Streetwise Professor

A paper on HFT by Baron, Brogaard and Kirilenko is attracting a lot of attention.  They provide shocking evidence: HFT traders make money.  Who knew?

What is garnering the most attention is their analysis of profit by counterparty.  For instance, Bart Chilton was shocked to find that passive HFT traders earned a $5 per contract profit on average when trading with small traders.

The numbers are interesting and all very nice, but the interpretation is far more equivocal than the authors-and HFT critics like Chilton-would have you believe.

One issue is “how big is big?” or “big compared to what?”  Is the per contract profit supposed to be zero?

The paper reports eye-popping Sharp ratios, which suggests that HFT earns abnormal profits.  But great caution is required.  This Sharp ratio only takes into account the authors’ estimate of the capital required to support the HFT positions: given the rapid mean reversion of positions (especially for “passive” HFTs), this capital can be quite modest.  But HFT also requires a substantial investment in systems, software and human capital.  And data! A huge cost.  Arguably the trading capital is the smallest portion of the capital required to setup an HFT and keep it running.  Leaving those investments out of a Sharp ratio calculation renders the number utterly meaningless.  The fact that these are numbers from a single market and HFT traders usually trade in many markets also makes it impossible to know what the profitability of HFT firms is.

Indeed, given that there is free entry into HFT, why wouldn’t we expect the marginal entrant to just earn the market rate of return on all capital employed?  If a study that takes all the relevant costs and investments into account finds that the marginal HFT trader earns abnormal returns, the appropriate response would be to identify  the source of the entry barrier that gives rise to this rent, and attack that.

Another issue of interpretation relates to defining the but-for.  That is, what is the alternative to which HFT is being compared?  An electronic market without HFT?  Floor markets?  Consider the latter.  There is no doubt that floor traders-locals-reaped profits in the same way as the HFT traders in the Baron et al analysis.  Some were “passive”-quoting bids and asks, and supplying liquidity and trading against order flow.  Others were “active”-speculating on price movements, and always alive to picking off stale limit customer limit orders.   Some did both.  Given that the per contract profits reported in the Baron et al paper are fractions of a tick, it’s almost certain that floor traders earned profits as large or larger than they report for HFT, particularly if you leave out important cost/capital components (e.g., the opportunity cost of a seat).

When it comes to floor trading, we know that the marginal trader was earning a rent.  Know as in metaphysically certain.  How do we know that: seat prices were positive, and frequently very large. (A paper I published in 1999 shows that Q-ratios for exchanges calculated using seat prices were astronomical.  This provides clear evidence of rents.)  The seat price is the capitalized value of the abnormal profits earned by the marginal floor trader.  And we know the entry barrier that gave rise to these abnormal profits: exchange limitations on the number of memberships.

So that would be an interesting comparison.  The (appropriately calculated) profit of the marginal HFT firm vs. the marginal profit of floor traders (as measured using seat prices).

The paper also reports substantial skewness in the profitability in HFT.  But there was substantial skewness in profit on the floor too.  The Tom Baldwins and Harris Brumfelds made huge money, a lot of other traders did quite well, and a very large fraction-arguably a majority-were on breaking even and at risk of getting blown out.    And this isn’t a recent phenomenon.  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, titans like Old Hutch made substantially more money than the run of the mill pit trader.

Which brings me back to my constant refrain: what’s really all that different about HFT?  The functions and behaviors of market participants are pretty much static.  We have uninformed traders and informed traders.  We have liquidity suppliers and liquidity demanders.  We have opportunistic traders looking to take advantage of a time-and-space advantage, and the ability to respond sooner than others (thereby profiting at the expense of the slow).  The functions haven’t changed: just the technology for carrying out those functions has changed.

I’d wager that an analysis based on exchange street books from the floor days (which report price, volume, and trader type by CTI indicator) would produce very similar results to the HFT study’s, although the inability to observe the bid-ask on the floor makes it difficult or impossible to break down members trading on their own account (CTI1s) into “active” and “passive” categories in the same way Baron et al do.  I am highly confident that such a study would find that: CTI1s made per contract profits as large or larger than HFT traders; CTI1s profited primarily in trades with CTI4s (customers), and that there was variation in the per contract profit depending on whether the CTI4 was big or small; that floor trader Sharp ratios based only on the capital required to support their positions would be very large; and that there was substantial skewness in the profitability of CTI1s.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the study is the distinction between aggressive and passive HFT traders.  It is very hard to criticize passive HFT, because they are clearly providing liquidity (although no doubt Bart will find bad things to say).  The activities of aggressive HFT-HFT firms that are almost always hitting bids and lifting offers-could well be less salutary and perhaps inefficient.

Aggressive firms could be creating adverse selection.  One aggressive strategy could be to invest substantial real resources into scooping up huge amounts of public data, analyzing it faster than anybody else, and trading faster on it than anybody else when they recognize that quotes don’t reflect the information.  Some of this information could be obtained by scraping news and social media sites.  Some of it could be generated by statistical arbitrage: analyzing vast quantities of data to identify pricing relationships across multiple instruments; identifying times when prevailing quotes across these markets deviate from these relationships; and buying cheap and selling rich when such deviations are found.  To the extent quote submitters-including passive HFT firms-do not have this information, the aggressive firms will be better informed, profit at the expense of quote setters, and thereby cause liquidity suppliers to widen their quotes.

