Streetwise Professor

Last week the Basel Committee released its revised proposal on capital requirements for exposures to CCPs.  It made a few tweaks to its earlier proposal, which had attracted considerable criticism.  The critics are not mollified, and some new criticisms have been directed at the new version.

I won’t deconstruct the new proposal in detail.  I’ll just focus on a few of the high level issues, all in the way of reiterating a broader point that I’ve raised previously.

One criticism of the new proposal is that it imposes punitive burdens on client clearing, and is therefore inconsistent with the stated goal of encouraging the movement of more derivatives transactions to CCPs.  Against this, it is claimed that the new rules facilitate portability of client accounts between clearing firms.  So, you won’t be able to find someone willing to clear for you in the first place, but you’ll be able to move your account easily.  Or something.

The allegedly punitive treatment of client clearing, combined with the capital and margin burdens placed on non-cleared trades, will tend to reduce end user hedging with derivatives.  This is clearly an undesirable outcome, and will induce end users to devise alternative means (and in particular, to adjust their capital structures) in order to achieve the same objectives as they currently do through derivatives.  These alternatives  are likely to be more costly than derivatives.  Moreover, they will still result in the creation of counterparty risk (or credit risk).  From a systemic perspective, it is not clear that the ultimate effect will be to reduce the amount of credit risk, or improve its allocation.

The new draft reduces slightly the capital charges for default fund contributions, but the treatment is still sufficiently tough to make it likely that CCPs will jack up margins to avoid incurring the high capital charges associated with exposures in excess of the CCPs “hypothetical capital.”  Maybe this is precisely the intent, because the idea that derivatives trades should be massively collateralized is a matter of faith among many regulators.  But demanding high collateral can lead to many adverse effects, including less hedging, the utilization of riskier assets to pay initial margins, the substitution of other forms of leverage, including fragile repo-based collateral transformation services, and the engineering of securities that can be used as collateral (either directly with a CCP or indirectly via a collateral transformation) but which are loaded with systematic tail risk.

The proposals retain the very crude distinctions between risk exposures.  Capital charges across exposures do not vary sufficiently to account for their different risk characteristics.

All of these issues point out the basic problem with Basel capital requirements.  These rules are essentially price controls.  They cannot–metaphysically–get the prices right.  The way the risks are priced via capital charges will affect resource and risk allocation decisions.  Those subject to the rules will have the information and incentive to figure out how to minimize their impact, and will tend to load up on risks that are underpriced and take too few of the overpriced risks.  Many of the endogenous responses to the capital charges will occur in unexpected ways and places, and the connection between these responses and the rules will often be highly indirect and difficult to identify.

But the big problem is that since everybody is facing the same distorted price signals, they will tend to make correlated mistakes.  This increases the vulnerability of the system.  That’s why Basel is faulty generally.  The CCP capital charges are just a particular example of that.  They are intended to reduce systemic risk, but they largely ignore how the system will respond to the rules, thereby creating new vulnerabilities.

Just step back and look at what is going on now in Europe.  One of the basic principles of Basel II was that sovereign debt was safe.  Another was that mortgages were safe.  Financial Crisis I exploded the latter belief.  Financial Crisis II is demolishing the former.  But the favorable capital charges accorded these investments encouraged the supply and demand for both.

If you haven’t noticed, this is not working out well.  The CCP capital charges will have far reaching effects on how much risk there is in the system, and where it resides. The necessary crudeness of the capital rules, their inability to price different risks in a discriminating way, and the endogenous behavioral responses that they induce not just in clearing but throughout the interconnected financial markets, will create new systematic errors and vulnerabilities that won’t work out to well either.

The conceit of these rules is that they are pricing systemic risk.  How is that even possible when those formulating rules do not–and realistically, cannot–consider fully the systemic responses to them?  Charging a price can make things worse if the price is wrong.  A financial Gosplan hardly inspires confidence, and methinks that’s exactly what Basel is.

To put it in NavSlang: the MFers really screwed the pooch.  $600+ million in customer funds are missing.  That represents about 11 percent of the segregated customer funds.  It will be fun and games for customers to recover their money.  Matt Leising reports that customers may wait years to recover if MF Global is sued, as is almost inevitable.

New emerging details suggest that right after waving goodbye to CME auditors last week, MF started dipping into the customer kitty.  ICE states that there was no segregation breach.  Perhaps ICE was going to audit this week.

Not surprisingly, the CME and CFTC are coming under considerable criticism for the MF collapse.  One suggestion in this article by Greg Meyer is that the CME Group is lax in its oversight because MF was one of its biggest sources of order flow, thereby presenting the exchange with a conflict of interest.

