to be lowest. And severity will be lower when exuberance has corrected — often the time at which markets assess risks to be largest. In leaning against these tendencies, the stress-testing framework will lean against the cyclicality of risk taking: it will be countercyclical.”
The Bank of England’s approach to stress testing the UK banking system – October 2015 (page 5)
The second reason I favour the FPC strategy is because I believe it is likely to result in a more “usable” buffer once risk crystallizes (not just systemic risk) and losses start to escalate. I must admit I have struggled to clearly articulate why this would be so but I think the answer lies partly in the way that the FPC links the CCyB to a four stage model that can be interpreted as a stylised description of the business cycle. The attraction for me in the FPC’s four stage model is that it offers a coherent narrative that helps all the stakeholders understand what is happening, why it is happening, what will happen next and when it will happen.
The BCBS Review talks about the importance of communication and the FPC strategy offers a good model of how the communication strategy can be anchored to a coherent and intuitive narrative that reflects the essentially cyclical nature of the banking industry. The four stages are summarised below together with some extracts setting out the FPC rationale.
Stage 1: The post-crisis repair phase in which risks are subdued – the FPC would expect to set a CCyB rate of 0%
FPC rationale: “Risks facing the financial system will normally be subdued in a post-crisis repair and recovery phase when the financial system and borrowers are repairing balance sheets. As such, balance sheets are not overextended. Asset and property prices tend to be low relative to assessed equilibrium levels. Credit supply is generally tight and the risk appetite of borrowers and lenders tends to be low. The probability of banks coming under renewed stress is lower than average.”
Stage 2: Risks in the financial system re-emerge but are not elevated – the FPC intends to set a positive CCyB rate in the region of 1% after the economy moves into this phase.
FPC rationale: ‘In this risk environment, borrowers will not tend to be unusually extended or fragile, asset prices are unlikely to show consistent signs of over, or under, valuation, and measures of risk appetite are likely to be in line with historical averages”. As such, it could be argued that no buffer is required but the FPC view is that a pre-emptive strategy is more “robust to the inherent uncertainty associated with measuring risks to financial stability”. It also allows subsequent adjustments to be more graduated than would be possible if the CCyB was zero.
Stage 3: Risks in the financial system become elevated: stressed conditions become more likely – the FPC would expect to increase the CCyB rate beyond the region of 1%. There is no upper bound on the rate that can be set by the FPC.
FPC rationale: “As risks in the financial system become elevated, borrowers are likely to be stretching their ability to repay loans, underwriting standards will generally be lax, and asset prices and risk appetite tend to be high. Often risks are assumed by investors to be low at the very point they are actually high. The distribution of risks to banks’ capital at this stage of the financial cycle might have a ‘fatter tail’ [and] stressed outcomes are more likely.”
Stage 4: Risks in the financial system crystallise – the FPC may cut the CCyB rate, including where appropriate to 0%.
FPC rationale: “Reducing the CCyB rate pre-emptively before losses have crystallised may reduce banks’ perceived need to hoard capital and restrict lending, with consequent negative impacts for the real economy. And if losses have crystallised, reducing the CCyB allows banks to recognise those losses without having to restrict lending to meet capital requirements. This will help to ensure that capital accumulated when risks were building up can be used, thus enhancing the ability of the banking system to continue to support the economy in times of stress.”
The March 2018 meeting of the FPC advised that the CCyB applying to UK exposures would remain unchanged at the 1% default level reflecting its judgement that the UK banking system was operating under Stage 2 conditions.
The FPC’s approach to calibrating the size of the CCyB also offers some interesting insights. The FPC’s initial (April 2016) policy statement explained that a “CCyB rate in the region of 1%, combined with other elements of the capital framework, provides UK banks with sufficient capital to withstand a severe stress. Given current balance sheets, the FPC judges that, at this level of the CCyB, banks would have sufficient loss-absorbing capacity to weather a macroeconomic downturn of greater magnitude than those observed on average in post-war recessions in the United Kingdom — although such estimates are inherently uncertain.”
The first point to note is that the FPC has chosen to anchor their 1% default setting to a severity greater than the typical post war UK recession but not necessarily a GFC style event. There is a school of thought that maintains that more capital is always better but the FPC seems to be charting a different course. This is a subtle area in bank capital management but I like the the FPC’s implied defence of subtlety.
What is sometimes lost in the quest for a failure proof banking system is a recognition of the potential for unintended consequence. All other things being equal, more capital makes a bank less at risk of insolvency but all other things are almost never equal in the real world. Banks come under pressure to find ways to offset the ROE dilution associated with more capital. I know that theory says that a bank’s cost of equity should decline as a result of holding more capital so there is no need to offset the dilution but I disagree (see this post for the first in a proposed series where I have started to set out my reasons why). Attempts to offset ROE dilution also have a tendency to result in banks taking more risk in ways that are not immediately obvious. Supervisors can of course intervene to stop this happening but their already difficult job is made harder when banks come under pressure to lift returns. This is not to challenge the “unquestionably strong” benchmark adopted by APRA but simply to note that more is not always better.
Another problem with just adding more capital is that the capital has to be usable in the sense that the capital ratio needs to be able to decline as capital is consumed by elevated losses without the bank coming under pressure to immediately restore the level of capital it is expected to hold. The FPC strategy of setting out how it expects capital ratios to increase or decrease depending on the state of the financial cycle helps create an environment in which this can happen.
APRA has set the CCyB at 0% whereas the BOE approach would suggest a value of at least 1% and possibly more given that APRA has felt the need to step in to cool the market down. It is important to note that transitioning to a FPC style CCyB does not necessarily require that Australian banks need to hold more capital. One option would be to harmonise one or more elements of APRA’s approach to capital measurement (thereby increasing the reported capital ratio) and to “reinvest” the surplus capital in a CCyB. The overall quantum of capital required to be unquestionably strong would not change but the form of the capital would be more usable to the extent that it could temporarily decline and banks had more time to rebuild the buffer during the recovery phase.
A capital adequacy framework that includes a CCyB that is varied in a semi predictable manner over the course of the financial cycle would be far more resilient than the one we currently have that offers less flexibility and is more exposed to the risk of being too late or missing the escalation of systemic risk all together.
Tell me what I am missing …
From the outside 