If that’s all there is to it, aggressive HFT would be inefficient.  Real resources are devoted to earning a rent, and this rent seeking distorts prices (notably the price of liquidity), thereby inducing others trading for risk-related reasons to trade too little.

But price discovery is the flip side of adverse selection.  Informed trading drives the price discovery process.  The question becomes what is the value of the price discovery provided by aggressive HFT.  Impossible to answer quantitatively.  I would surmise that the conventional wisdom is that the value is small.  Why do we need to have prices adjust by a fraction of a cent to reflect information a fraction of a second sooner?  What real decision (e.g., investment decision, planting decision) is going to change if a price embeds slightly more information a blink of an eye sooner?  I am similarly skeptical about the value of speeding up price discovery, and therefore am quite willing to accept that some aggressive HFT is opportunistic rent seeking, and hence inefficient.

But even granting that, what are you going to do about it?  Is there a way of restricting rent seeking HFT that does not also burden beneficial HFT, for instance by imposing costs on passive HFTs that supply liquidity?

It’s not obvious that there are discriminating ways of pricing trading services in ways that reduce opportunistic trading without also reducing liquidity supply and trading for risk shifting reasons.  Tinkering with maker-taker fee structures, or tinkering with price schedules more generally seems to be the most sensible way to do it.  The question becomes: who should do the tinkering?  Exchanges presumably have the strongest incentives to drive out the opportunistic wolves that feed on the sheep, and the best information to do it.  I therefore don’t see a strong case for external regulation intended to reduce rent seeking HFT.  Let the exchanges handle it.

It is obvious that some of the regulations that have been proposed would make things far worse, rather than better.  Time-in-force rules are probably the best-or worst-example of that.  Requiring quote submitters-including passive HFT firms-to keep quotes in force for some minimum time period makes them incredibly vulnerable to the opportunistic HFT firms.  The aggressive HFT firms feed off of quotes that aren’t adjusted to reflect the information they produce by stat arb or whatever.  Time-in-force rules make it harder to adjust quotes, giving more targets of opportunity to aggressive HFT traders.  Prediction: TIF rules will increase aggressive HFT trading; reduce passive HFT trading; lead to aggressive HFT representing a higher proportion of HFT overall; and lead to wider spreads.

And ironically, these effects will increase the profits HFT firms earn at the expense of non-HFT traders. So, Bart: if you think the profits that HFT earns off the little guys are unconscionable now, be careful what you ask for.  Some of the restrictions on the “cheetah traders” that you advocate will make those profits even more unconscionable.

Put differently: Time-in-force rules don’t constrain aggressive traders who are taking quotes instead of making them.  They only constrain those making quotes and thereby make them vulnerable to the takers.  This makes sense how, exactly?

In almost any human endeavor, there is opportunism and rent seeking and inefficient behavior that goes on side-by-side with beneficial, wealth increasing conduct.  We don’t have the information or sufficiently discriminating and cheap deterrents to eliminate bad conduct altogether.

When it comes to any financial trading-old school floor trading or HFT-dominated electronic trading-rent seeking trading will occur.  When evaluating HFT generally, and restrictions on HFT that do not discriminate between the virtuous and vicious forms of the activity, you have to take the good with the bad and see which predominates.  The vast bulk of the existing empirical evidence shows that HFT is associated with better market quality in terms of spreads and depth.  So even though some HFT is almost certainly predatory, the effects of the predatory trading are more than offset by the efficient, wealth-increasing kinds.   Indiscriminate regulations that constrain both types of HFT are therefore highly objectionable.  Not a good idea to shoot a prize bull in the head because it has a parasite that available drugs won’t kill.  But that’s what those who get all hot and bothered about aggressive-and arguably parasitical-HFT threaten to do with indiscriminate regulations that would impede all HFT.

I’m sure you would never peg me as a green type, but I have decided to join the recycling movement!

I am doing so in response to the call by Barney Frank (the Frank of Frankendodd) to merge the SEC and the CFTC.  This idea has itself been recycled many times, dating back to the 1980s and the birth of stock index futures.

One of the recycling efforts was by Hank Paulson, in the spring of 2008, in his proposal to reform the financial markets.  A centerpiece of this proposal was the org chart shuffling.  What I said then holds true today, so I’ll conserve scarce resources (mainly my time), and merely recycle:

The biggest headline was that the recommendation for the merger of the SEC and the CFTC. This puts in me in mind of two quotes. The first is by Churchill: “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Whenever anything happens in the financial markets, the cry immediately goes up to merge the SEC and the CFTC. Many people are apparently fanatical, because they never change about their minds about the desirability of the merger, and the subject always seems to return to it.