I disagree with this interpretation.  I’ve written a lot about self-regulation over the years, and the theme of that research is that self-regulation is well-suited for some things because incentives are strong and well-aligned, and ill-suited in others for which incentives are weak or poorly-aligned.  Market manipulation is the main example of the latter.  (I have an article in the JLE from 1995 that examines this in detail.)  Especially for a for-profit investor owned exchange, incentives for broker oversight are stronger.  Having a broker go bust, especially as ugly as MF went bust, is not good for business because it casts doubt on the reliability of FCMs generally.   Lower confidence in the reliability of brokers and the safety of customer funds reduces the demand to trade.  Yes, MF accounted for a decent amount of order flow, but there is vigorous competition to serve that flow, and it is in CME Group’s interest that it be served by reliable and trustworthy FCMs.  There is no upside for CME from lax enforcement here, and a whole lot of downside–which it is experiencing now.

There is no such thing as perfect, error free, real time auditing.  Moreover, regulators had been pressuring MF Global for some time, so it’s not like the firm completely escaped scrutiny.  The issue is that when firms like this go down, it tends to happen very rapidly.  They are inherently fragile.  Once the run begins, it tends to end rather quickly.  In MF’s case, it lost funding when haircuts on its repo’d Eurodebt went up because of (a) the decline in market value of the debt, and (b) its rating downgrade–which was in fact in large part a response to regulatory action.  The end came in a matter of days.

Another theme is that there was a breakdown in controls at MF Global.  Uhm, controls are intended primarily to keep underlings–like the Delta One trader at UBS–in line: they aren’t designed to, and are unlikely to, stop a determined CEO from taking on excessive risk.  That’s especially true when the CEO is somebody like Corzine.  (Who is, by the way, a disgrace to my alma mater.)  It’s the board that has to keep the CEO in line, and all too often the board is like the CEO’s petting zoo.  That appears to be the case here.

One last thing.  I noted that the collapse of MF makes the CFTC look foolish not because of its failure to oversee the firm, but because of its adoption of a rule regarding clearinghouse membership that MF lobbied for very hard.   (The NY Fed also doesn’t look too swift for approving MF as a primary dealer.)  Another big supporter of the $50 million capital rule adopted by the CFTC was Jefferies Group.  Jefferies was downgraded by a non-big 3 rating agency (Egan-Jones).  The company’s stock fell about 15 percent on the news; it has since recovered on positive comments from Meredith Whitney on CNBC.  This bears watching, and again highlights the tension between the goal of making CCPs safe and allowing easy access to CCPs.

*Obscure Supersuckers reference.  A h/t to the first to decode it.

FCM, investment bank, primary dealer, and wanna be Goldman MF Global declared bankruptcy today.  As is typical with financial firms, the end came quickly.  The firm’s problems metastasized quickly last week.  Another quarterly loss, a ratings downgrade, and worries about losses on trades in European government bonds led to the typical downward spiral of lost funding and lost customers.  These firms are very fragile.  When they fall, they usually don’t get up.

Ironically, MF’s FCM operation was acquired from  . . . REFCO, which cratered almost exactly 6 years ago, in October, 2005.  Will anyone dare to take on this cursed franchise?

Piecing things together, I surmise that the firm bought about $6 billion in Italian and other southern Euro bonds and repo’d them out.  Due to the decline in the prices of these bonds, and the firm’s deteriorating financial condition, the repo counterparties demanded higher haircuts.  The firm couldn’t come up with the cash, and in desperation maxed out its credit lines.  But that couldn’t stop the hemorrhaging.

The most likely explanation for all this is that the firm was already foundering, and CEO John Corzine tried to gamble on resurrection by ramping up the risk.  As is so often the case, this more often results in a more rapid descent to financial hell than resurrection.

One major irony is that MF Global was pushing hard for low capital requirements for members of OTC derivative CCPs.  How’s that idea looking now, GiGi?

Especially since suspicions are rife that MF has misused segregated customer funds, presumably to keep the resurrection gamble going.  Reports state that the firm is stonewalling regulators on turning over records, and that about $300 million in customer funds are missing.  This is one of the most egregious things a brokerage firm can do.

This is already a major fall for former Goldman CEO, US senator, and NJ governor Corzine.  He is also a major Obama fundraiser, who is presumably now a Nonperson.  If the suspicions about misuse of customer funds prove true, major fall won’t even come close to describing what lies in store for Mr. Corzine.  He will long to be merely a Nonperson.

