What to do with failed banks?

Governments in the US and Europe have set their faces against bailouts of failed banks following the crisis of 2007- the Dodd FranK Act in the US prohibits such bailouts hereafter. Yet, as an article in the FT asks: what alternatives do we have?

A time tested-alternative, the author points out, was to merge a failed bank with a strong bank. Banks are now finding out that this can be costly for one reason or another. The huge fine that BofA has had to cough up has to do with the problems at Merrill Lynch and Country which it acquired in 2008 and these problems happened before the merger. This is going to deter future acquisitions and mergers because the amount of due diligence will take too long and will be too costly.

The other alternative, getting banks to prepare living wills  that will document an orderly winding up of a bank when it fails, is proving unworkable so far- in the US, the regulators have rejected living wills prepared by US and European banks. It's no use asking for banks to have contingent capital- this will be very costly and it may not suffice.

So, governments will have no recourse against bank failure other than bailouts. The only answer, which I have urged repeatedly, is to ensure that the problem is manageable when it happens and that is to limit bank size as a proportion of GDP. No policy maker or regulator is willing to touch this political hot potato.

How bad is the global downturn- and what can be done?

There is talk of recovery and growth in the western world and in the global economy. In the US, there is celebration because there are more jobs today than at the high point of 2008. We need to hold the celebration, though. We need to compare where output and jobs are today with where we might have been, had the crisis not occurred. An article in the FT sums up some of the findings on this subject.

While several economies have now returned to their previous peak levels of output, very few have approached the previous long term trendlines which had been established for decades before that. For the developed economies as a whole, output remains about 12 per cent below these trendlines.

The trillion dollar question is: can the developed world return to the growth level indicated by the trendlines- and how soon? Now, output can depart from the trendline for two reasons: a permanent loss of capacity and an output gap (that is, output does not fully come up to the output capacity). The article cites a paper that shows that the overwhelming proportion of the departure from trendline is on account of loss of capacity- 7.2%. Only 2.6% of the departure is explained by the output gap.

Now, we can speculate about why the loss of capacity has turned out to be permanent. When you have a protracted recession, labour participation goes down because of a loss of skills, investment spending is crippled, innovation gets a severe setback. Whatever the reason, the fact that only a small portion of the loss of output is on account of an output gap means that fiscal or monetary stimulus can only do so much to restore the developed world to their growth path.

As the article points out, there could be a role for a broader range of fiscal instruments, such as tax cuts, incentives for investment and for work, infrastructure spending etc. But these instruments operate not just on the demand side but also on the supply side. In other words, given the damage that has occurred to economic capacity, there is only so much that demand management can accomplish. Perhaps, that would explain why both the fiscal and monetary stimulus that followed the crisis have yielded so little.

Cyprus solution is band-aid, not cure

Another crisis, another half-solution, another sigh of relief. When will the Eurozone stop rattling financial markets? Not in the near future, I guess.

In Cyprus, those concerned- the EU, the ECB, the IMF and the government of Cyprus- had the sense to rework a badly flawed proposal and come up with something that seemed to pass muster. But this does not mean the Eurozone problems have gone away. Indeed, the approach in Cyprus raises serious questions about what would happen if problems in Spain, Italy or Portugal reared their head again.

The total cost of the bail-out is € 17 bn. The absolute amount is so small that the EU could easily have underwritten all of this. But voters in Germany won't stand for it- they want to see citizens in the distressed economies suffer for their past sins. So, Cyprus had to bear some of the pain. The issue was what form it should take.

Mercifully, the insane proposal to penalise insured depositors- which mean a straight flouting of the EU-wide guarantee- was given up. Instead, Cyprus agreed that their share of the burden-
€ 5.8 bn- would fall on large deposits (those over € 100,000). In return, the EU would hand Cyprus 
€ 10bn. 

