Category Archives: markets

Target the S&P 500?

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Lifted from the comments:

EMH has me puzzled. Since stocks are linked to the economy you must also conclude that long-range predictions of the economy are no better than throwing darts. Yet many economists seem to believe that the Fed could in fact target NGDP and therefore create the economy they want in some respect (obvisously there are plenty of variables they can’t control). Is a variable really efficient if someone can target it?

To put it more simply perhaps, the Fed COULD target the S&P 500 if they wanted to (essentially pick a value). If an entity exists that can control a variable then isn’t it impossible for that variable to be completely unknowable?

1. Long-range predictions of the economy are not much better than throwing darts. Even projections of a year ahead are not much better than just guessing that the real GDP will grow by 2.5 percent.

2. I think that Scott Sumner would say that the Fed could target the level of the S&P 500. That is a nominal variable.

3. However, the Fed cannot target the real return on stocks. If the Fed targets an S&P 500 of 2200 for one year from now, and this is credible, then the S&P 500 has to rise today to the point where the expected real return is comparable to that on other assets.

4. Part of the EMH is that markets anticipate what the Fed will do. So the Fed cannot suddenly surprise markets by targeting an S&P 500 of 2200. If you extend that, you would say that the Fed cannot suddenly surprise markets by targeting a particular level of NGDP.

5. I think there is a bit of tension between believing in the EMH and believing that the Fed can choose any NGDP value it wants. I think Scott is aware of the tension, and I forget how he resolves it.

6. I think that bringing up the stock market is a very good way to raise the issue of whether the Fed can target any nominal variable.

7. Of course, I am not the one who has to defend the proposition that the Fed can target nominal variables. I believe that financial markets can do what they want with asset prices, and that money and prices are consensual hallucinations.

Sunday’s Washington Post

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It had two long pieces that angered me. Usually, I let these things go. It’s a waste of time trying to play Whack-a-Mole with those with whom you disagree. But I’ll waste my time this time.

1. Here is Barry Ritholtz.

Finance is filled with colorful phrases such as “Spoos,” “Vol,” “Monte Carlo simulation,” and “Gaussian Copula.” In these columns, I try to eschew the usual Wall Street jargon. But I have used the phrase “secular cycles” (most recently here), and a reader recently called me on it. To redress that error, this week I will discuss what a secular — vs. cyclical — market is, its significance and what it might mean to your portfolios.

What made me angry is that the Wall Street jargon to which he refers has some theoretical content to it. There may be erroneous assumptions baked in, and practitioners who know the jargon are capable of making really bad decisions.

But he is making it sound as though “secular market,” and in particular “secular bull market,” is a generally accepted scientific concept that can be used to predict future stock prices. I think that this article should have at the very beginning a huge disclaimer that says “I am about to present a concept that has absolutely zero rigorous research behind it.”

Every attempt to analyze the stock market must start with the efficient markets hypothesis. As far as I know, there is no alternative that is sufficiently robust to yield strong predictions of market movements that hold up for long periods out of sample.

Note that I am not saying that I can predict the market better than he can. I am not saying that there aren’t a zillion other stock market columnists serving baloney sandwiches every day. What I resent about this particular column is his sheer pretentiousness. He is passing off his baloney sandwich as if it were expert knowledge. That is what ticks me off.

2. We Need a National Food Policy, by Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Ricardo Salvador and Olivier De Schutter.

They do not say, and indeed they could not possibly say, that we now have a free market in food. Among other criticisms of current policy, they write,

in February the president signed yet another business-as-usual farm bill, which continues to encourage the dumping of cheap but unhealthy calories in the supermarket.

The problem is not that we lack a food policy. The problem is that these four authors would like to see a different food policy.

The article strikes me as a classic “moral will” story. That is, experts know the right policy. All we need is the moral will to execute it. There is no acknowledgment of either the socialist calculation problem (centralized experts may not have the information they need to actually make a better food policy than the market) or the public choice problem (government as an institution is ripe for capture by interest groups).

Of course, you could say that libertarians have our own “moral will” story. We think that people need the moral will to resist campaigns to put the national government in charge of everything.

