Streetwise Professor

There has been a spate of world-turned-upside-down stories about the US as a potential exporter of oil and refined products.  The explanation is quite simple.  Supposedly menopausal North American geology has produced a surprise energy baby.  Or, I should say “babies”, for this is a multiple birth, in fact: oil and gas in different locations.

This has resulted in substantial changes in price relationships in oil and gas.  The most visible of these is the Brent-WTI spread, which blew out again to over $20/bbl (better than 20 percent of the WTI price).  But all sorts of spreads have reached record or near record wides.  Canadian oil sells at a deep discount to WTI at Cushing, which sells at a deep discount to the price in the Gulf.  Refining margins are wide.

Commodity trading is all about transformations in space, time, and form.  Spreads price transformations: they are the shadow prices of transformations.  Time spreads price the cost and benefit of transformations in time (through storage).  Locational spreads measure the marginal cost of transformations in space (through transportation).  Spreads between processed and raw materials price the costs of refining/processing.

The spread blowouts in energy  are highly visible evidence of how the spike in domestic energy production, and notably its location and quality, has been at odds with the energy transformation infrastructure that has developed in the US in the past decades.  That transformation infrastructure was-and crucially still is-configured to transform foreign and heavier/sour crudes into refined products for domestic production.  The main direction of movement of crude was south to north, from import points at the Gulf to refineries in the Gulf and Midcontinent.

The new production is in the north, or in Eagle Ford in Texas.  It is sweeter and lighter than the oil that most domestic refineries are configured to process.  Refineries in position (in the Midcon) to process this new output (especially the Bakken) are operating at capacity, giving them fat margins.  The transportation capacity to bring the oil to the Gulf (and to East Coast refineries, many of which have been shuttered in recent years) is highly limited because it was structured to bring oil inland, not ship it to the coast either for refining or (when the law permits), export.

Meaning that in the short run, quantities cannot adjust in response to the oil output shock: there are bottlenecks in transportation, storage, and refining.  Since quantities cannot adjust, prices bear the burden, leading to dramatic movements in spreads that price these transformations.

These spreads are signals about the locations of bottlenecks in the value chain, and the value of making investments in transportation, storage, and refining capacity to ameliorate them.  These investments are expensive, and take time.  Hence, historically anomalous spread levels are like to persist for some time.

Moreover, some investments can exacerbate other bottlenecks.  For instance, building Keystone XL (which will bring oil from Bakken and Canada to the Midcontinent) without adding more Midcon refining capacity and/or more capacity to move oil from Midcon to the Gulf (and perhaps the East Coast) would actually exacerbate the refining and outbound transportation bottlenecks in the Midcontinent.  This would, most notably, cause the Brent-WTI spread to widen further.  There is essentially a race between production capacity in the Midcontinent on the one hand, and the outbound transportation and refining capacity there.  Right now production is winning.  This will tend to cause spreads to change in ways that discourage too much output expansion, and encourage expansion in the ability to consume what is produced in the Midcon.  But there will be a minuet between production and consumption that will go on for years: prices/spreads will play conductor of the music that producers and consumers dance to.

There are economic considerations that limit the speed with which quantities will respond to these price signals.

For one, investment takes time.  You can’t snap your fingers to build a pipeline or add refining capacity, and have it arrive instantaneously in a puff of smoke.

Uncertainty is another.  The ability to invest in refining or pipeline or production capacity is a real option: in the face of uncertainty, it is often optimal to delay decisions to invest pending the arrival of new information about the economic value of those investments.

Sadly, politics is another.  Whether it is a politicized pipeline approval process, Byzantine environmental laws that give enviros and nimby-ists the ability to impede energy investments, or laws that restrict exports, the legal and regulatory systems in the US inflate the cost of investment in energy infrastructure, and crucially add an element of considerable uncertainty that also slows investment due to the real option considerations I just mentioned: the vagaries of politics and political influence are volatile, hard to predict, and can have first-order effects on the profitability (or not) of an investment.   It would have taken some time regardless to make the investments necessary to reconfigure America’s energy infrastructure to accommodate the huge shock to the location and quality of oil production.  Politics and regulation will only slow that response, and make it less efficient and complete than it should be.