The second quote is by somebody slightly–well, a lot actually–less famous; that would be me. In a 2001 Regulation Magazine piece on the Clinton regulatory legacy, I wrote that the SEC-CFTC combination was a solution in search of a problem.

I am always somewhat mystified by the substance of the arguments for the merger. The most commonly mentioned benefit is a harmonization of margins between stocks and stock index futures. What, it’s not possible to harmonize without going merging the two bodies? Moreover, given the myriad other more important issues facing the two agencies, this seems like a very thin reed on which to rest a major reshaping of the regulatory structure.

In reality, there is very little overlap between the regulatory responsibilities of the two agencies. What’s more, there are huge swathes of the trading landscape that fall outside the jurisdiction of either agency. So merger will hardly reduce that much duplicative or contradictory regulation, and will not fill any regulatory gaps. So what’s the point?

Indeed, there are many sources of potential danger in a merger. One, very underappreciated in my view, is that it sacrifices the advantages of specialization. There are issues unique to securities markets and derivatives markets. Specialized agencies can develop the expertise needed for each market space. Of course the staff at a merged agency could specialize, but major policy, rulemaking, and interpretive decisions are made at the commissioner level. Right now SEC commissioners, for example, need to deal with arcane issues of accounting, disclosure, securities intermediation, and securities trading practices in stock, option, and fixed income markets. This is an already daunting task. Adding new areas of responsibility involving different markets and different instruments with different issues will further tax the already limited expertise of the commissioners of the merged agency.

The inevitable outcome of this dilution of expertise and specialization will be to enhance the power of staff, and degrade the quality of commission decision making. Neither outcome is desirable.

Indeed, I would argue that the SEC is already underspecialized. The agency operates subject to three statutes, the Securities Act of 1933, the Exchange Act of 1934, which focus on primary and secondary markets for securities, respectively; and the Investment Company Act of 1940, which focuses on mutual funds and the like. The agency has responsibility over the issuers of securities, and the markets and intermediaries that trade securities. There is little overlap between these areas. Issues of disclosure and accounting can be conceptually and operationally distinguished from issues of market structure and organization.

A second area of concern is that a unified agency will provide a mechanism to reduce and distort competition between different sectors of the financial markets. There are many on Wall Street that would love to throttle the futures exchanges in order to reduce competition for the securities business. (The margin issue is a perfect example of this. The securities firms would love to force an increase in margins on futures to drive some business from the futures exchanges to the stock market.) The regulatory autonomy of the CFTC has largely precluded such an outcome. The SEC has indeed tried in the past to impede the development and introduction of futures products that compete closely with securities markets but has largely failed in these endeavors because it does not have the necessary authority or jurisdiction.

Now, of course, a merger would change agency politics. Under the current framework, the SEC is largely responsive to securities firms and exchanges, and the CFTC is responsive to the futures exchanges and the FCMs. A merged entity would be responsive to the interests of all of these parties. But that is not necessarily a good thing, as one very likely outcome is that the merged entity would implement regulations that would reduce competition between the varying constituencies.

A more sensible, but still problematic, regulatory reorganization would involve (1) stripping out the primary market, accounting, and disclosure responsibilities from the SEC and putting them in a separate agency focusing on these corporate finance issues, and (2) creating a separate agency responsible for trading and market structure issues in securities and derivatives markets. This second agency, call it the “Commission for Financial Trading and Markets” (“CFTM”) would focus on issues relating to manipulation; fraud; the financial adequacy of intermediaries (securities and derivatives brokerages); and facilitating competitive market structures in financial markets. Arguably the manipulation, fraud and competition responsibilities should give the CFTM some authority in the OTC markets.

This approach would be far preferable to mashing together two disparate agencies with very different histories and cultures in the hope that something beneficial will come out of the unnatural coupling. It would permit the development of some specialization, and many issues of fraud, manipulation, and market structure are common across securities and derivatives markets, so the specialization could be applied to a variety of related markets. This alternative is still problematic, however, because the CFTM could easily become a mechanism for stifling competition between different methods of allocating risks and discovering prices.

All that said, there is little likelihood that the merger (or the creation of a CFTM) will come to pass in any event. The idea has been around for decades, and has never even come close to implementation. This is no surprise. There are powerful political forces in the way. Most notably, the futures exchanges, their members, and the FCMs have fought the SEC’s loving embrace vociferously, and found vocal support in Congress. Moreover, whereas the SEC falls under the congressional banking committees (e.g., the Senate Banking Committee and the Securities, Insurance and Investment Subcomittee), the CFTC is under the ag committees. Neither is about to readily cede jurisdiction over a large, well-heeled, and generous industry.

What he, er I, said.

Expecting miracles from mashing together org charts is insane.  At best, it has no effect.  The more likely outcome is to make things worse.  (Want an example?  Look at the effects of the reorganization of the intelligence community post-911.)   The point about specialization is particularly apposite, IMO (naturally, since I brought it up!)  The five commissioners of the CFTC and the five commissioners of the SEC are already overwhelmed by their complex responsibilities, and can devote relatively little time to becoming expert in any one particular area.  Extending the scope of the commissioners’ responsibilities is supposed to make that problem better?