Canadian Banking and U.S. Banking

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Timothy Taylor writes,

Clearly, the U.S. has a larger share of financial activity happening in the “other financial institutions” area, while Canada has a larger share of its financial activity happening explicitly in the banking sector. The Canadian economy is of course closely tied to the U.S economy. But the recession in Canada was milder than in the U.S., perhaps in part because Canada’s financial sector was less exposed to the issues of shadow banking.

Two interesting possibilities:

1. The Canadian shadow banking sector is underdeveloped. Canada is an ok place to get a mortgage or a commercial loan, but for more sophisticated financial transactions you have to go elsewhere.

2. The American shadow banking sector is overdeveloped. Our financial institutions are playing a game of hide-and-seek from the regulators, and shadow banking has emerged to enable banks to produce balance sheets that appear (to regulators) to be safer than they really are.

Of course, both of these could be true to some extent. I am more inclined to believe (2).

As an aside, I have no idea how one could measure the size of the shadow banking sector with any precision. I picture large books of derivatives, and do you look at gross or net exposure, current market value or potential value at risk, etc.?

The Single Point of Entry Solution

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Rebecca J. Simmons writes,

The critical element of the SPOE strategy is the recapitalization of the company’s material operating subsidiaries with the resources of the parent company. For the SPOE top-down approach to work effectively, there must be sufficient resources at the holding company level to absorb all the losses of the firm, including losses sustained by the operating subsidiaries.

SPOE is being touted as the solution to the too-big-to-fail problem. You have a gigantic bank holding company that gets in trouble. You (the FDIC) want to keep all the subsidiaries going, because you want depositors and counterparties not to panic. So you put the holding company into receivership, and only pay off shareholders and debtholders of the holding company after your are sure you have got money to do that.

I may not fully understand this. Here is what I think happens. The value of the subsidiaries as ongoing concerns is positive, say $100. However, if you subtract the value of the outstanding debt of the holding company, the value of the holding company is negative. With, say, $150 in outstanding debt, the holding company’s value is -$50. The receivership creates a new holding company, which will eventually be sold back to the public, but without the outstanding debt. When the new holding company is sold, the debtholders in the old company get first dibs on the proceeds, and if there is anything after that, the equity holders can get it. Again, I could be completely wrong about this, but that is my understanding.

Simmons continues,

The capitalization of the bridge financial company must be sufficient…not only to allow the operating subsidiaries to obtain needed capital from the bridge to continue operations but also to allow stakeholders and the broader public to view the entity as safe and viable as it transitions from failed firm to bridge financial company, and ultimately to emergence as a new firm.

The problem is that financial firms have multiple self-fulfilling states of equilibrium. There is a state in which everyone believes in you, so you pay low interest rates on your debt, and you are fine. There is a state in which counterparties do not believe in you, so your interest costs soar, and you are dead. One key question about SPOE is whether it can prevent a jump from the good equilibrium to the bad equilibrium.

Suppose that we had this strategy in place, with all of the legal means for implementation. I still believe that if JP Morgan Chase or Citigroup got into trouble, the Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary would be wetting their pants. In a crisis, the probability that they would go through with SPOE, rather than undertake an ad hoc bailout, is very low.

Bank Breakup Worries

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1. I am worried that breaking up the biggest banks would not make the system safer.

I do not believe that having smaller banks would have prevented the 2008 crisis or the next crisis. I do not believe that regulatory policy can prevent such crises. My only solution for systemic financial risk is to try to make the financial system easier to fix when it does break. I think it is easier to fix when there is less debt, so I would look for ways to reduce incentive to take on debt. Instead of subsidies for mortgage borrowing, how about subsidies for down-payment saving? Instead of favorable tax treatment for debt, why not favor equity–or at least be neutral between the two? etc.

For me, breaking up the banks is not a safety issue. It is instead an issue of restoring democracy and the rule of law. Really big banks are crony banks, whose interactions with government officials are at the highest levels. Instead, I would like to see the biggest banks dealt with by career civil servants who are following clear, predictable rules and guidelines.

2. I am worried that it would be difficult to define size.

Once you decide that banks above a certain size should be broken up, you need a definition of size. Among the problems with doing this, the first one that comes to my mind is accounting for derivatives. If you ignore derivatives, then in very short order banks will mutate their loan portfolios into derivative books. But if you try to include derivatives, then the whole notional-value vs. market-value argument is going to kick in. Also, gross exposure vs. net exposure.