All you clearing and market infrastructure aficionados must read Bill Hodgson’s piece on collateral transformation at DerivSource.  He points out quite accurately the new sources of fragility and vulnerability to stress that will arise from collateral transformation services that are being offered to finance CCP margins in the aftermath of clearing mandates.

The bitter irony here is that many derivatives end users (real money investment funds, industrial hedgers) did not pose any real systemic risk under bilateral structures.  But forcing them to clear drives them to utilize funding mechanisms that are systemically risky.  As one big corporate end user told me: clearing mandates have transformed credit risks into liquidity risks: I can manage the first, but the second scares me.

I continue to gape in amazement that the sorcerer’s apprentices that created these mandates did not think to step two.  They did not step back and ask: “Gee, we’re imposing a major change on the structure of financial markets.  How will market participants respond?”  This is especially unbelievable since a big component of the narrative of the financial crisis is that it was the result of excessive financial engineering.  What, did FrankenDodd, Timmy!, GiGi, the G-20, the EC, etc., think that the big changes that they imposed would not lead to a new burst of financial engineering?  Are they really that clueless?

I think I know the answer.  I think you do too.

Markets do not stand still.  Market participants will adjust contracts in response to regulations and laws motivated by beliefs that the existing system of contracts is flawed.  A useful first approximation is that these contractual adjustments will try to reproduce the economic substance of the banned or restricted contracts.  However, many of the work-arounds necessarily utilize less efficient–and often more fragile–ways to achieve that substance.  Which means that vulnerabilities have largely been relocated, rather than eliminated, and in many cases the new vulnerabilities are more dangerous than the old.

Read Bill’s piece to get an excellent illustration of this dynamic at work.  And then remember that the biggest systemic risk is government, and in particular, ill-considered government policies.  And that’s especially true when static-minded legislators and regulators attempt to impose their vision on a dynamic, strategic, reacting, self-ordering system.

The CFTC voted out two rules today, one on position limits, the other on clearing.  I’ve beaten both issues to a bloody pulp over the last couple of years, so I don’t have too much to add.  Just a couple of high level comments.

Bottom line: Both rules are highly ill-advised.

Regarding position limits, some of the most inane provisions of the original proposal are gone, notably the “class” limits that constrained netting across the futures and OTC swaps.  This was a hidden constraint on market making by dealers, and made no economic sense.  Fortunately it is gone.  Also gone–for the most part–is the conditional spot month limit that treated cash-settled and delivery-settled contracts differently.  This made zero economic sense too, and it is also gone.  The one exception is that there are different limits for cash- and delivery-settled contracts for Henry Hub nat gas.  This makes zero economic sense too, and is a blatant political compromise by the Commission intended to throw a bone to ICE that lost on the conditional limit issue generally.  Laws, sausages–and CFTC rules.

My comment letter on position limits criticized both stricken provisions.  But other provisions I inveighed against, particularly those that constrain ETFs like USO and US Nat Gas funds, remain.

The partisan rancor on this issue came through loud and clear at the meeting, as this piece by Jeremy Grant makes clear.  Jill Sommers and Scott O’Malia were very outspoken:

“We went beyond the statute” by doing things like narrowing the bona fide hedge exemption, Sommers told Reuters. “Those are the things that people can use for a legal challenge.

O’Malia said: “over-reached in interpreting its statutory mandate to set position limits.”  O’Malia also emphasized the lack of empirical evidence of a need for limits, echoing my “No Theory? No Evidence? No Problem!” refrain.

As I was quoted saying in the Reuters piece, this statutory overreaching will be the basis for a legal challenge.  Not just on the hedge exemption issue, but on the more fundamental issue of whether it is necessary for the Commission to find that “excessive speculation” has indeed caused “unwarranted” fluctuations in prices, i.e., the “no evidence” point.  I would not be surprised if the cost-benefit analysis, such as it is, is not challenged as well.

The disappointing guy was Dunn, who blasted the idea of position limits, but voted for them anyways.  Not exactly a profile in courage or conviction by a retiring commissioner.

The other rule would require CCPs to admit firms with a minimum of $50 million in capital.  I think this is a terrible idea.  I understand that CCPs could potentially use excessively onerous admission requirements to reduce competition: hell, I’ve been making that point for well over a decade.  But I also understand that undercapitalized members, and members who cannot contribute constructively to the auctioning of a defaulter’s position, can undermine the effectiveness and even the safety of the clearinghouse.

There is a tension between encouraging competition, and making CCPs secure: Gensler and the majority focused on competition, and I think that is a major mistake, particularly given the fact that the clearing mandate in Dodd-Frank is intended to reduce systemic risk. Micromanaging CCP operations is a horrible, horrible idea.