In the end, nothing is likely to happen.  This is a lame duck kerfuffle.  The people who will have skin in the game in the next Congress will want nothing to do with this, as has been the case for about the last 15 Congresses.

November saw a mini-drama involving the CME, CFTC, and DTCC about the issue of SDRs.  (Acronym overload!)  SDRs being Swap Data Repositories, a spawn of Frankendodd-arguably the only good thing in the Title VII litter.

CME had filed to become an SDR, and wanted to require anyone who cleared swaps through CME to report the trade to its SDR.  The CFTC didn’t like the idea of tying clearing and reporting, and held things up: it had stated that the choice of SDR should be up to the customer.  So CME sued.  DTCC-which has its own SDR and would benefit if some CME swap deals were reported to it-filed as an intervenor in the suit.

Lo and behold, the CFTC approved the CME application, including the provision that tied clearing and reporting.  CME dropped its suit, and DTCC is stomping its little feet:

“The Commission’s action late yesterday was an unexplained and an abrupt reversal of course,” the DTCC, which runs a rival swaps data repository, said in a statement.

“This action is inconsistent with the Commission’s previous actions, and will cause market participants to question the finality of any Commission rule or interpretation.”

Two comments.

First, issues of tying and vertical integration are cropping up all over in trading and exchanges.  I just presented a paper at a conference honoring Oliver Williamson that looks at vertical integration between execution and clearing and settlement.  But the issues are also present in things like data centers and reporting and likely will be present in any service exchanges offer.  Regulators are hostile to these sorts of arrangements.  The lesson of my paper is that there can be-and in my view, typically are-good, transactions cost economics-based reasons for these sorts of vertical arrangements.  Regulators should take a deep dive into TCE and learn something about the potential benefits of vertical restrictions or vertical integration rather than continuing to indulge in their reflexive hostility to it.  What’s the transaction at issue?  What are the potential contractual hazards?  Are the contracting and governance methods chosen to implement the transaction well-adapted to the contracting hazards?

IOW, as if (40 plus years after Coase made an observation on the subject) it is rather astounding that regulators look at every vertical restriction with a jaundiced eye.

Second, in some respects this is like Groundhog Day for me.  I’ve seen this before.  I came across a similar controversy in my failed attempt to create a predecessor to SDRs-an “energy data hub”-back in 2003.  It was obvious then, and is obvious now, that there are substantial scale and scope economies in creating and operating an SDR, and that an SDR is a natural, multi-product monopoly.  It is highly likely that the efficient form of organization would be an industry utility/cooperative, likely a non-profit.

But as I experienced in ’03, industry players see this as a great commercial opportunity, and there is intense competition to establish for-profit data hubs and regulators will not mandate the creation of a single hub or pick a winner.  Hence, it is likely that in the end, in each jurisdiction there will be one dominant hub that could be quite lucrative.  Hence the intense competition to be the winner in a winner-take-all contest.  This competition is typically dissipative.  Moreover, if multiple SDRs do survive (because, for instance, the firms play some sort of oligopoly pricing game), there will be excessive costs due to incomplete exploitation of scale and scope economies (i.e., fragmentation is costly).

Which all means that although mandatory reporting to a data hub/SDR is a good idea, as a result of political economy considerations it will be implemented in a highly inefficient way.

Go figure.

By “they” I mean Gazprom, and by “it” I mean pricing long term European gas contracts off of a spot gas index, rather than an oil index:

Norway’s Statoil ASA signed a 10-year gas supply deal with Germany’s Wintershall AG, based on spot gas prices that challenged Russian gas export monopoly OAO Gazprom, which insists on oil-linked prices despite European Union opposition.

Statoil agreed on Tuesday to supply Wintershall, the natural gas unit of chemicals firm BASF SE, with 45 billion cubic metres of gas worth $17.4-billion (U.S.) at current prices, in a deal aimed at creating a flexible gas market in northwestern Europe.

“This is the first contract of such magnitude and length in continental Europe,” Statoil executive vice-president Eldar Saetre told Reuters.

Government-controlled Statoil, Europe’s second biggest gas supplier after Gazprom, is now selling about half of its gas under spot terms, including more than 40 per cent of its European gas, Mr. Saetre said.

As I’ve often written, there will be a positive feedback effect here.  More index-linked pricing will enhance the liquidity of the spot market and the spot indices, making gas hub indexed pricing more viable, and on and on.  Note this:

Analysts at SocGen said oil-indexation was already down to 55 per cent of total volumes of gas sales in Europe, and that spot indexation would be the dominant form of pricing by 2014.

The tipping point is nigh.  So Gazprom can hold its breath insisting on oil linked pricing until it turns blue, but competitive pressure and the insistence of buyers and the increasingly evident absurdity of its denigration of gas index pricing will eventually force it to capitulate.

