Streetwise Professor

There was another hearing on HFT on Capitol Hill today, in the Senate. The best way to summarize it was that it reminded me of an evening at the local bookstore, with authors reading selections from their books.

Two examples suffice. Citadel’s Ken Griffin (whom I called out for talking his book on Frankendodd years ago) heavily criticized dark pools, and called for much heavier regulation of them. But he sang the praises of purchased order flow, and warned against any regulation of it.

So, go out on a limb and bet that (a) Citadel does not operate a dark pool, and (b) Citadel is one of the biggest purchasers of order flow, and you’ll be a winner!

The intellectually respectable case against dark pools and payment for order flow is the same. Both “cream skim” uninformed orders from the exchanges, leaving the exchange order flow more informed (i.e., more toxic), thereby reducing exchange liquidity by increasing adverse selection costs. I’m not saying that I agree with this case, but I do recognize that it is at least grounded in economics, and that an intellectually consistent critic of dark pools would also criticize purchased order flow.

But some people have books to sell.

The other example is Jeffrey Sprecher of ICE, which owns and operates the NYSE. Sprecher lamented the fragmentation of the equity markets, and praised the lack of fragmentation of futures markets. But he went further. He said that futures markets were competitive and not fragmented.

Tell me another one.

Yes, there is limited head-to-head competition in some futures contracts, such as WTI and Brent. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. Futures exchanges do not compete head to head in any other major contract. Execution in the equity market is far more competitive than in the futures market. Multiple equities exchanges compete vigorously, and the socialization of order flow due to RegNMS makes that competition possible. This is why the equities exchange business is low margin, and not very profitable. Futures exchanges own their order flow, and since liquidity attracts liquidity, one exchange tends to dominate trading in a particular instrument. So yes, futures markets are not fragmented, but no, they are not competitive. These things go together, regardless of what Sprecher says.  He wants to go back to the day when the NYSE was the dominant exchange and its members earned huge rents. That requires undoing a lot of what is in RegNMS.

Those were some of the gems from the witness side of the table. From the questioner side, we were treated to another display of Elizabeth Warren’s arrogant ignorance and idiocy. The scary thought is that the left views her as the next Obama who will deny Hillary and vault to the presidency. God save us.

Overall the hearing demonstrated what I’ve been saying for years. Market structure, and the regulations that drive market structure, have huge distributive effects. Everybody says that they are in favor of efficient markets, but I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that their definition of what is efficient happens to correspond with what benefits their firms. The nature of securities/derivatives trading creates rents. The battle over market structure is a classic rent seeking struggle. In rent seeking struggles, everybody reads out of their books. Everybody.

Vladimir Putin played his favorite game today: divide and conquer. He weighed in on the $9 billion US fine of French bank BNP Paribas for its flagrant and repeated violations of US sanctions on Sudan and Iran. He took a typically narcissistic view: according to Vova, the US offered to relent on its prosecution of BNPP if France terminated its sales of Mistral attack ships to Russia:

“We know about the pressure which our U.S. partners are applying on France not to supply the Mistrals to Russia,” Putin told Russian diplomats in Moscow today. “And we even know they hinted that if the French don’t deliver the Mistrals, they would quietly get rid of the sanctions against the bank, or at least minimize them,” he said without naming BNP Paribas.

He knows this how, exactly? Electronic surveillance? (Don’t tell Angela!) A leak from the French?

Certainly Putin is trying to stir trouble between the US and France, and exploiting the French anger at the US penalties. (To which I say: the anger should be directed at the mangers of BNP Paribas, especially the offenders in its Geneva commodity finance operation who violated sanctions against malign regimes with malice aforethought.)

But the chronology is way off. The US prosecution of BNP began long before Ukraine exploded. Years before. The USDOJ was particularly furious at the French bank’s flagrant attempts to conceal its sanctions busting: the bank eliminated identifying information from the transactions in order to evade detection, a sure sign of a specific intent to commit a violation. This fury was well-stoked long before Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine/Crimea. What’s more, US prosecutors operate very independently, and those involved in the BNP case would be outraged at attempts to interfere in their case against the French by a White House playing geopolitical games, especially given the years and blood, sweat, and tears involved in the prosecution. Prosecutors do not take orders from on high, especially in big cases like this.