What are the implications? First, Cyprus has imposed capital controls, which goes against the principle of an economic union.  These controls are supposed to be "temporary" but we all know what that means. Secondly, and more importantly, the principle of bailing in creditors has been carried farther than in the case of Greece. In Greece, bond-holders suffered a hair-cut; here, uninsured depositors have been included. 

You might say this is fair: creditors should suffer in any bankruptcy (after shareholders), not tax payers. Not accepting this principle gives rise to moral hazard, which has been the bane of banking. But there are costs to this approach. First, Cyprus' banking system will shrink. Make no mistake, this means that GDP will shrink. What happens to the debt to GDP ratio then? How does the Cyprus solution solve the basic problem of sovereign indebtedness?

Secondly, how would depositors in other troubled economies, such as Italy and Spain, respond? Can we expect a flight of deposits to safer economies? What does this mean for recovery in Italy and Spain? Lastly, in the case of Greece, bond-holders were told that the losses they had to take were an exceptional case. It now turns out that this is to be the norm. What does this mean for the cost of raising subordinated debt for banks in Europe? Debt is going to become more expensive and this will translate into higher costs for borrowers. Also, at the first hint of trouble, bondholders will flee. Again, growth will be a casualty.

Granted, all stakeholders in banks will have to suffer the burden of adjustment in what is fundamentally a banking crisis. But the burden has to be distributed not just among bank shareholders, creditors, taxpayers and the citizens of distressed economies. Taxpayers elsewhere in Europe - and indeed the rest of the world- have to chip in if stability and recovery in the Eurozone are to be facilitated. Banks in Europe have to be recapitalised and the costs of recapitalisation must be universally shared, albeit in differing degrees. 

FT has a good article on the balance to be struck between moral hazard and systemic risk and resolving banks.  

Europe can avert a Lehman

Time is running out for the Eurozone economies. They have to show quickly that they have the will and the means to tackle the sovereign debt problem emanating from Greece and embracing several other countries, including large ones like Italy. It is possible to avert a 'Lehman moment', a cataclysm in the financial markets. But this requires deep pockets to recapitalise banks and to provide finance to distressed economies, including Greece. There is no escape from doing these two things. Either this is done in an orderly way, and possibly at a lower cost, or it is done in a chaotic way, and at a higher cost.

It's no use quoting stress tests that show only 8 banks are vulnerable. Or pointing to potential losses of €300 bn on sovereign debt. Once mayhem breaks out in the markets, losses will escalate and so will the number of failing banks. The key to understanding the banking problem is not to tot up losses on sovereign debt exposure as of today but to understand their dependence on short-term US money market mutual funds. It is is this dependence that creates the potential for another Lehman moment. More in my ET column, Europe's Lehman moment.

Reining in large banks

The contours of Obama's plan to deal with the problems posed by large banks are slowly taking shape. Three elements have been spelt out:

• A levy of 0.15% on banks with assets of more than $50 bn
  
• Keeping banks out of proprietary trading on their own account, hedge funds and private equity
• Limits on bank size other than the present restriction of 10% of deposits

What will be the impact on bank size of all these put together? For now, US officials say it will prevent banks from growing larger. But that is just the immediate effect. When banks find they cannot grow earnings by growing bigger, that increases the incentive to sell off some of the assets and shrink. It also creates incentives against consolidation in banking.

So, yes, a modest beginning has finally made towards serious reform of banking instead of just increasing capital requirements. My own preference is to have regulatory limits on bank assets- say, 5-10% of GDP. We may get there eventually at the present rate but I would go for it without too much delay.

Secondly, I think it may not be advisable to ask banks to eliminate risky activities such as hedge funds and private equity. Instead, we may be better off setting exposure limits. More on all this in my ET column, At last, the remaking of banks?

Obama's banking levy

President Obama has proposed a levy on large banks in order to recoup costs incurred by tax payers in the financial crisis. There are two separate questions. One, is the levy merited or is it just? Two, will it serve the larger purpose of ensuring financial stability?