This is one source of trouble for Gazprom.  Another source is the shale gas revolution.  It’s not right to say that there’s gas under every rock, but it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say there’s gas in every rock, and becoming easier to access every day.  Like in Algeria.

Other sources of trouble are closer to home.  Like Ukraine (“Little Sovok”) threatening to cut purchases of gas from Russia (“Great Sovok”).

And as Anders Aslund points out, at home proper-through an insane investment program pushed by Putin.  Even though North Stream is operating below capacity, it is plunging ahead with South Stream (gas supplies to be named later) and adding additional capacity on North Stream at a combined cost in the $50 billion range.  It is also moving forward on a massive greenfield production and LNG project in Siberia (cost-$40-$65 billion) to supply China.  You know, that big Asian country that Russia has failed to negotiate a deal with for traditional piped gas despite 5 (or is it 6?) years of bargaining: but hey, they’ve agreed on everything but price!

So, Gazprom is supposed to complete a gargantuan production and LNG project on spec, and negotiate the terms with the Chinese later, after the investment is sunk?  How do you say “holdup” in Russian?  And did I mention that Gazprom has never delivered on an LNG project?

That makes sense how, exactly?

The only way it makes sense is as a means of tunneling resources out of Gazprom into well connected pockets from steel pipe makers to Putin.  But that’s the epitome of good sense in Russia.

Aslund is right that the world’s most malign company-Gazprom-is in desperate straits.  Indeed, the splurge suggests that they know the game is up and are tunneling while the tunneling is good.  Maybe Putin realizes the game is up, and as Aslund suggests, is putting his chips on Rosneft instead, and in the meantime is directing an insane capital investment program to move as much money out of Gazprom as possible.  (Sechin’s ascendence is bad news for Gazprom as well: the bad blood between him and Gazprom is well known.  Thinking of which also reminds me of how insane BP was to go to Sechin to help them out with their Kovytka problem with Gazprom.  What could they have been thinking?)

This is all quite encouraging.

Who says there’s no good news?

In the futures pits, the bane of traders’ existences was an outtrade-when a trade was submitted for clearing but the buyer and seller couldn’t be matched.  An outtrade could be due to a difference or price or quantity.  The worst kind was when both parties thought they were on the same side of the trade.  Another kind of scary outtrade was when a trader said he bought, but there was no matching sale, or the reverse.

Ukraine and a Spanish company have such an outtrade apparently.  To the tune of $1.1 billion:

Ukraine, keen to show it is weaning itself off Russian gas, announced on Monday it had created a consortium to build a $1.1 billion liquefied natural gas plant, but its reported partner, Gas Natural of Spain, swiftly denied any involvement.

Ukraine said it would build the first LNG regasification terminal within its borders, in partnership with Gas Natural, which would allow it to import gas from all over the world, breaking its dependence on Russia.

But Gas Natural flatly denied signing any deal with Ukraine.

“Gas Natural has not signed any contract to invest in an LNG plant in the Ukraine, nor are we leading any consortium to develop such a terminal… nor are we studying anything along these lines,” the company said in a statement. [Sounds pretty definitive!  No ‘effing way I traded with you lot. I didn’t even think about trading with you lot.]

. . . .

Even after the official denial by Gas Natural, Ukraine’s state investment agency insisted the deal had been signed and said it was looking into the report stating otherwise.

“There must have been some miscommunication,” a spokeswoman for the agency said.

A miscommunication.  Over $1.1 billion.  It could happen to anyone!

As sometime commenter Elmer says, Ukraine is sovok.  It shows, and maybe this is an example of that.  But I wonder if sovok central-Russia-put the word in a Spanish ear.

Apropos my visit to Germany: Bloomberg reproduced a piece from InsideClimateNews.com titled “Can the US Create Its Own German-Style Energy Revolution.”  It is a paean to Germany’s Energiewende. Indeed, it is the capstone to a 6 part series (available as an Amazon eBook!) plus a slide show that is one big slobbering wet kiss to Germany’s top-down policies designed at controlling how energy is produced and consumed.  And of course, German top-down social control policies have always worked out so well.

The piece is a classic in the genre.  It measures “progress” in alternative energy purely by outputs.  How many MWs generated by wind.  How many generated by solar.  The cost of these MWs as compared to alternatives is not even mentioned, except obliquely.  And that oblique reference illustrates the absurdity of the whole exercise, not that the author of the piece notices:

For Tunnicliff, who works in natural resource management, adopting native landscape was a logical choice in a desert climate. Bolted to his roof was another rational choice: a solar photovoltaic system that supplies most of his family’s electricity needs. He installed the system even though he estimates it will take 12 years to break even on the investment.

“That is the future of energy,” he said, pointing to the dark blue panels on his roof.

12 years to break even on solar.  In Phoenix.  If that’s the future, we’re screwed.

Interestingly-but not surprisingly-the piece fails to mention any of the problems with Energiewende, in particular the huge costs of implementing the policy-costs that are far larger than originally estimated, and which are causing unease even in the relatively docile German populace as electricity tariffs are skyrocketing.  It also fails to mention the degradation in electricity quality that results from a reliance on solar and wind, which are vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather.