This is likely another example of Putin projection. This is how Putin would have instructed his prosecutors to act, and they would have implemented his instructions without question: he just presumes that the same would happen in the US. But the US is very different in that regard. Indeed, I would wager that if the White House did attempt to interfere in this way, the prosecutors would have leaked.

Of course Putin has another agenda here. He realizes that the biggest threat he faces is US sanctions that would be enforced (via the financial provisions of the Patriot Act) by prosecuting any sanctions violator who deals in dollars just as the US has prosecuted BNP. By emphasizing the existential legal threat that European banks would face under a sanctions regime, Putin is attempting to fuel opposition to sanctions: since Obama has made it plain that he will not proceed with sanctions without European support, by fomenting European opposition he can counter the US. To the Europeans (and probably American banks too), the easiest way to avoid severe punishments for sanctions violations is to have no sanctions at all. Which is what Putin wants.

In other words, Putin’s mischievous comment on the BNP Paribas case is a tell. He is revealing what he really fears.  So let’s take the hint, and make his nightmares reality.

If the vaults are in China, that is. Over the weekend I posted on the fraudulent commodity-based lending (collateralized by aluminum) in Qingdao. Now a Chinese government auditor claims that the gold used as collateral in $15 billion of loans does not exist.

To put this into context, Goldman (ha!) estimates that there are about $80 billion in loans in China collateralized by gold. Thus, the auditor’s report means that at least 20 percent of those loans are fraudulent. Given that it is likely easier to verify the existence of gold pledged as collateral than is the case for copper or soybeans, this suggests that even higher percentages of these other commodity-based loans (totaling another $80 billion) are backed by warehouse receipts that aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.

This situation creates the conditions for a horrific information contagion, which is the worst sort of systemic risk. Many analyses of systemic risk focus on counterparty credit risk, where the failure of one institution topples a set of interconnected dominoes. But historically, the domino problem has been less of a source of financial crises than information contagion. For instance, information contagion was arguably a far more important cause of the 2008 crisis than counterparty contagion.

Information contagion is a panic that results when the quality of assets in one part of the financial system leads people to question the value of other assets, usually similar but not always. For instance, in 2008,  the problems at Bear and Lehman were the result of bad mortgage investments by these firms. This raised questions about the solvency of other financial institutions that held, or were believed to hold, similar assets. Suddenly all banks became suspect, and had problems funding their assets. They started dumping assets to raise cash, which cratered prices and thereby created problems in institutions that had to mark their assets to a (now depressed) market. Banks that had extended liquidity support to SIVs had to bring them back on their balance sheets, threatening to make them undercapitalized.

Information contagion is most likely to occur, and is most severe when it does, when (a) asset values and balance sheets are opaque, and (b) financial institutions engage in a lot of maturity transformation (i.e., borrowing short to lend long). When asset values and balance sheets are opaque, market participants are more likely to draw inferences from revelations about the values of other firms/assets, because they can’t evaluate the firms/assets directly. In these circumstances, bad news about one firm or one type of asset can lead to a massive loss in confidence in other firms and assets. When these assets are funded with short term borrowings, firms can’t roll over their loans under these conditions, and are more likely to go bankrupt. Moreover, they are more likely to dump assets in fire sales that impose externalities on other firms holding similar assets.

China’s financial system is nothing if opaque. This is particularly true of the shadow banking system, but the banking system is also incredibly murky. For instance, the actual quality of loans on bank books is very difficult to assess. A lot of loans reported as performing are actually quite dodgy.

Information contagion is especially likely because the nature of the revelations about commodity loans raises serious questions about the monitoring of loans and the evaluation of the creditworthiness of borrowers and the quality (and existence!) of their collateral by financial institutions. If banks do a bad job at evaluating commodity loans and borrowers, and commodity collateral, it is reasonable to infer that they do a bad job at monitoring other loans and evaluating other borrowers. It is these sorts of inferences that lead to information contagion.

Moreover, maturity transformation is ubiquitous in China. This is especially true in the shadow banking system.

What this means is that although a few tens of billions of loans backed by non-existent collateral may not seem like a big deal in a financial system with about $17 trillion in credit outstanding (about 35 percent of which is in the shadow sector), the ramifications are far more serious than the value of these commodity loans suggest. There is a serious risk that doubts about the quality of the commodity loans will lead to growing doubts about the quality of other assets, especially in the shadow banking sector.  This creates the potential for panics and runs in that sector, and given the connections between shadow financial institutions and mainstream banks (connections which are themselves opaque) this could spillover into the conventional sector.

