MacroScope

The mantra that regulation is holding back the U.S. economic recovery is playing into Wall Street’s efforts to prevent significant reforms of the financial industry in the wake two major crises – one of which continues to rage in the heart of Europe. The sector’s staunch opposition to reform was captured in JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon’s claim that new bank rules are “anti-American.”

A new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggests the opposition to substantially higher capital requirements is misguided. In particular, economist Patrick Slovik argues that a move away from the Basel accords’ “risk-weighted” approach to capital rules toward a hard-and-fast leverage ratio is the only way to prevent banks from finding creative ways to hide their true risk levels.

When the Basel accords first introduced the calculation of regulatory capital requirements based on risk-weighted assets, it was not expected that for systemically important banks the share of risk-weighted assets in total assets would consequently drop from 70% to 35%. Nor was it expected at the time that the financial system would transform high-risk subprime loans into seemingly low-risk securities on a scale that would spark a global financial crisis.  […] Tighter capital requirements based on risk-weighted assets aim to increase the loss-absorption capacity of the banking system, but also increase the incentives of banks to bypass the regulatory framework. New liquidity regulation, notwithstanding its good intentions, is another likely candidate to increase bank incentives to exploit regulation.

In addition, Slovik says market forces can only work properly if regulators debunk the perception that certain firms – like JP Morgan – are considered simply too big to be allowed to fail.

Increasing the capacity of markets to discipline banks will require addressing the too-big-to-fail problem, strengthening and rationalizing bank resolution regimes, and improving bank information disclosures.  […] The introduction of a leverage ratio based on non-risk-weighted total assets would help to align banks’ activities with their main economic functions and maximise capital-allocation efficiency. Although a common argument against a stringent leverage ratio is that it would increase bank lending cost and negatively affect the economy, this study has shown that the differences between the macroeconomic impact of risk-weighted and non-risk-weighted regulatory regimes are relatively low.

Banks took more than $50 billion from the European Central Bank on Wednesday in the first offering since it, the Federal Reserve and other major central banks slashed the cost of borrowing dollars in response to a worsening euro zone crisis. The high volume of emergency borrowing was seen as a sign that some of the region’s banks are having  problems obtaining dollar funding.

This means that, as our friend Mike Derby aptly predicted, the Fed’s balance sheet, currently around $2.8 trillion, will show a big increase when its weekly custody holdings figures are released on Thursday.

If one believes, as the Fed does, that the extent of unconventional monetary stimulus depends on the stock of assets the central bank holds rather than the “flow” of its interventions in Treasury and mortgage bond markets, then this amounts to a defacto monetary easing – about 1/12 of the Fed’s $600 billion QE2 bond-buying program.

The implosion of MF Global Holdings Ltd, the largest independent U.S. futures broker until it filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday, calls to mind the collapse of Refco – which in its time was the largest independent U.S. futures broker – after revelations that Refco’s CEO had defrauded his investors. (London hedge fund company Man Group Plc bought Refco’s futures brokerage just about six years ago, and later spun off its brokerage and renamed it MF Global.)

But now that questions are arising on the whereabouts of assets that clients entrusted to Jon Corzine’s firm to back their futures trades,  it may also be worthwhile to bear in mind the bankruptcy of another futures brokerage – that of Sentinel Management, in 2007.

Sentinel was a different kind of futures brokerage than MF Global. The company largely managed money for other futures brokers, delivering outsized returns that, Sentinel’s bankruptcy trustee says, were juiced up by improperly using customer money to secure bank loans that went to fund risky trades.  When the credit crisis hit in the summer of 2007, the scheme unraveled, and Sentinel quickly plunged into bankruptcy. Sentinel managed about $2 billion in customer assets; about $600 million of it was never recovered, and clients are still wrangling over how to divvy up what remains.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on Wednesday gave a speech on the lessons about sustained growth that can be gleaned from the experience of emerging markets. Bernanke said not all of the “Washington consensus” policies pushed by multilateral lenders in the 1990s had proven fruitful. In particular, he said the Asian financial crisis showed the risks of opening up financial markets to foreign capital flows until a country has implemented measures to strengthen banks and regulation.

Yet Bernanke missed an opportunity to link his speech back to the recent experience of the United States. For while his message was tailored for the developing world, he may as well have been describing the U.S. banking sector in the run-up to the 2008-2009 financial crisis:

Dismantling controls on the domestic financial industry has proven counterproductive when important complementary factors — such as effective bank supervision … were absent.

The market for U.S. commercial paper, a key source of short-term funding for firms, is signaling fresh distrust of the banking sector. Investors continue to favor commercial paper issued by non-financial companies over those issued by banks, the latest Fed data show. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, non-financial CP outstanding increased $5.1 billion to $187.1 billion in the week ended Sept. 21, while financial CP rose $3.2 billion to $503.5 billion. Since the end of 2010, the amount of industrial CP outstanding has grown by 65 percent, while the amount of bank CP has contracted by 10 percent.

Amid the storm of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, investors have found a safe harbor in the Swiss franc. Attracted by its low levels of inflation and stable debt-to-GDP ratio, traders have pushed Switzerland’s currency up 15 percent against the euro in 2010 and 6 percent so far this year. This has been a boon to the Swiss government’s ability to finance its operations — Switzerland’s 10-year benchmark bond is currently yielding just 1.53% — as well as Swiss tourists, who are enjoying huge discounts on trips abroad thanks to their favorable exchange rate.