And it should be noted that even though much of the law and legislation will be cloaked in the language of public interest, notably environmental paeans and invocations of “jobs, jobs, jobs”, it is largely the product of nakedly self-interested calculations.  This is most notable in the debate over natural gas exports, in which domestic petrochemical producers are trying to prevent-or at least sharply constrain-in order to reduce the cost of their feedstocks and thereby increase their margins.  Similar arguments are already starting to appear in oil just as the prospect of oil exports is being mooted.  It is also notable in transportation: is it any surprise that oil pipelines (notably Keystone) are the target of much opposition, given that Warren Buffett is making oodles of money transporting oil by rail, due to his ownership of the BNSF RR and a major manufacturer of rail tank cars.  (Sort of OT: speaking of Buffet, could the fact that the USDOJ is going after S&P but not Moody’s, despite the fact that their conduct during the pre-crisis period was almost identical, have anything to do with the fact that Saint Warren has a big stake in Moody’s?)

In other words, naked rent seeking is going to play a big role in the speed and efficiency with which firms make the investments necessary to respond to the unexpected domestic energy production shock.  Sadly, the intensely politicized nature of energy, and the swollen nature of the US government and regulatory apparatus (which deems that everything is its business) will dramatically impede this adjustment process.  Meaning that we are likely to be in a world of wide spreads for some time to come.

When the government is the bookie, it’s very hard to beat the spread.  Especially when that government is all too often indistinguishable from the mob.

Last year there were concerns about a “hard landing” in China.  Those fears have dissipated with 7.8 percent growth in the fourth quarter.  Now there is widespread optimism that China’s growth will continue inexorably: the recent spike in iron ore prices (which had plunged when concerns about the Chinese economy were most acute) is a very visible sign of that.

But . . .

It appears that this rebound is the result of another dose of stimulants, notably an injection of credit.  Which (a la Michael Jackson) gives less of a lift each time it is applied.  Now it takes about 3 RMB of credit to generate a RMB of GDP growth.  Moreover, this application of stimulus has deepened the investment-dependence of the Chinese economy, and delayed its transition to a more balanced, natural system.  Furthermore, to the extent that the projects funded by this debt don’t generate sufficient returns, the borrowers will not be able to repay; this risks a solvency crisis, and of course, a liquidity crisis that can break out when lenders are solvent, but at elevated risk of becoming insolvent.

A few articles in the last few days suggest that the optimistic turn may be quite overdone, and that there are dangers lurking beneath the sea of debt.  Chinese banks are rolling over local government debt that was used to fund stimulus spending.   Chinese heavy manufacturing enterprises are becoming increasingly indebted, and are staying afloat with borrowing.  The shadow banking system is growing and mutating.

The Chinese economy is still largely centrally planned.  Not directly, but through subsidies and especially through subsidized credit.  Admittedly, my priors are that centrally planned economies are doomed to difficulty, even though they can produce spurts of measured growth.  With sufficient coercive powers, such governments can keep things going for quite a while.  But there’s a point when they can’t.  I wouldn’t be surprised if China is approaching that point.  In other words, the further injection of credit may have just deferred the hard landing . . . and made it all the harder.

Hint: collateral crunches are not an ab exercise.  Instead, regulators and legislators around the world are waking up to the reality of what they have wrought: that the regulations that they blithely decided to impose on the derivatives markets are likely to have severe adverse consequences.  Specifically, Europeans have awakened to the fact that clearing and collateral mandates will be extremely burdensome on firms that use derivatives to manage risk, but who pose no real systemic threat.  Thus, a committee of the European Parliament has voted to send clearing regulations back to the European Commission for reconsideration.  There is a realization that a “collateral crunch” is impending as a result of these various regulations:

This has led to talk of a “collateral crunch”, with most central counterparties accepting only government bonds or cash as collateral, assets that may not be readily available. This is more restrictive than at present, with corporate bonds and even equities often accepted as collateral in uncleared bilateral deals, if lodged in sufficient quantity.

The problem may be particularly acute for mutual funds, as an equity or corporate bond fund will simply not possess anything it can use as collateral. Instead it may have to use the securities lending or repo markets to secure suitable assets.

But many pension funds will also be hit. As Mr Haines points out, even the index-linked government bonds that pension funds do tend to hold in abundance are not generally accepted as collateral by central counterparties, even if conventional bonds issued by the same governments are.

Estimates of the cost of using the repo market to access the necessary collateral range from 50 basis points of a pension fund’s assets to several hundred basis points, Mr Haines adds. Alternatively, pension funds may feel pressured to alter their asset allocation so they do have sufficient in-house collateral.

Totally unpredictable, right?  Uhm, not really.

I find it particularly amusing that virtually every article on the effects of Frankendodd and Emir bewail the “unintended consequences.”  A million pardons, but that was a theme here on SWP, and in various presentations I made, before Frankendodd and Emir were actually adopted.  Unintended, but eminently foreseeable-and totally ignored.