In other words, the potential for information contagion in a highly leveraged (with credit at about 250 percent of GDP), highly maturity transformed, and exceedingly opaque financial system is what makes the fraudulent commodity loans a big deal. Potentially a very big deal.

Today’s big news is the suit filed by NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman alleging that Barclays defrauded the customers of its LX dark pool.

In the current hothouse environment of US equity market structure, this will inevitably unleash a torrent of criticism of dark pools. When evaluating the ensuing rhetoric, it is important to distinguish between criticism of dark pools generally, and this one dark pool in particular. That is, there are two distinct questions that are likely to be all tangled up. Are dark pools bad? Or, are dark pools good (or at least not bad), but did Barclays  not do what dark pools are supposed to do while claiming that it did?

What dark pools are supposed to do is protect traders (mainly institutional traders who can be considered uninformed) from predatory traders. Predatory traders can be those with better information, or those with a speed advantage (which often confers an information advantage, through arbitrage or order anticipation). Whether dark pools in general are good or bad depends on the effects of the segmentation of the market. By “cream skimming” the (relatively) uninformed order flow, dark pools make the exchanges less liquid. Order flow on the exchanges tends to be more “toxic” (i.e., informed), and these information asymmetries widen spreads and reduce depth, which raises trading costs for the uninformed traders who cannot avail themselves of the dark pool and who trade on the lit market instead. This means that the trading costs of some uninformed traders (those who can use the dark pools) goes down and the trading costs of some uninformed traders (those who can’t use dark pools) goes up. The distributive effect is one thing that makes dark pools controversial: the losers don’t like them. The net effect is impossible to determine in general, and depends on the competitiveness of the exchange market among other things: even if dark pools reduce liquidity on the exchange, they can provide a source of competition that generates benefits if the exchange markets are imperfectly competitive.

What’s more, dark pools reduce the returns to informed trading.  The efficiency effects of this are also ambiguous, because some informed trading enhances efficiency (by improving the informativeness of prices, and thereby leading to better investment decisions), but other informed trading is rent seeking.

In other words, it’s complicated. There is no “yes” or “no” answer to the first question. This is precisely why market structure debates are so intense and enduring.

The second question is what is at issue in the Barclays case. The NYAG alleges that Barclays promised to protect its customers from predatory HFT sharks, but failed to do so. Indeed, according to the complaint, Barclays actively tried to attract sharks to its pool. (This is one of the problematic aspects of the complaint, as I will show). So, the complaint really doesn’t take a view on whether dark pools that indeed protect customers from sharks are good or bad. It just claims that if dark pools claim to provide shark repellent, but don’t, they have defrauded their customers.

Barclays clearly did make bold claims that it was making strenuous efforts to protect its customers from predatory traders, including predatory HFT. This FAQ sets out its various anti-gaming procedures. In particular, LX performed “Liquidity Profiling” that evaluated the users of the dark pool on various dimensions. One dimension was aggressiveness: did they make quotes or execute against them? Another dimension was profitability. Traders that earn consistent profits over one second intervals are more likely to be informed, and costly for others without information to trade with. Based on this information, Barclays ranked traders on a 0 to 5 scale, with 0 being profitable, aggressive, predatory sharks, and 5 representing passive, gentle blue whales.

Furthermore, Barclays claimed that it allowed its customers to limit their trading to counterparties with certain liquidity profiles, and to certain types of counterparties. For instance, a user could choose not to be matched with a trader with an aggressive profile. Similarly, a customer could choose not to trade against an electronic liquidity provider. In addition, Barclays said that it would exclude traders who consistently brought toxic order flow to the market. That is, Barclays claimed that it was constantly on alert for sharks, and kept the sharks away from the minnows and dolphins and gentle whales.

The NYAG alleges this was a tissue of lies. There are several allegations.

The first is that in its marketing materials, Barclays misrepresented the composition of the order flow in the pool. Specifically,  a graph that  depicted Barclays’ “Liquidity Landscape” purported to show that very little of the trading in the pool was aggressive/predatory. The NYAG alleges that this chart is “false” because it did not include “one of the largest and most toxic participants  [Tradebot] in Barclays’ dark pool.” Further, the NYAG alleges that Barclays deceptively under-reported the amount of predatory HFT trading activity in the pool.