Instead, I am attracted to using the amount of insured deposits as a measure of size. It is a clean measure that cannot be gamed using accounting transactions. It is a measure of the potential impact of the bank on the FDIC. Charging a risk premium that is graduated by size would be a reasonable rule-of-law approach to discouraging large banks. Banks could avoid the risk premium by spinning off branches. The giants that were assembled by mergers could be dis-assembled by spin-offs.

3. I am worried about large shadow banks.

You can do a lot of banking without a lot of deposits. You can finance with commercial paper. You can finance with repo. You can write a ton of derivatives. I do not think that this is bad per se. But, just as with large commercial banks, large shadow banks could acquire the political power of large commercial banks.

I welcome suggestions for dealing with shadow banking. I am not thinking about how to reduce the risk of shadow banking. My view is that systemic risk is systemic risk, and you cannot get rid of it by breaking up banks.

What I am concerned with is the political power that might be concentrated in a large financial institution. The problem is that, once you get away from deposits, measuring “large” becomes quite tricky.

Policy Theater

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[Wow. I wrote the rest of this post between Tuesday and Thursday, to go up Saturday. Friday’s Wapo has a very long front-page story on the influence of donors on the agenda at the Brookings Institution. Martin Baily and Doug Elliot, listed below, are with Brookings.]

Eric Garcia writes,

Financial regulation experts said Tuesday breaking up large banks could be costly while offering no additional safety-benefits for the economy.

I was on the panel at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and I argued in favor of breaking up big banks, but I am not mentioned in the story.

The panel was called to discuss a research paper commissioned for the Center and written by Martin Baily, Doug Elliot, and Phillip Swagel. The paper says that (a) we have little reason to worry about too-big-to-fail, because the FDIC is on its way to having enough authority to resolve big bank failures, (b) there are economies of scale in banking at the very highest levels, (c) there are transition costs to breaking up big banks, in that employees and customers would be left hanging waiting to see how the re-org falls out, and (d) breaking up big banks would not get rid of systemic risk, anyway.

I agree entirely with (d). I thought that (c) was a fair point, but there is such a thing in the corporate world as a spin-off, and it can be done. I disagreed with (a) and I was unpersuaded by (b).

I was invited to a pre-panel breakfast. However, when I got there, I soon felt out of place. Part of it was that the breakfast sandwiches were not what I would eat for breakfast (or any time). Another part of it was that the setting was larger and more formal than I had expected. Instead of a few panelists milling around, it was an executive conference table, and Elliot, Swagel, and I were the only panelists there. The rest of the approximately fifteen men (plus one woman) around the table were from trade associations (such as the American Bankers’ Association), except for two from Bank of America.

So I excused myself to go to the bathroom, got back on the elevator, went downstairs to a cafe next door, got a little food and tried to collect my thoughts. I discarded most of my talking points, which had been focused on left-vs.-right issues in narrating the financial crisis and financial regulation. I tried to come up with something appropriate for an audience of bank lobbyists.

When I got back upstairs, the breakfast was still underway. Elliot and Swagel proceeded to give the main points of the paper, with the K street folks nodding in approval. Elliott made a crack about not being able to persuade opponents who refuse to be persuaded by evidence, and I was the only one who didn’t laugh. Meanwhile, I perused a copy of the annual report of the Bipartisan Policy Center, because it happened to be on a shelf behind my seat. I thumbed through the annual report, looking for its list of donors. I cannot say that I was surprised to find in that list Bank of America, the American Bankers’ Association, etc.

A few minutes before 10 AM, the rest of the panelists assembled. I asked Baily, as an expert on productivity statistics, whether he thought that any economist would claim to have a reliable measure of bank output. “Of course not,” he replied, nearly breaking into a laugh. I was glad to hear that response, because it reinforced my view that econometric estimates of scale economies in banking are not reliable. When you measure economies of scale, you are comparing the ratio of output to inputs at different-sized firms. It’s rather difficult to do that if you cannot measure the numerator.