The recent angst focuses on initial margin: the amount of capital that has to be tied up to support derivatives positions from the moment they are initiated.  Given that collateral is costly, the large increases in initial margin will require derivatives users to choose between continuing to use them to manage risk, but obtain lower returns, or to eschew derivatives and live with greater risk.

The benefit received in exchange for this very real cost?  Given that many entities so affected pose no systemic risk, it’s quite difficult to identify any gain.

Not that initial margin is unimportant, but the focus on it distracts attention from what I believe to be the true systemic risk inherent in clearing and collateral mandates: the contingent needs for liquidity to make variation margin payments.  Big price moves lead to big variation margin flows.  These will tend to occur when markets are stressed and liquidity becomes scarce.  Thus, the need to make variation margin payments will exacerbate stresses on the market, especially will stress liquidity supply mechanisms.  Given that financial crises are, typically, liquidity crises, this is a major systemic problem.

So by all means pay attention to the drag that the dramatic increase in initial margin requirements will impose.  This is a drag that will be experienced day after weary day.  But do not overlook the truly dangerous unintended consequence of the clearing and collateral mandates in Frankendodd and Emir.  The stress that these mandates will put on liquidity supply mechanisms at the precise instant that these mechanisms are at risk of failure.

What could go wrong?

I say again: regulate/legislate in haste, repent at leisure. The seeds for the next crisis are being sown in the alleged attempts to prevent a recurrence of the last one.  Legislative and regulatory generals fighting the last war.

A tag-team of my favorite blogs-the wonderfully sardonic (and insightful) Rhymes With Cars and Girls and the less sardonic (but equally insightful) Deus ex Macchiato-discuss the fact that model-based risk-weighted capital calculations on the same assets differ substantially between models/banks.

From this, DEM concludes the need to centralize capital calculations:

he answer is clear. Centralize and standardise capital calculation. Throw all those internal models away, and use one common, regulator developed approach. Now that a lot of progress has been made on trade reporting, the data infrastructure exists to do this — or least it wouldn’t be too hard to extend what does exist to do it. Developing the models would be a huge undertaking, but compared to having each large bank do it individually, a central infrastructure would be cheaper and more reliable, and anyway you could pick the best of individual banks’ methodologies. You could even spin out the var teams from four or five leading banks into the new central body — just don’t pick the bank whose IRC is less than 10% of the average answer…

Crimson Reach at Rhymes is more cautious, repeating his theme that All Large Calculations are Wrong.  He concludes:

In other words, it’s a Large Calculation. But as RWCG readers know, all large calculations are wrong. So, I’m skeptical that the answer to this is to ‘centralise’ the calculation – i.e., make it even larger.

I’m on Crimson’s side on this one.  (Sorry, David.)

Centralize capital calculations?  No. No. No. No. No fucking no.

Crimson is right: all Large Calculations Are Wrong.  Including those-and I would suggest, especially those-undertaken by some Centralized Authority, e.g., The Wizard of Financial Oz.

What would you rather have?  Randomly distributed mistakes, or perfectly correlated ones?

The answer, it seems to me, is gob-smackingly obvious.  Randomly distributed.  Perfectly correlated errors are a recipe for systemic risk.  All banks will crowd the risks that the model underprices and avoid the risks that it overprices.  If an adverse shock hits the crowded investment, every bank is screwed simultaneously.  All will need to liquidate their positions in that asset, or in other assets.  Every bank will have fire sales at the same time.

That’s what we want to avoid.  That’s what creates a systemic risk.

We want to diversify model risk, not concentrate it.  Centralized calculation concentrates it.  I actually see an evolutionary benefit in the wide range of model risk weights that DEM bewails.  That represents a diverse ecosystem of entities with divergent views that is less vulnerable to a single shock.  Yeah, that shock will crater some banks, but not all of them. When I think of any-ANY-centralized calculation, I think of the Socialist Calculation Debate.  I also think of monocultures that are dangerously vulnerable-systemically vulnerable-to a single shock.  Think of the devastation that smallpox wreaked on native American populations.  A single shock can crater everybody all at once.

If that happens, who is the buyer in the fire sale?  If there are no buyers in the fire sale, how low can prices go? Pretty damn low.

Crimson is right.  All Large Calculations Are Wrong.  The answer to this problem is exactly the opposite that DEM suggests.  Diversify this risk.  Don’t concentrate it.  Don’t sort on it.