The second basic allegation is that Barclays did not exclude the sharks, and that by failing to update trader profiles, the ability to avoid trading with a firm with a 0 or 1 liquidity profile ranking was useless. Some firms that should have been labeled 0’s were labeled 4’s or 5’s, leaving those that tried to limit their counterparties to the 4’s or 5’s vulnerable to being preyed on by the 0’s. Further, the AG alleges that Barclays promised to exclude the 0’s, but didn’t.

(The complaint also makes allegations about Barclays order routing procedures for its customers, but that’s something of a separate issue, so I won’t discuss that here).

Fraud and misrepresentation are objectionable, and should be punished for purposes of deterrence. They are objectionable because they result in the production of goods and services that are worth less than the cost of producing them. Thus, if Barclays did engage in fraud and misrepresentation, punishment is in order.

One should always be cautious about making judgments on guilt based on a complaint, which by definition is a one-sided representation of the facts. This is particularly true where the complaint relies on selective quotes from emails, and the statements of ex-employees. This is why we have an adversarial process to determine guilt, to permit a thorough vetting of the evidence presented by the plaintiff, and to allow the defendant to present exculpatory evidence (including contextualizing the emails, presenting material that contradicts what is in the proffered emails, and evidence about the motives and reliability of the ex-employees).

Given all this, based on the complaint there is a colorable case, but not a slam dunk.

There is also the question of whether the alleged misrepresentations had a material impact on investors’ decisions regarding whether to trade on LX or not: any fraud would have led to a social harm only to the extent too many investors used LX, or traded too much on it. Here there is reason to doubt whether the misrepresentations mattered all that much.

Trading is an “experience good.” That is, one gets information about the quality of the good by consuming it. Someone may be induced to consume a shoddy good once by deceptive marketing, but if consuming it reveals that it is shoddy, the customer won’t be back. If the product is viable only if it gets repeat customers, deception and fraud are typically unviable strategies. You might convince me to try manure on a cone by telling me it’s ice cream, but once I’ve tried it, I won’t buy it again. If your business profits only if it gets repeat customers, this strategy won’t succeed.

Execution services provided by a dark pool are an experience good that relies on repeat purchases. The dark pool provides an experience good because it is intended to reduce execution costs, and market participants can evaluate/quantify these costs, either by themselves, or by employing consultants that specialize in estimating these costs. Moreover, most traders who trade on dark pools don’t trade on a single pool. They trade on several (and on lit venues too) and can compare execution costs on various venues. If Barclays had indeed failed to protect its customers against the sharks, those customers would have figured that out when they evaluated their executions on LX and found out that their execution costs were high compared to their expectations, and to other venues.  Moreover, dark pool customers trade day after day after day. A dark pool generates succeeds by reducing execution costs, and if it doesn’t it won’t generate persistently large and growing volumes.

Barclays LX generated large and growing volumes. It became the second largest dark pool. I am skeptical that it could have done so had it really been a sham that promised superior execution by protecting customers from sharks when in fact it was doing nothing to keep them out. This suggests that the material effect of the fraud might have been small even had it occurred. This is germane for determining the damages arising from the fraud.

It should also be noted that the complaint alleges that not only did Barclays not do what it promised to keep sharks out, it actively recruited sharks. This theory is highly problematic. According to the complaint, Barclays attracted predatory HFT firms by allowing them to trade essentially for free.

But how does that work, exactly? Yes, the HFT firms generate a lot of volume, but a price of zero times a volume of a zillion generates revenues of zero. You don’t make any money that way. What’s more, the presence of these sharks would have raised the trading costs of the fee-paying minnows, dolphins, and whales, who would have had every incentive to find safer waters, thereby depriving Barclays of any revenues from them. Thus, I am highly skeptical that the AG’s story regarding Barclays’ strategy makes any economic sense. It requires that the non-HFT paying customers must have been enormously stupid, and unaware that they were being served up as bait. Indeed, that they were so stupid that they paid for the privilege of being bait.

It would make sense for Barclays to offer inducements to HFT firms that supply liquidity, because that would reduce the trading costs of the other customers, attracting their volume and making them willing to pay higher fees to trade in the pool.