But there is one paragraph in the piece that should be sufficient to convince any American that this is a crack-brained idea:

The absurdity of the U.S. impasse over energy reform was highlighted when the primary author of the Germany law, Hans-Josef Fell, told me what I already had heard from other German leaders—that he was inspired to write the act by what today seems like an unlikely source.

“Your President Jimmy Carter was the first politician to promote an industrial revolution with renewables,” Fell said when we met in his Berlin office in April. “I looked to the USA in the 1970s. There was wind power in California and solar power on the White House. I thought, ‘Oh, this is wonderful! Why can’t we have this in Germany?'”

Jimmy Carter thought it was a great idea.  That’s all you need to know.

We don’t need energy revolutions.  We need energy evolution that is driven by balancing costs and benefits.  Costs and benefits that are highly unpredictable, and which can change rapidly in short periods due to technological, economic, and political shocks.   Exactly the circumstances in which top-down, socially planned, command-and-control-type approaches are extraordinarily inefficient, and prone to creating economic havoc.

I think Germany will come to regret Energiewende when it moves beyond dreaming about the environmental benefits and actually has to pay to costs of achieving them.  So let’s hope that the US doesn’t smuggle in Jimmy Carter’s energy policies using Germany as a cutout.

John Parsons and Antonio Mello at Betting the Business rightly slam the SEC’s evaluation of JP Morgan’s application to create a physical copper ETF. They are spot on that the SEC’s Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation’s analysis was superficial, and quite frankly, silly.  Who knew that there was no connection between copper prices and inventories?

That said, I think that Parsons & Mello are far too generous in their praise for the comment letter submitted by the Americans for Financial Reform (an advocacy organization with strong ties to organized labor).  That letter posits some very speculative feedback loops: prices go up, people get excited about copper, they buy more of the ETF shares, driving up the price, and on and on.  If that mechanism exists, wouldn’t it exist even without the ETF?  And I’m dubious about the strength of that mechanism if it exists, and in fact doubt its very existence.

The only real concern is that the physical ETF somehow constrains the response of inventories to supply and demand shocks.  Inventories should rise when there are surprise negative demand shocks or positive supply shocks, and should fall with surprise positive demand shocks or negative supply shocks.  Speculative storage adjusts inventory in response to changes in fundamental conditions, and the forward curve is determined simultaneously.

If the ETF somehow impeded inventory adjustments, there would be a problem.  Here it should be noted that there is an asymmetry.  It is hard to see how that the ETF could in any way constrain increases in inventories.  If demand declines, for instance,  there is nothing to preclude traditional speculative storers from adding to inventories.

Things are conceivably different when inventories should decline.  One can at least consider the possibility that holders of the ETF would lock up inventory.

There is a redemption mechanism that limits this possibility.   “Authorized participants” (basically broker-dealers) can redeem ETF shares and receive physical copper in return: these firms would likely be ones that act as speculative storers in the absence of the ETF.  Thus, an ETF share is effectively a perfect substitute for copper warrants, and its creation does not obviously alter the market mechanism in a fundamental way.

I guess one could tell a story that goes something like this.  Irrational investors (not participants in the physical markets) hold onto ETF shares even if some of those shares should be redeemed and inventories released onto the market.  As a result, prices become too high.  Due to the excessively high prices, the Authorized Participants don’t buy and redeem the ETFs, cancel the warehouse receipts and load out copper when it should be loaded out.

For this price distortion to occur, the quantity held by the stubborn, irrational ETF investors must represent a binding constraint: they must end up holding the entire inventory.  Thus, a necessary condition-but not a sufficient one-for the ETF to distort inventory holdings (and hence prices) is that the ETF holds 100 percent of inventories.  (Note: things are a little more complicated because LME warehouses are located around the world, but the JPM ETF’s copper holdings will be limited to its Henry Bath warehouses.  It is conceivable that some inventory should be taken out of Bath warehouses, but isn’t due to the stubbornly irrational ETF holders.  So ETF holdings=100 percent of Bath inventories could be a symptom of a distortion, even if there are inventories in other LME regular warehouses.  However, to the extent that inventories in other locations are close substitutes for Bath inventories, the potential for a distortion is limited.   That’s one reason to have multiple delivery locations.)

Moreover, stubborn ETF holders who distort prices present a great short selling opportunity.  That also tends to limit the potential for a price distortion, particularly a large, enduring one.

My take on the JPM phyz ETF is therefore Alfred E. Newman-esque.  What?  Me worry?  One can imagine circumstances where it causes a problem, but the symptoms of this are clear: the ETF owns all the copper.  If those symptoms don’t arise, there’s no problem.  If they do-an unlikely event, IMO-take a look at it then, and figure out what to do in that event.

In other words: don’t borrow trouble.  Deal with trouble when-and if-it arises.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this report by Hal Scott and the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, titled “Interconnectedness and Contagion.”  It evaluates the issue of systemic risk through the lens of the Lehman Brothers failure (and to a lesser degree, the AIG failure).