To answer the first, here is the levy in brief: 15 bp on covered liabilities; insured deposits are subtracted because banks are already charged by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It will yield about $90 bn over ten years. US banks- the top 50 or so to whom it will apply- can bear it, all right, since it is estimated to amount to 2-7% of pre-provision profit of US banks.

According to one estimate, American tax payers have lost $47 bn on the capital they had infused into banks, so the levy is fair. I don't know what the basis for this estimate is. Capital infused into banks has been mostly returned.Are we talking of interest on this amount? Besides, the government can hope to make a profit on bad assets hived off and sold in future. I am not sure that the levy can be justified as recovery of loss.

It makes more sense to justify it on other grounds:

• penalty on windfall profit- similar to the one-time windfall tax imposed in the UK.
  
• Intended to penalise large banks
• Intended to penalise dependence on wholesale funds as deposit liabilities are not covered by the levy
• Help bridge huge fiscal costs incurrred in crisis
• Assuage popular anger against bankers
  

As for the second question, two academics argue in FT that we cannot hope to abolish or diminish banking crises with levies of this kind:

First, we must sharply raise capital requirements at leveraged institutions, so shareholders rather than regulators play the leading role in making sure their money is used sensibly. This means tripling capital requirements so banks hold at least 20-25 per cent of assets in core capital.

Second, we need to end the political need to bail out every institution that fails. This can be helped by putting strict limits on the size of institutions, and forcing our largest banks, including the likes of Goldman Sachs and Barclays, to become much smaller.

As readers of this blog would know, I agree with the above. The nature of banks and banking needs fundamental change. But the present crisis does not seem to have done enough damage to focus minds in the political class or fend off all-powerful banking lobbies. Alas, we need a bigger disaster, it seems, before this happens.

Wall Street remains untamed

Wall Street's top banks are bracing for the backlash that will follow the announcement of last year's bonuses. They will make some cosmetic reductions.They will sound suitably apologetic. But they will make sure that no meangingful attempt to reform them succeeds.

Robert Reich, former US labour secretary, writes in FT:

Bankers are still making wild bets, still devising new derivatives, still piling on debt. The big banks have access to money almost as cheaply as in 2007, courtesy of the Fed, so bank profits are up and bonuses as generous as at the height of the boom.

The only difference is that now the Street’s biggest banks know they are “too big to fail” and will be bailed out by taxpayers if they get into trouble – which means they have every incentive to make even riskier bets. And, of course, American taxpayers are out some $120bn, while millions have lost their homes, jobs and savings.

....The bill that has already emerged from the House is hardly encouraging. Dubbed the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act”, it effectively guarantees future Wall Street bail-outs. The bill authorises Fed banks to provide up to $4,000bn in emergency funding the next time the Street crashes. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into financial markets last year. The bill also enables the government, in a banking crisis, to back financial firms’ debts – a wonderful insurance policy if you are a bondholder. To be sure, the bill authorises the Fed and Treasury to spend these funds only when “there is at least a 99 per cent likelihood that all funds and interest will be paid back,” but predictions about pending economic disasters can be conveniently flexible, especially when it comes to bailing out the Street.

No prizes for guessing why there is so much pussy-footing on bank reform:

A larger explanation, I am afraid, is the grip Wall Street has over the American political process. The Street is where the money is and money buys campaign commercials on television. Wall Street firms and executives have been uniquely generous to both parties, emerging as one of the largest benefactors of the Democrats. Between November 2008 and November 2009, Wall Street doled out $42m to lawmakers, mostly to members of the House and Senate banking committees and House and Senate leaders. In the first three quarters of 2009, the industry spent $344m on lobbying – making the Street one of the major powerhouses in the nation’s capital.

Money is powerful. Talk is cheap.