All we have to go on now is the complaint, and some basic economics. Based on this information, my initial conclusion is that it is plausible that Barclays did misrepresent/overstate the advantages of LX, but that this resulted in modest harm to investors, and that even if the customers of LX got less than they had expected, they did better than they would have trading on another venue.

But this is just an initial impression. The adversarial process generates information that (hopefully) allows more discriminating and precise judgments. I would focus on three types of evidence. First, a forensic evaluation of the LX trading system: did the Liquidity Profile mechanism really allow users to limit their exposure to toxic/predatory order flow? Second, an appraisal of the operation of the system: did it accurately categorize traders, or did Barclays, as alleged in the complaint, systematically mis-categorize predatory traders as benign, thereby exposing traders who wanted to avoid the sharks to their tender mercies? Third, a quantification of the performance of the system in delivering lower execution costs. If LX was indeed doing what a dark pool should do, users should have paid lower execution costs than they would have on other venues. If LX was in fact a massive fraud that attracted customers with promises of protection from predatory traders, but then set the sharks on them, these customers would have in fact incurred higher execution costs than they could have obtained on other venues. At root, the AG alleges that LX promised to lower execution costs, but failed to do so because it did not protect customers from predatory traders: the proof of that pudding is in the eating.

The adversarial judicial process makes it likely that such evidence will be produced, and evaluated by the trier of fact. The process is costly, and often messy, but given the stakes I am sure that these analyses will be performed and that justice will be done, if perhaps roughly.

My bigger concern is  in the adversarial political process. Particularly in the aftermath of Flash Boys, all equity market structure market issues are extremely contentious. Dark pools are a particularly fraught issue. The exchanges (NYSE/ICE and NASDAQ) resent the loss of order flow to dark pools, and want to kneecap them. Many in Congress are sympathetic to their pleas. As I noted at the outset, although the efficiency effects of dark pools are uncertain, their distributive effects are not: dark pools create winners (those who can trade on them, mainly) and losers (those who can’t trade on them, and rent seeking informed traders who lose the opportunity to exploit those who trade on dark pools). Distributive issues are inherently political, and given the sums at stake these political battles are well-funded.

There is thus the potential that the specifics of the Barclays case are interpreted to tar dark pools generally, resulting in a legislative and regulatory over-reaction that kills the good dark pools as well as the bad ones. The facts that AGs are by nature grand-standers generally, and that Schneiderman in particular is a crusader on the make, make such an outcome even more likely.

Given this, I will endeavor to provide an economics-based, balanced analysis of developments going forward. As I have written so often, equity market issues are seldom black and white. Given the nature of equity trading, specifically the central role played by information in it, it is hard to analyze the efficiency effects of various structures and policies. We are in a second best world, and comparisons are complex and messy in that world. In such a world, it is quite possible that both Barclays and the AG are wrong. We’ll see, and I’ll call it as I see it.

Back in the early-60s, a guy named Tino de Angelis*, owner of the Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Corporation, carried out a huge scam based on commodity finance. He bought soybean oil, against with American Express issued warehouse receipts. De Angelis took the warehouse receipts to banks, who took them as collateral against loans issued to Allied. And not just banks. Companies like Bunge and Proctor and Gamble also lent against the warehouse receipts.

So far, this is routine: commodity traders and processors routinely use their inventories as collateral against loans they use to finance them. The scam came in the fact that Allied obtained loans on non-existent bean oil. De Angelis had a variety of schemes to fool Amex into believing he owned more bean oil than he really did. Some of the tanks at Allied’s facilities did have oil in them, and those would be shown to Amex inspectors. The inspectors would then be led through the firm’s labyrinthine facility, allegedly to another tank to inspect. Except they’d been led back to the tank they had already inspected, but the number on the tank had been changed. Another con was to fill the tanks with water, with some oil sitting on top of the water. Allied also linked the tanks with pipes, and would shuttle the oil between tanks to keep ahead of the inspectors.

Through these means, de Angelis amassed warehouse receipts for quantities of oil that exceeded the entire amount in the US, and borrowed about $200 million against the phantom inventories (well over $1 billion in current dollars). Eventually, inspectors figured out the scheme, and the fraud was uncovered. The revelation caused Amex’s stock price to plummet (Warren Buffet scooped up some and made good money off the deal). Moreover, soybean oil futures also crashed.