We need less centralized control-freakishness.  Not more.  A lot less.  Mistakes are inevitable.  Create a system that induces them to make uncorrelated mistakes (or at least, mistakes with low correlation).  Don’t induce perfect correlation in errors.  I say again: don’t induce perfect correlation in errors.  Create a diverse ecosystem, not a monoculture.   Imposing uniformity because disagreement is unseemly and reveals the fundamental uncertainty with assessing risk is exactly-exactly-the wrong answer.  It makes errors systematic.  Systematic errors create systematic risk.

Diversified, diverse populations are far more robust than uniform, monocultural ones.  Disagreement is a feature, not a bug.  Enforced agreement is the worst bug of all.  Sort of like smallpox.

This week’s big derivatives story was about a public workshop at the CFTC on the issue of futurization.  I was one of the first people to comment on this issue, last year when ICE announced it was converting all of its energy swaps into energy futures.

That was Futurization 1.0. The conversion merely consisted of renaming “swaps” “futures”.  In all economic dimensions (contract specs, execution, clearing) the contracts remained identical.  But the renaming allowed some energy swap users to escape the dreaded Swap Dealer designation.

Futurization 1.1 was the CME’s conversion.  This illustrates some of the silly impacts of Frankendodd.  The CME has cleared energy swaps for going on 10 years now.  The parties would execute a swap, and submit the swap for clearing through an Exchange of Futures for Swaps (EFS) trade.  So the originally executed swap existed only until it was submitted for clearing, when it was replaced with economically equivalent futures contracts.  But no matter how short the swap’s life, the fact that it was born a swap meant that it counted towards the volume of swaps activity used to determine whether someone was a swap dealer.  So the process has now changed, and market participants use (mainly) block trades of futures to create the positions they want, thereby cutting out the interim swap step.

The transformation of the energy derivatives landscape, and the launch of swap futures by CME and Eris are now raising the question of whether futurization will spread beyond energy.

One motive to eschew swaps in favor of futures is unlikely to exist in interest rates, credit and other financial derivatives: the biggest market participants are likely to trade enough bespoke swaps for which there are no futures equivalents, meaning that they will be treated as swap dealers regardless: this reduces their incentive to substitute futures for swaps.

The main driver of futurization outside of energy will be CFTC regulatory treatment of futures and swaps.  Differential treatment will affect the economics of futures vis a vis swaps, and the prospect of such differential treatment was the center of controversy at the CFTC meeting, and in the larger debate in the industry.

The main sources of differential treatment are execution and margining.  Swaps will have to be executed subject to (allegedly) soon-to-be announced SEF rules, and are subject to immediate reporting.  Most market participants who will substitute futures for swaps will execute these deals via privately negotiated block trades subject to exchange rules.  Crucially, reporting of block futures trades is delayed 15 minutes, a concession to fears that immediate reporting would impair liquidity because block positioners (those supplying liquidity to the block futures market) could find it difficult to lay off their risk if the fact they had just done a big trade was announced immediately.  This would induce them to require larger price concessions for doing block trades.

Which raises the question: why the difference between the futures goose and the swaps gander?  Similar considerations obtain for swaps.

Thus, this rule difference is likely to favor futures executed via block trades as opposed to swaps executed via traditional means (but with immediate post-trade transparency) or via SEFs.  (Economically material differences between the rules governing block trades and SEF trades could also affect the relative costs of trading in these disparate ways, and hence affect the choice between them.)

Margining will be different for swaps and futures.  Futures will be margined assuming a one- or two-day liquidation period (i.e., margins will be based on something analogous to a one- or two-day value at risk).  However, swaps-even cleared swaps-will require a minimum liquidation period of 5 days for calculating initial margin.

This substantially higher margin for swaps results in a substantial economic disadvantage to these contracts compared to futures contracts that generate the exact same cash flows (in the absence of default).   This will likely be another factor pushing the market towards futures-which is a major reason for the fury of swaps dealers.

This differential treatment of economically equivalent contracts just because one is called a “swap” (BAD!) and the other is called a “future” (GOOD!) makes little-or no-economic sense-and reflects the swap-o-phobia that pervades DC, and which was an animating principle behind Frankendodd.

The reason to set margins based on a liquidation period reflects the purchase of IM: it is intended to cover potential losses on a defaulted position before that position can be liquidated by the clearinghouse (i.e., the position can be assumed by another solvent market participant).  The less liquid an instrument,  the longer it takes the CCP to work out of the position, the more it is exposed to potential adverse price moves and hence the more margin cover it needs.