Swiss exporters, though, are not so thrilled with the franc’s rally. Nearly half of the Swiss corporate executives that the central bank surveyed earlier this year admitted they “experienced negative effects” due to the currency’s strength. But it’s the chairman of the Swiss National Bank, a former hedge-fund manager named Philipp Hildebrand, who may be come out as the biggest loser from these events. In an effort to contain the franc’s upward climb early last year, Hildebrand spent 147 billion francs — nearly 25% of the country’s GDP — buying mostly euros, U.S. dollars, and British pounds sterling. The central bank reported a book loss of nearly $21 billion last year as the franc continued its ascent.

Now Hildebrand, like his American counterpart Ben Bernanke, is facing heat at home for his unorthodox monetary maneuvers. Reuters Zurich bureau chief Emma Thomasson wrote an illuminating profile of Hildebrand last month that nicely captured his opponents’ gripes.

This week’s rehashing of European banking concerns – related variously to the Basel III impact on German banks, the ongoing morass re Anglo Irish Bank or any other scare story you want to exhume — provided the latest excuse for a global markets wobble as September kicked off. Yet, with some justified head-scratching over what really was new to the world this week as opposed to last week, price moves showed little conviction. Most losses were quickly recouped and decibel level of the commentariat, still frantically competing to warn you of the next disaster, toned down.

The world’s major sovereigns and banks have big financial problems, no doubt, and Europe more than its fair share. The rescues of the Spring did not provide a silver bullet and genuine repair will likely take a painfully-long time. But we’ve also had a lot of time to adequately discount these risks and the marketplace at large is already positioned extremely cautiously. That’s why the idea of sudden, blind panic on these long-running sagas seems just a little OTT – especially against a relatively stable, if bruised, economic backdrop. The bigger issue many investors are grappling with is the growing difficulty in making money in a hyper-cautious, low-growth environment. Ask Stanley Druckenmiller. If he threw in the towel because money-making conditions are just lousy, then you can be sure others see the same. Anecdotally at least, pressurised hedge funds – who faced rising redemptions through the summer – are ultra-cautious about open positions and seem quick to cut and run on even the slightest gain, long or short. (A bit like continually shouting ‘bank!’ on reaching £100 pounds on The Weakest Link!) Big institutional funds, meantime, are sufficiently uncertain about the market and economic direction that many are already keen to lock down for the remainder of the year and are hugging benchmarks to preserve whatever capital they have without resorting to zero-yielding cash or barely-more-attractive TBonds. U.S. midterms in November only add the caution. In short, it will take a pretty major positive or negative surprise to truly set these markets alight and there is every chance we won’t get a decisive one for some time.  We already have historically high vol and caution – but relative steady, unspectacular conditions for all that. The smart money may simply be tempted to buy or sell any hysterical extremes. Is may even be possible that some are tempted to foster a long-absent patience gene?

As to next week? There’s welter of new economic data to maybe add some flavour. The biggest potential movers are August China production and investment stats (now, oddly, being released Saturday rather than Monday) and then US retail sales, Philly Fed and German ZEW indices later in the week. On the issue du jour re European banks/sovereigns, an informal EU summit on Thursday provides the main set-piece – but BIS central bankers meeting in Basel this weekend and Spanish and Italian debt auctions next week may add their own spice.

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet  signalled on Thursday that the days of 12-month loans to banks will come to an end soon and that will be the start of a gradual exit from unlimited liquidity injections.***”The market, as far as I see, it is not expecting that we will prolong (our) one-year operation, I will say nothing to dispel this present sentiment of the market,” Trichet said in a news conference after the 16-country bloc’s central bank kept rates at 1 percent. “The enhanced credit support … was not for eternity,” he added.******The ECB started the 12-month cash injections to help the ailing banking sector back into form, and banks reacted with joy, snapping up nearly half a trillion euros of cheap money in the first such operation in June.******But Trichet also had soothing words for banks addicted to cheap money. The ECB would keep interbank interest rates well below the main refinancing rate, he said.  But it seems banks will have to learn to play again with each other rather than relying only on the ECB’s largesse.******And before signing off, Trichet also had words of advice for the media.  “This is exactly the same language as we always have utilised. Everybody knows that, so no news there.”******That advice seemed fall on deaf ears, as most media, including Reuters, would make a lot of hay out of his words on 12-month liquidity injections and keep it the centrepiece of their coverage.

MacroScope is pleased to post the following from guest blogger Ian Bright. Bright is senior economist at ING and winner of the 2008 Rybczynski Prize from the UK Society of Business Economists. He says here that bank lending’s future can be seen in Japan’s past — and it is not good for the would-be borrower. 

“There is anger in many countries that banks are not lending money. Or more correctly, they are lending less than people want.

There is nothing new in this. Even before the failure of Lehman Brothers and the collapse of the global financial system, banks were tightening lending criteria. We even saw people who paid off their credit cards each month have them withdrawn. Small companies found that the criteria used to value the assets backing loans were made more onerous.

The good news for Africa when the global financial meltdown began was that its financial markets were generally so far behind the rest of the world that groups such as the World Economic Forum reckoned that there was little or no danger. A new paper, posted on the economic research website VoxEU, suggests that that might be a bit too optimistic.

Tilburg University economist and former World Bank official Thorsten Beck – along with the World Bank’s Michael Fuchs and Marilou Uy —  write that despite shallow financial markets, sub-Saharan Africa is unlikely to escape the repercussions of the financial crisis.

Indeed, they argue that the crisis is threatening what little progress has been made to reverse what they call the alarming superficiality of African finance.