De Angelis went to jail. Went released, he tried to run a Ponzi scheme.

This all happened more than 50 years ago: the scam was revealed a few days before JFK was assassinated. But a replay appears to be occurring in China, in the port of Qingdao specifically (though there are concerns that other ports may have similar problems). One trading firm has found to have borrowed large sums collateralized by non-existent aluminum allegedly stored in the port.

This is a major concern because commodity-based lending is a big deal in China, and if the practice is indeed widespread it could result in large losses. Commodity-based lending has been used in carry trades involving using letters of credit to borrow dollars buy commodities (initially mainly copper, but now other metals, iron ore, and ag products) that are imported into China and put in warehouses. The warehouse receipts are then used to collateralize loans in China, the proceeds of which are invested in high yielding, speculative endeavors.

This entire structure was already very fragile (because carry trades are inherently fragile), but if it turns out that even of a modest proportion of the collateral doesn’t exist it could collapse altogether. This could impose substantial losses on many banks. CITIC and Standard Charter are facing losses on the loans to the Qingdao trader. If there are many others, many more banks (and perhaps some western trading firms) could be hit hard.

One note of caution: some (notably Zero Hedge) are saying that collateral has been “rehypothecated.” This is not correct. Rehypothecation involves the lender pledging the collateral received from the original buyer as collateral to a loan. This process may occur several times. This results in the issuance of gross debt that is a multiple of the value of the collateral (the multiple could be as large as the inverse of the “haircut” on the collateral). But the net debt is approximately equal to the value of the collateral, and fraudulent receipts are not created. These collateral chains are potentially fragile, but the fragility does not result from the creation of fraudulent receipts.

In contrast, as described, the Qingdao scheme is like de Angelis’s, in that receipts are issued on non-existent goods. In this scheme, fraudulent receipts are created, and the net debt exceeds the value of the actual collateral. Of course, if the fraudulent receipts are rehypothecated, things will get uglier still.

Dealing with this mess would be hard enough in a jurisdiction with a solid and transparent legal system, reliable judges, and the rule of law. One can just imagine how this will play out in China, which has none of the above.

Then there are potentially broader implications. The commodity loans are one part of China’s vast shadow banking system. Concerns about the fragility of this system abound. If (a) the commodity loan problems are more pervasive, and (b) these problems are symptomatic of shoddy and fraudulent practices in the shadow banking system more generally, there is an appreciable risk of a financial crisis in China.

* Interestingly, de Angelis made money primarily on government programs, namely the National School Lunch Act and Food for Peace.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has asserted publicly that Russia is covertly funding and coordinating with anti-fracking environmental groups in Europe:

“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” Mr Rasmussen, former Danish prime minister, told an audience at Chatham House, the international affairs think-tank.

This is a classic KGB MO. One that was employed throughout the Cold War. Then peace and disarmament groups were the primary targets. No doubt the Russians have also covertly supported anti-fracking efforts here in the US, but Europe is the focus of their efforts because increased gas production on that continent competes directly with Russian gas, whereas US production is a very indirect, and somewhat distant, threat.

Europe is totally compromised by Russian influence operations, propaganda, and money.  With a few exceptions (e.g., the antitrust action against Gazprom) Europe has been completely feckless in its dealings with Russia. Its energy policies have been particularly self-destructive, putting the EU at the mercy of Russia for the foreseeable future. Some of these self-inflicted wounds would have been suffered even without direct Russian influence (energiewende, for instance, is largely the product of dreamy German romanticism about energy), but by co-opting European energy companies and manipulating European environmental sensitivities Russia has tightened its grip on European energy markets. It exploits this grip for both economic and political gain, with Ukraine being a prominent example of the latter.

I can only imagine the flack that Rasmussen is going to catch for this. For he has committed a mortal sin: speaking a very embarrassing truth. Killing the messenger is the usual remedy.

While I’m doing the SWP Itoldyasopalooza, three more items.

First, the CFTC has reopened comments on the position limits proposed rule. The CFTC has taken intense incoming fire on the issue of hedge exemptions in particular, and with good reason. There are many problems, but the most egregious is the restriction on “cross hedges” (e.g., using gas futures as a hedge against electricity price risk).