Crisis fails to dent Indian banks' financials

Many experts have talked about stability in Indian banking in the recent crisis. Several factors have been cited as underpinning stability: caution on capital account convertibility, public sector dominance, Indian banks' low exposure to international assets, strong regulation including counter-cyclical capital requirements imposed by RBI.

There is something else to Indian banks' performance in the crisis: they have done as well on efficiency indicators as in the boom period. There has been a slowdown in economic growth and in credit growth, so one would expect to see some impact on banks coming through interest income and provisions. This hasn't happened. The end result? Indian banks have posted a return of 1% on assets in the midst of the worst financial crisis of the last century! You have to pinch yourself in disbelief. Now, somebody tell me why we should be making any material change in Indian banking.

I explore this topic in my ET column, A crisis-proof banking sector.

Banking bonuses can't be left to market

Both Martin Wolf of the FT and the Economist have joined the chorus for containing bank bonuses in today's conditions. Wolf wants a 'windfall tax'. The Economist asks that a 'funding premium' be recovered from banks before bonsuses are calculated- this would compensate the tax payer for government support to banks.

I think the problem goes beyond the present crisis. We need to view executive pay in banks as a potential source of systemic risk. I cannot see the market responding suitably to this problem. We will soon require regulators to approve top management pay in banks. This is not as novel as it sounds- the RBI has been doing it for long. The challenge for regulators is to put in place norms for executive pay at banks and apply these to the entire sector. We need regulators in different countries to agree on this as otherwise we are bound to see 'regulatory arbitrage'.

More on this in my ET column, Reining in rogue bonuses

Tackling asset bubbles

There is a sense that we have to do something about asset bubbles in order to prevent major financial disruption although it's not clear what is to be done and at what point. Frederic Mishkin, writing in the FT, draws a distinction between "credit bubbles", which are driven by excess bank lending, and "irrational exuberance", such as the boom in IT stocks in 2001. The former are a problem, he says, because they endanger banks. The latter are ok, some investors get burnt, that's all.

Right now, Mishkin argues, the US does not face a credit bubble although various asset prices may have shot up. Credit is, in fact, in short supply, so monetary tightening would be premature.

I am not entirely persuaded about this distinction. Take a stock market bubble. It could be driven, not by excess domestic credit growth, but by a surge in foreign inflows. Does this need to be tackled or not? A sudden withdrawal of foreign funds could cause the stock market to collapse and it may derail investment plans of companies to which banks are exposed. Domestic bank credit has not driven the stock bubble, yet banks could be imperilled.

Of course, the central danger to guard against is bank exposure to risk assets- real estate, stocks and commodities. But, it's not necessary that banks are at risk only from bubbles caused by excess credit. There could be an indirect impact on banks from the collapse of bubbles for which banks are not primarily responsible. Corporates' overseas borrowings, which find their way into the domestic market, for example.

Some bubbles may be more dangerous than others, as Mishkin points out, but all bubbles may need watching.

Novel suggestion on bank bonuses

Even that paragon of the free market, the Economist, has joined the chorus against bank bonuses. I suppose you could call that progress in thinking after the sub-prime crisis.

Banks argue that they have repaid government capital, they need to retail talent, that management pay is for shareholders to approve and that the government, the media and the public should stay out of it.

The Economist makes the point that the top ten investment banks at the start of 2008 made an average return on equity of just 8% between 1999 and 2008. Four made cumulative losses. Staff got four times as much as shareholders did in profits. So, bonuses are at the expense of shareholders.

Moreover, banks are handing out large bonuses to employees while arguing that higher capital requirements would be too onerous for them! In a free market, you could still argue that these are matters between management and shareholders and that the government and the public should stay out of it. But this is not a free market situation: the banks have been bailed out by tax payers and- more, importantly- still enjoy subsidies:

It is not just that they were saved from destruction. They got public capital (much of it now repaid), short-selling bans on their shares and rescues of counterparties, such as American International Group, which the public otherwise had no interest in saving. Today they enjoy laxer accounting, loose collateral rules at central banks, explicit debt guarantees and asset-purchasing schemes. And, critically, they can borrow cheaply because they are deemed too big to fail. All of them—from comparatively healthy Goldman to the nationalised weaklings—are being subsidised by the rest of us. As a way to keep cash flowing to the wider economy and help banks rebuild their capital, this subsidy made sense; nobody intended it to go to employees.