One way to summarize the report is “everything you knew about Lehman was wrong.”  Certainly, everything Gensler and Timmy! and Frank and Dodd and legislators and regulators around the world knew was wrong.

That conventional narrative is that Lehman’s failure brought the world financial system to its knees because it was so interconnected to the rest of the financial system.  That losses on exposures to Lehman-an most notably through derivatives exposures-threatened to propagate through an interconnected set of large financial institutions.   That the crisis was the result of a “daisy chain” or “domino” effect via what Scott refers to as “asset interconnectedness” (e.g., derivatives exposures) or “liability interconnectedness” (e.g., a big supplier of credit/liquidity fails, thereby forcing those dependent on it for credit or liquidity to fail).

Scott thoroughly debunks the interconnectedness narrative.  Instead, he shows persuasively that a contagion caused the crisis.  The Lehman shock dramatically shifted beliefs about whether large financial institutions would be bailed out, and also conveyed information about the severity of losses on real estate assets that were held not just by Lehman, but by a wide array of financial institutions.  This raised doubts about the solvency of all financial institutions, resulting in a run on their liabilities and a refusal to roll over these liabilities.  Given the dependence on short term credit, this run caused a major crisis.

In other words, it’s all about the funding mechanism.  It’s about liquidity.   It’s about runs.

Scott notes that the configuration of the financial network does affect its vulnerability to contagion, but that attempting to mitigate systemic risk through policies intended to affect the degree of interconnection is unlikely to reduce substantially the risk arising from contagion.

This is incredibly important because Frankendodd and EMIR and all of it is largely predicated on the belief that interconnection is the source of systemic risk.  But the diagnosis is wrong, meaning that the prescription is almost certainly wrong too.

Scott looks at CCP mandates in particular, and gives them 1.5 cheers.  I think that’s one or 1.5 too many, but it is gratifying to see that he does forthrightly downplay the potential benefits of CCPs as a means of preventing future crises.

The reason that I think he is not negative enough on this point is that he only looks at the first order impacts of CCPs, through their effect on derivatives netting, for instance.  He does devote some attention to the effects of CCP mandates on funding and liquidity, but more focused attention on the indirect effects of clearing and collateral mandates would, in my view, raise more serious concerns, especially in light of the primacy of funding/liquidity contagion channel in creating systemic risk.

Scott, citing Duffie’s work, claims that CCPs may reduce the incentive to run on big financial institutions.   I can see that in some scenarios, but I can also envision others in which a rigorous, highly-time sensitive, no-credit system like that will result from CCP and collateral mandates can lead to runs, either on the CCP, or on firms connected to the CCP.  That’s my take on what happened on Black Monday, 1987.

Clearing and collateral mandates will lead to a whole series of changes to the demand for liquidity, and the mechanisms for supplying it.  A cleared system is more tightly coupled; increases the likelihood in big shocks to liquidity demand; potentially ties up liquidity (especially under rigorous segregation regimes); and on and on.  Given the nature of cleared systems (and the imposition of rigorous daily variation margin based on mark-to-market for non-cleared derivatives), market users will make arrangements to secure contingent liquidity.  As a result, the entire financial network topology will change.  How it will change, and how these changes will affect systemic risk, are impossible to divine at present.  But it is certain that these changes will be profound and it is not difficult to imagine scenarios in which the new topology is as fragile in the face of large shocks as the old one.  Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine scenarios in which the new topology is more fragile than the old.

Clearing and collateral mandates should also be viewed as regulations of capital structures.  (“No credit extended through derivatives transactions” and “derivatives are at the top of the priority queue.”)  Capital structures will respond to this regulation, again in unpredictable ways, and in ways that affect the vulnerability of the system to contagion.

I am giving a talk on Monday at a joint Bundesbank-University of Frankfort conference about central banking.  My talk is about systemic risk and CCPs, and I will explore all of these themes.  The overarching theme is that you cannot view an intervention into the structure of financial markets, like a CCP mandate, in isolation.  You have to consider the endogenous responses throughout the system. The entire structure of financial contracts will change as the result of such a big intervention, and this structure will have its own special vulnerabilities.

When evaluating these vulnerabilities, one should pay special attention to liquidity issues, and liquidity contagion.  This was a theme of my JACF article “Clearing and Collateral Mandates? The New Liquidity Trap?”  Scott’s report adds special force to this contention that liquidity and contagion, rather than interconnection, should be the focus of any regulatory and legislative efforts.

It also suggests that much, and arguably virtually all, of the regulatory response to the 2008 Crisis was misdirected, and hence will either not reduce systemic risk, and may increase it.   Given the costs that these regulations impose, this is a sobering conclusion.

It finally suggests that it all comes down to central banks, as lenders of last resort.  If it is a liquidity problem (and in this Scott is closely aligned with Gary Gorton), the institutional means for supplying liquidity in times of crisis-which now means central banks-is of paramount importance.