Then came the panel. I was a bit embarrassed to be in a chair with no desk in front of me. I was wearing high-topped gym shoes, in order to lessen a mild but nagging foot injury. Continue reading →

Bank Regulation, Left and Right

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One possibility I am considering for this panel discussion is to give a spiel on how free-market economists have been more hawkish than mainstream economists when it comes to bank regulation. I was inspired by listening to Robert Litan recount some of the history at a talk last night on Trillion Dollar Economists. You may recall that may take on that book is that it has great material, but I would have liked to see different organization and emphasis. I was reading it with my high school economics students in mind.

Anyway, here is the spiel.

Long ago, two groups of free-market economists decided to “shadow” the Fed. The Shadow Open Market Committee, which I believe started in the 1970s, issued pronouncements critical of monetary policy. The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (SFRC) , issued pronouncements critical of regulatory policy starting in 1986.

The SFRC had both a deregulation agenda and a regulation agenda. Their deregulation agenda was mainstream. Observers of banking regulation across the political spectrum recognized that deposit interest ceilings were no longer workable, that the Glass-Steagall separation of banking and securities was no longer workable, and that prohibitions against interstate banking and branch banking were no longer workable. People had known since the late 1960s that those regulatory boats were sinking, and the laws that Congress passed in the 1980s were just the long-awaited permission to abandon ship.

Take Glass-Steagall, for example. In 1968, the distinction between a loan and a security was obliterated by GNMA. A few years later, the distinction between a deposit and a security was obliterated by money market funds. Even though some people try to blame the financial crisis on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the fact is that it collapsed 20 years before it was repealed and nobody has said that you could bring it back.

It was the SFRC’s hawkish regulatory agenda that was out of the mainstream. In particular, if you read through its old statements, you will see that the SFRC issued many warnings that bank capital regulations were inadequate. They pleaded for tighter regulation of Freddie Mac and Fannnie Mae, for higher capital requirements for banks, and for regulators to require banks to have a thick layer of subordinated debt which would put the onus for failure on the private sector rather than the taxpayers. These calls went unheeded. The SFRC economists were viewed as cranks, whose judgment on these matters was impaired by an irrational distrust of government agencies.

The Financial Supermarket Bubble and Banking History

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Here is a chart, using the Google ngram tool, showing the frequency of the appearance of the term “financial supermarket” over time.

Note the spike in the mid-1980s. Given that these are books, which appear with a slight lag, I would say that the spike in the media was in the early 1980s.

At this panel, I don’t know whether I will have time to get into the history of bank concentration in the U.S., but here it is.

1. The market share of the largest banks follows a hockey stick pattern since 1950. It stayed very low until the late 1970s, and then around 1980 it started to grow exponentially. Growth of banks had been retarded by ceilings on deposit interest rates, branching restrictions, and Glass-Steagall restrictions. Banks had been trying to find loopholes and ways around these restrictions, and regulators had been trying to close the loopholes. Then, during the period 1979-1994, the regulators stopped trying to maintain the restrictions, and instead cooperated in ending them. That was when the hockey stick took off.

2. The regulators thought that this would bring more competition and consumer benefits. What the banks had in mind was something else. That is where the chart comes in. The bankers all thought that “cross-selling” and “one-stop shopping” would be killer strategies in consumer banking. In 1981, when Sears bought Dean Witter, many pundits thought that putting a brokerage firm inside a department store was going to be a total game-changer.

3. It turned out, though, that consumers did not flock to brokerage firms in department stores, or to any of the other one-stop-shopping experiments in financial services. The economies of scope just weren’t there.

4. Meanwhile, concentration in banking soared thanks to mergers and acquisitions. I’ve read that JP Morgan Chase is the product of 37 mergers and Bank of America is the product of 50. All of these took place within the past 35 years.

5. Just five years into this exponential growth process, Continental Illinois became insolvent, and that was when “too big to fail” began. So out of the 35 years where we were on the exponential part of the hockey stick, 30 of them have taken place under a “too big to fail” regime. In short, the concentration in banking got started during the “financial supermarket” bubble, and from then on was supported, if not propelled, by “too big to fail.” But the market share of the biggest banks is not something that grew naturally and organically out of superior business processes.