<>If we accept that outsized bonuses, courtesy of public subsidies, are just not on, how do we deal with them? The popular solution is to rein in bonuses. The Economist thinks this won't work and it will lead to micro-management by government. It proposes an alternative:

Assume that America’s top five investment banks would pay two percentage points more on unsecured borrowings without an implicit guarantee. On that basis the subsidy is $36 billion a year (compared with pay this year of perhaps $120 billion). Providing banks have built up adequate capital, they could face a funding “premium” in much the same way that they already pay premiums for deposit insurance......The premium would last at least until the state guarantees are withdrawn. The longer-term debate may yet move from wishy-washy living wills to breaking up banks (as the governor of the Bank of England suggested on October 20th—see article).

Dealing with asset bubbles

Everybody now talks of 'macroprudential surveillance', which is monitoring systemic risks in order to prevent a major crisis. Is this feasible? Is it possible for central banks to meangingfully use financial stability as a goal in addition to price stability? The IMF's World Economic Outlook (October 2009) has an analytical survey. I comment on it in ET column, How to respond to asset bubbles.

The IMF's analysis suggests that having financial stability as an additional goal is not easy to implement. But the RBI has long had it as an objective. How come? Well, if you do have financial stability as a goal, then you are liable to intervene in a high growth phase even if that means sacrificing some growth. In other words, not intervening carries the risk of financial instability but intervening could mean losing out on growth. Advanced countries will tend towards the former because they can take occasional setbacks in their stride. Not so less developed countries- they don't mind sacrificing some growth but they just cannot afford financial instabilty.

In the near future, because nobody wants another major crisis, expect policy makers to intervene even while economists struggle to refine their understanding of what constitutes an asset bubble.

Backlash from bankers

I wrote in my ET column, cited in yesterday's post, that it would be difficult to push through regulation because of the power of banking lobbies.

Josef Ackermann, the Deutsche Bank head, has fired the first salvo, reports FT:

A deluge of financial regulations threatens to harm economic growth, one of the world’s top bankers said on Friday, in what appeared to be the start of a concerted fightback by the industry against feared regulatory overkill.

........There is a trade-off between maximising stability of banks and optimising growth of the real economy. That balance [should] not be forgotten,” Mr Ackermann told the Financial Times. He warned that the entire economy would “pay a high price” if regulation went too far.

.....He cited proposals to raise the quantity and quality of capital banks have to hold, alter the definitions of capital, add capital buffers for systemic firms, rainy-day provisions, liquidity requirements and “living wills” to apply in case of failure.

Mr Ackermann's main contention is that regulators must harmonise rules across the globe, otherwise the global financial system could fragment. True. But, national regulators cannot wait until agreement is reached on all matters. In some cases, they are bound to press ahead, depending on how pressing local needs are. We must hope that if some nations give the lead, that will force others to follow suit. Otherwise, we may have to wait forever for meangingful changes to emerge.

I am not very hopeful that there will be radical changes in regulation. As I have said before, we need a bigger crisis and wider social unrest for that to happen.

G-20 meet and proposed solutions

The G-20 has promised to get tough with banks. And the proposals are stronger than the ones talked about earlier. So far, so good. But is it good enough? No. Because higher capital, executive pay linked to risk and stiffer regulatory requirements for large banks will not stave off the next crisis, if only because the solutions that finally get implemented will not be tough enough.

We need better macroeconomic mangement. In other words, regulation must be supplemented by "macro-prudential" surveillance. More on this in my ET column, Tame the economy, not the banks