One of the things that turned Japan’s initial early-90s crash into Double Dip Lost Decades was the refusal to let failing firms die and the failure to force other firms to restructure or reorganize.  Zombie banks were allowed to live on, rather than being wound up or recapitalized.  Zombie banks continued to lend to inefficient loss making firms in desperate need of reorganization, restructuring, or seppuku, letting them stumble on unreformed, half-alive, half-dead.   The overwhelming urge was to retain the status quo to the greatest extent possible, and to resist the forces of creative destruction by all means available.

We can see the results, with a Japanese economy lurching along, also half-alive, half-dead.

A Reuters article suggests that the social and political pressures to maintain the status quo, to prop up existing firms (that just happen to have political connections), are leading China down the Japanese path:

The problems at China’s Yingli Green Energy Holding Co Ltd (YGE.N), the world’s No.3 solar-panel maker, are going from bad to worse as the company struggles with mounting losses, collapsing product prices and a stock in free-fall.

And yet, despite a government directive to rein in loans, Chinese banks keep extending credit to the New York-listed firm, and at below-market rates. Outstanding short-term borrowing has almost tripled to 8.2 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) since 2009, according to Yingli’s 2011 annual report.

. . . .

Yingli is one of many companies in China receiving life support from the country’s banks. That support – at a time when China’s economy and financial system are also under pressure – is raising fears that a spike in bad loans will push Chinese lenders into default.

“Banks like lending to us,” said Yingli’s Chief Financial Officer Bryan Li in an interview. “They feel that we are a potential winner if there is any consolidation in the industry.”

That feeling may come back to haunt the banks.

A Reuters News analysis on 40 of China’s most indebted companies – most of them from sectors already reeling with overcapacity such as wind-turbine maker Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology Co Ltd (002202.SZ) and COSCO Shipping Co Ltd (600428.SS) – showed debt levels rising as profits decline across industries that Beijing has said it wants to promote.

On average, operating profit at these companies dropped 15 percent in 2011 as their debt piles grew by the same percentage, according to company and Thomson Reuters data.

. . . .

Goldman Sachs & Co (GS.N) estimates in a research note that the NPL ratio is more than six times the official rate. [Gotta love that official Chinese data!] That’s already less pessimistic than most investors, who expect NPL levels of at least 10 percent, according to the bank.

Much of the pressure to lend to unprofitable firms comes from the government’s desire to prevent a total collapse in industries struggling in an economy that has slowed for the seventh consecutive quarter.

“If you run a bank’s operations in a certain province and the governor tells you to roll over a loan, you are going to do it even if it doesn’t make commercial sense,” said Arthur Kwong, head of Asia Pacific equities at BNP Paribas Investment Partners.

Japan misallocated capital for years, and is paying the price now.  China, through its stimulus programs, showcase projects, and now these efforts to prop up politically connected losers, is also wasting capital on a colossal scale.  When originally “invested”, this money shows up as GDP, and props up the growth rate.  But if that capital is used unproductively, that GDP gold turns to dross.

The Chinese hatred for everything Japanese-a hatred that is waxing particularly hot right now-will likely prevent them from learning something from the Japanese experience.  But by failing to heed the Japanese experience, China is running the very serious risk of repeating it.

It is far better to submit to the gales of creative destruction than to attempt to preserve an unviable structure and unviable firms.  Japan tried otherwise and failed.  China seems intent on making the same mistake.

After the US economy began to recover rather robustly in the mid-1930s, a series of ill-considered government policies, notably a tax on undistributed profits, a big increase in marginal rates on high incomes, the Wagner Act, and a Fed contraction of the money supply led to a substantial contraction in 1937.  The depression within the Depression.

One notable feature of the 1937 episode was the so-called “Capital Strike”, a sharp decline in corporate investment.

The imminency of Obamacare and Frankendodd, and the continued failure to address seriously the country’s fiscal situation, with the associated uncertainty about taxes and spending, may be creating a modern-day version of the capital strike.  The WSJ reports that growth in investment expenditure has slowed to a standstill, and that many large companies are slashing investment plans.  The article places the blame on the “Fiscal Cliff”, but in reality, this is overdetermined, as they say.  There are multiple factors at work, and all in the same bearish direction: the regulatory friction (epitomized by Obamacare, Frankendodd and the EPA) is a major drag on growth, and a major source of investment-killing uncertainty.  Indeed, I would put the least weight on the Fiscal Cliff as it is conventionally portrayed: that conventional portrayal is almost purely comic book Keynesian in nature, focusing on “aggregate demand”.  IMO, the handling of the expiration of various tax reductions and the potential for sequestration is relevant not because of AD-a slippery and largely chimerical concept-but because of what it portends about the future course of government spending, and in particular the appetite to deal with entitlements and transfer payments.

If what the WSJ reports is indeed a harbinger of a modern day capital strike, that would be consistent with my broad forecast in my post-election post.  A protracted period of stagnation/slow growth.  Which will only exacerbate the fiscal situation and increase the risk of a rollover/funding crisis.

As if we really should need another Ghost of Christmas Future to warn us, take a look at Japan right now.  Just saying.