This liquidation period depends on the economic characteristics of the contract, how widely it is traded in the marketplace, the identity, number and capitalization of the firms that trade it, and market conditions at the time of liquidation. All of these conditions should be pretty much the same for two contracts that specify the same contingent cash flows, one of which is called a swap and the other a future.  Consider say a 10 year vanilla IRS and economically equivalent futures contracts that offer the same contingent cash flows.  Abstracting from margining differences, these contracts have identical price risks, and should attract the same kinds of users.  Why should liquidity of one differ from the liquidity of the other in the event of the default of the holder of a big position?

And don’t tell me that futures are traded in light markets and swaps are traded in dark ones.  As already noted, futures traded as substitutes for swaps are and will be typically traded in blocks outside the limit order book.

More importantly: in the event of the default of a big FCM or dealer that should be the reason to be concerned, the CCP is going to try to get rid of the defaulted portfolio in big chunks through some sort of auction process.  The firm winning the auction will then trade out of the position, likely using the central market and block trades.

This isn’t much different than how a swap CCP will handle the default process.  Indeed, LCH obligates its members to assume portions of a defaulted portfolio, and one reason for having stringent CCP membership requirements is to ensure that the members have the capital and trading expertise to manage big pieces of defaulted portfolios.

We actually have a case study of futures and swap default management processes.  When Lehman defaulted, CME auctioned off its interest rate, equity, currency, commodity, and energy positions.  These trades were done at differentials from market prices, to reflect the risk that those taking over the positions would assume and have to work off.  A couple of the positions were under-margined: the firms taking over the positions required the CME to provide more funds than the Lehman margin it had against those positions.  As it turned out, the other positions were over-margined, and across all positions the over-margining exceeded the under-margining, meaning that the CME clearinghouse did not suffer any loss as the result of the default.  But this illustrates the possibility that futures can be under-margined, and that even the putatively more liquid futures contracts can require substantial price concessions to get someone to assume them.

LCH.Clearnet handled the default of the Lehman IRS positions. These totaled $9 trillion in notional-bigger than the Lehman futures positions at CME, and arguably far larger in terms of risk.  ($1 trillion in notional of a 10 year IRS poses substantially more risk than $1 trillion in notional of Eurodollar futures.)  90 percent of the position was hedged within a week.  According to LCH.Clearnet, the costs of trading out of the defaulted position were “well within” the Lehman margins it held.

It’s hard to see much of an economic difference between the CME and LCH experiences.  It doesn’t appear that it was materially more difficult to manage the default of “swaps” than it was “futures.”   The Lehman default does not provide any evidence that swap-o-phobia is anything but a mental illness.

Further, this case study illustrates that there is no reason to believe that absent government regulation, swaps will be under-margined and futures will not.  Indeed, had the Lehman positions been held at 5 separate CCPs, two of them would have been under margined.

Indeed, there are serious reasons to be concerned that government regulations of the margining of economically similar (and in some respects identical) contracts will create systemic risks, rather than mitigate them.

The margin regulations-with larger IM imposed on swaps than futures-are a form of price control, in this case default risk price control.  And we know that price controls work out swell, especially when applied by regulators in a two-sizes-fits-all fashion across all different kinds of instruments posing different risks and cleared by CCPs with potentially disparate financial strength.

Moreover, this price control will tend to induce activity to move towards futures CCPs.  Whereas in the absence of the margin differential clearing activity in, say, interest rate derivatives would be split between futures CCPs and swap CCPs, under the differential regulation, business will tend to tip to the futures CCPs-most notably, CME.  This will tend to lead to greater concentration of credit risk.

Wasn’t the whole point of Frankendodd to reduce concentration? Just asking.

The whole conceit that regulators can set risk prices is quite dangerous, and is likely to be a source of systemic risk because these prices are set on the basis of highly limited information in a politicized process, and because mistakes in setting risk prices (especially price differences between similar products) tend to lead to crowded trades and risk concentration that is highly destabilizing during crisis periods (cf. Basel II).

The case for setting different margins (default risk prices) on very similar-and in some cases identical-derivatives contracts is particularly weak.  It is the characteristics of the products and those who trade them that will drive liquidity and liquidation periods: products called “futures” that share the same economic characteristics as products called “swaps” will pose virtually the same challenges to liquidate in the event of a large default.  Given this, the economics suggest that imposing differential margins based on a name difference-rather than economic differences-can’t make things better, and could well make them worse.

But the Sorcerer’s Apprentices know better. So futures are likely to get an artificial advantage, and swaps an artificial burden. Such distortions are quite dangerous.  My conclusion? Futurize in haste, repent at leisure.