I discussed this issue in my comment letter to the CFTC. Here’s the gist of the problem. The CFTC calculates the hedging effectiveness (measured by the R2 in a regression) of nearby NG futures for spot electricity prices. It finds the effectiveness is low (i.e., the R2 in the relevant regression is small). Looking past the issue of how some risk reduction is better than nothing, this analysis betrays a complete misunderstanding of electricity pricing and how NG futures are used as hedges.

Spot electricity prices are driven by fuel prices, but the main drivers are short term factors such as load shocks (which are driven by weather) and outages. However, these spot-price drivers mean revert rapidly. A weather or outage shock damps out very quickly.

This means that forward power prices are primarily driven by forward fuel prices, because fuel price shocks are persistent while weather and outage shocks are not. So it makes perfect sense to hedge forward power price exposure with gas futures/forwards. The CFTC analysis totally misses the point. Firms don’t use gas forwards/futures to hedge spot power prices. They are using the more liquid gas futures to hedge forward power prices. This is a classic example of hedgers choosing their hedging instrument to balance liquidity and hedging effectiveness. Gas forwards provide a pretty good hedge of power forward prices, and are are more liquid than power forwards. Yes, power forwards may provide a more effective hedge, but that’s little comfort if they turn out to be roach motels that a hedger can check into, but can’t leave if/when it doesn’t need the hedge any more.

The CFTC  ignores liquidity, by the way. How is that possible?

Market participants have strong incentives to make the liquidity-hedging effectiveness trade off efficiently. They do it all the time. Hedgers live with basis risk (e.g., hedging heavy crude with WTI futures) because of the liquidity benefits of more heavily traded contracts. The CFTC position limit rule substitutes the agency’s judgment for that of market participants who actually bear/internalize the costs and benefits of the trade-off. This is a recipe for inefficiency, made all the more severe by the CFTC’s utter failure to understand the economics of the hedge it uses to justify its rule.

As proposed, the rule suggests that the CFTC is so paranoid about market participants using the hedge exemption to circumvent the limit that it has chosen to sharply limit permissible hedges. This is beyond perverse, because it strikes at the most important function of the derivatives markets: risk transfer.

(This issue is discussed in detail in chapter 8 of my 2011 book. I show that the “load delta” for short term power prices is high, but it is low for forward prices. Conversely, the “fuel price delta” is high for power forward prices, precisely because load/weather/outage shocks damp out quickly. The immediate implication of this is that fuel forwards can provide an effective hedge of forward power prices.)

Second, Simon Johnson opines that “Clearing houses could be the next source of chaos.” Who knew? It would have been nice had Simon stepped out on this 5 years ago.

Third, the one arguably beneficial aspect of Frankendodd and Emir-the creation of swaps data repositories-has been totally-and I mean totally-f*cked up in its implementation. Not content with the creation of a single Tower of Babel, American and European regulators have presided over the creation of several! Well played!

Reportedly, less than 30 percent of OTC deals can be matched by the repositories.

This too was predictable-and predicted (modesty prevents me from mentioning by whom). Repositories are natural monopolies and should be set up as utilities. A single repository minimizes fixed costs, and facilitates coordination and the creation of a standard. I went through this in detail in 2003 when I advocated the creation of an Energy Data Hub. But our betters decided to encourage the creation of multiple repositories (suppositories?) with a hodge-podge of reporting obligations and inconsistent reporting formats.

This brings to mind three quotes. One by Ronald Reagan: “‘I’m from the government and here to help you’ are the 8 scariest words in the English language.” The other two by Casey  Stengel. “Can’t anybody play this game?” and “He has third base so screwed up, nobody can play it right.”

One of the reddest of herrings is that the movement to for-profit exchanges is the source of our current woes in securities and derivatives markets. The herring were running today in DC, at a hearing on HFT held by  the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. One of the witnesses, Andrew Brooks of T. Rowe Price testified thus:

We question whether the functional roles of an exchange and a broker-dealer have become blurred over the years creating inherent conflicts of interest that may warrant regulatory action. It seems clear that since the exchanges have migrated to “for-profit” models, a conflict has arisen between the pursuit of volume (and the resulting revenue) and the obligation to assure an orderly marketplace for all investors. The fact that 11 exchanges and over 50 dark pools operate on a given day seems to create a model that is susceptible to manipulative behaviors. If a market participant’s sole function is to interposition themselves between buyers and sellers we question the value of such a role and believe that it puts an unneeded strain on the system. It begs the question as to whether investors were better served when exchanges functioned more akin to a public utility. Should exchanges with de minimus market share enjoy the regulatory protection that is offered by their status as exchanges, or should they be ignored?