6. As another historical point, when the S&L crisis hit, the government set up the Resolution Trust Corporation. Each failing institution was divided into a “good bank” and a “bad bank,” with the good bank merged into another bank and the assets of the bad bank bought by the RTC. While this was a somewhat distasteful bailout, it was conducted under the rule of law. When TARP was enacted in 2008, Congress and the public were led to expect something similar to the RTC, with TARP used to buy “toxic assets” in a blind, neutral way. Instead they ended up calling the biggest banks into a room and “injecting” TARP funds into them. They also spent TARP funds on restructuring General Motors. It was the opposite of government acting in a predicable, law-governed way. It was Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner making ad hoc, personal decisions. I think that in the U.S., that is what bank concentration leads to–arbitrary use of power. That is why as a libertarian I do not think that allowing banks to become too big to fail is desirable.

Better than HBR on Two-sided Markets

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Jean Tirole and Jean-Charles Rochet wrote,

The starting point for the theory of two-sided markets by contrast is that an end-user does not
internalize the welfare impact of his use of the platform on other end-users.

If Anita’s attendance at the singles bar would attract more men, then Bonnie, Christine, and Debbie should subsidize Anita’s attendance. (Similarly, Anita should want to subsidize the others.) But the transaction costs of doing this are high compared to having the singles bar do the subsidizing. On the other hand, at a brothel, the same externalities do not apply.

The Problem of Big Banks

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Stephen G. Cecchetti and Kermit L. Schoenholtz write,

Imagine the following simple approach (like that of Acharya et al). Let the capital structure of a bank’s long-term liabilities be clearly stated and then honored if and when necessary. That is, think of the bank as having a hierarchy of long-term debt ranging from the most senior (call it tranche A) to the most subordinated (tranche Z for zombie!). Whenever a bank’s capital position is deficient – say, because the market value of its equity sinks below a threshold ratio to its book assets – the resolution authority automatically makes some of the debt into new equity, starting with the Z tranche and then climbing up the alphabet until there is sufficient capital to return the bank above the regulatory minimum. Provided that there is sufficient long-term debt to absorb the losses, the concern remains a going one. (The resolution authority could still replace management and shut down risky activities in an effort to prevent a serial failure.)

Pointer from Mark Thoma. This is an alternative to the idea of divesting the firm’s assets according to a “living will.” The authors write,

But let’s not overstate the attractiveness or simplicity of the phoenix plan. No scheme can eliminate policy discretion, as crises often lead governments to change the rules on the fly (think of the 2008 TARP legislation that followed the failure of Lehman).

The way I read this, we really cannot get back to the rule of law if we have too-big-to-fail banks. That is what I will be arguing in two weeks. These institutions will be given special treatment, particularly in a crisis. In 2008, AIG was eviscerated in order to provide a liquidity injection to Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and others. Does anyone think that the decisions would have come out the same if the Treasury Secretary had been a proud alumnus of AIG rather than of Goldman Sachs?

Some of my other thoughts for the panel.

1. Suppose that we were to limit any financial institution to $250 billion in liabilities that are not backed by capital. Currently, the largest banks in this country seem to have over $1 trillion in liabilities.

2. What can you not do with a $250 billion portfolio? What would such a bank be precluded from doing, other than buying another huge bank?

3. I think it is pretty hard to know for certain the extent of economies of scale and scope in banking. However, my intuition is that the big banks did not get where they are today through natural market competition. In other industries, dominant firms are characterized by focused excellence. Intel is very good at designing and manufacturing chips. Walmart is very good at logistics. What is JP Morgan Chase very good at? Citigroup?

Another characteristic of dominant firms in competitive markets is that they grow by doing more of what they are good at. In contrast, banks grow primarily through mergers and acquisitions.

4. How much does too-big-to-fail matter? Well, try to imagine what the computer industry would look like if the government had designated the dominant firms as of 1970 as too big to fail. We would still have Wang and DEC, but I doubt that we would have Apple or Microsoft.

5. If we imagine banks without TBTF, then it is likely that at times in the past the stock prices of some of the large banks would have been very low, which would have halted their growth through acquisitions and perhaps forced management to divest poorly-managed business lines in order to appease shareholders.

We cannot have large banks without TBTF. We cannot have TBTF without an unfair playing field and mockery of the rule of law. So we should break up large banks.