Back in Houston after a long trip to Turkey, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands speaking about various commodity and clearing related issues, plus some R&R. Last stop on the tour was Chicago, where the Chicago Fed put on a great event on Law and Finance. Clearing was at the center of the discussion. Trying to be objective as possible, I think I can say that my critiques of clearing have had an influence on how scholars and practitioners (both groups being well-represented in Chicago) view clearing, and clearing mandates in particular. There is a deep  skepticism, and a growing awareness that CCPs are not the systemic risk safeguard that most had believed in the period surrounding the adoption of Frankendodd. Ruben Lee’s lunch talk summarized the skeptical view well, and recognized my role in making the skeptic’s case. His remarks were echoed by others at the workshop. If only this had penetrated the skulls of legislators and regulators when it could have made a major difference.

And the hits keep on coming. Since about April 2010 in particular, the focus of my criticism of clearing mandates has been on the destabilizing effects of rigid marking-to-market and variation margin by CCPs. I emphasized this in several SWP posts, and also my forthcoming article (in the Journal of Financial Market Infrastructure, a Risk publication) titled “A Bill of Goods.” So it was gratifying to read today that two scholars at the LSE, Ron Anderson and Karin Joeveer, used my analysis as the springboard for a more formal analysis of the issue.

The Anderson-Joeveer paper investigates collateral generally. It concludes that the liquidity implications of increased need for initial margin resulting from clearing mandates are not as concerning as the liquidity implications of greater variation margin flows that will result from a dramatic expansion of clearing.

Some of their conclusions are worth quoting in detail:

In addition, our analysis shows that moving toward central clearing with product specialized CCPs can greatly increase the numbers of margin movements which will place greater demands on a participant’s operational capacity and liquidity. This can be interpreted as tipping the balance of benefits and costs in favor of retaining bilateral OTC markets for a wider range of products and participants. Alternatively, assuming a full commitment to centralized clearing, it points out the importance of achieving consolidation and effective integration across infrastructures for a wider range of financial products. [Emphasis added.]

Before the financial crisis, Gazprom CEO Alexi Miller boasted that his firm would be the first $1t market cap firm. Six years on, he’s only off by an order of magnitude: the company’s market cap is around $100 billion. Moreover, it sells for a comical 3x earnings (a little less, actually). The company’s capex is notoriously inefficient, and it is frequently cash flow negative. Other than that, it’s a financial marvel.

But that big China deal must surely have provided a boost for the company, right?

Apparently not. The other day Putin mooted the possibility that the company would have to be recapitalized by the state, i.e., receive an additional injection of capital from one of the state investment funds.

If the China deal were indeed favorable to Gazprom, it would have no problem financing the necessary investment in pipelines and greenfield production through the banks and/or the capital markets, rather than through the state. Putin’s suggestion of state funding strongly suggests that the economics and the risks of the deal are not favorable, and the necessary investments could not be funded externally: direct state funding would also suggest that Russian state banks are either unwilling or unable to fund it (or both), which speaks ill for the economics of the deal, and perhaps the financial strength of the banks. A further implication of this is that politics rather than economics was the main driver of the deal (if it exists, in fact), and that as a project intended to achieve state objectives, the state must fund it.

Reinforcing this perceived need for state rather than external funding  is the fact that obtaining outside funding would require Gazprom to divulge many more details of the deal than it has so far. This would be highly embarrassing to Putin and the government and Gazprom if these details show that Russia got the short end of the stick. So keeping the details out of public view by avoiding outside funding also suggests that there is something to hide, namely, that the Chinese exploited Putin’s needs.

If the government indeed recapitalizes Gazprom, it will be just the latest of a long line of economic policy failures. Another example of where politics or corruption/rent seeking has prevented Russia from putting its natural resource firms on a commercially sensible footing, and another example of where state funds that were generated by resource rents in the first place were ploughed back into inefficient state-controlled resource producers, rather than to help diversify the Russian economy.

This, my friends, is Putinomics. This is why Russia will remain on the hamster wheel from hell.