Grounds for challenge?  Maybe.

No surprises here, really. Gensler is hell-bent on ramrodding through his agenda.  And that’s probably the best way to phrase it: the agenda is pretty bent, and will create some regulatory hell.

Last Friday I was part of a group of 8 economists who made presentations to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.  Once or twice a year the Board invites academics to discuss a policy-relevant economic issue.  The subject of Friday’s session was Network Economics, and Alistair Milne and I spoke about network issues in clearing and trading.

The Parthian shot in my presentation was that it was essential not to ignore the unintended effects of derivatives regulation.  In particular, clearing mandates, capital and collateral rules, and the like are all intended to reduce the amount of leverage in the financial system.  But even if you require extensive collateral against derivatives trades, market participants can offset the reduction in leverage inherent in derivatives trades by using the freed up debt capacity to add leverage in other forms.  What goes out through the front door can return through the back door.  This can be particularly dangerous if you think you’ve solved the problem when Mr. Leverage walks out the front and ignore that he’s snuck back in.

Put differently, it is very hard to reduce leverage in the system as a whole by regulating just a piece of firms’ capital structure.

Another example.  Reducing derivatives counterparty credit risk through clearing and netting and collateralization works by increasing the priority of derivatives in bankruptcy.  But if you move derivatives towards the head of the line, somebody else ends up further back.  Like unsecured creditors, including money market funds who buy short term bank debt.  They can be systemically important, too, meaning that the regulations have primarily shifted the locus of systemic risk, and not really reduced it.

Focusing on the collateral issue, the numbers here are huge.  Tabb Group estimates that interest rate derivative collateral alone will total $1.4 trillion.  Credit, equity, and commodity derivatives-related collateral will likely add hundreds of billions to the total: although these markets are smaller, they are riskier, requiring more collateral per dollar of notional.

So where is all this collateral going to come from?  I’ve written about collateral management services, by which banks will effectively lend cash that can be used for margins, with the loans collateralized by assets that CCPs will not accept directly.  In other words, Mr. Leverage is  a Back Door Man.

CME Group’s Craig Donohue talked about the need for such services:

“There will be a need and a value for the collateral transformation services,” Donohue, chief executive officer of CME said today during a panel discussion at the Futures Industry Association annual conference in Chicago.

The types of accepted collateral may need to be expanded as thousands of new users seek to back trades. While cash and government securities will always be the least costly way to pay for margin, some who want to pledge “three chickens and an old Ford” will find it more expensive to have non-standard collateral transformed into acceptable form, said Jeffrey Sprecher, chief executive officer of Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange Inc.

The demand has created a “cottage industry” of firms and units within banks that will charge a fee to hold securities or other assets for investors in return for acceptable margin, said Richard Prager, managing director and head of global trading for BlackRock Inc. (BLK)

Cottage industry.  Somehow this brings to mind all the stories about shadow banking system in China that mushroomed after the government tried to crack down on bank lending.

And CCPs are looking to expand the assets they are willing to take as collateral.  This exposes the CCPs to higher risks, including valuation risks.  As an example, LCH.Clearnet (which has already begun accepting gold) is going to accept some corporate debt as collateral (no link yet, but it’s from a Matt Leising Bloomberg story that Matt emailed to me):

LCH.Clearnet Ltd., the biggest interest-rate swap clearinghouse, is considering accepting corporate bonds for the first time to meet an anticipated surge in demand for a broader array of collateral in the $601 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market.

“We want to be able to have more clients come to clearing,” Floyd Converse, head of U.S. sales and marketing for London-based LCH.Clearnet, said in an interview in Chicago this week at the Futures  Industry Association annual conference.  The world’s biggest swaps clearinghouses are expanding the
types of securities they accept as regulations force thousands of new users in the U.S. and Europe to use clearing. Among them, CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures exchange, is broadening the variety of company debt it accepts as margin for its customers.

(Quick thoughts off the top.  “Investment grade” doesn’t really give the warm and fuzzies, does it?  Will corporate debt be accepted as collateral against CDS trades?  I know LCH.Clearnet doesn’t clear CDS, but there is a reason to wonder whether competitive pressure would lead to such an outcome.  Wouldn’t this expose a CCP to substantial credit correlation risk, which is devilishly difficult to quantify and manage?)

And it is becoming far more widely accepted that CCPs will require central bank liquidity during periods of extreme systemic stress.

All of these stories suggest that mandates are first and foremost just leading to a reshuffling of leverage and risk.  There is room for deep skepticism that this reshuffling will reduce systemic risks.

Indeed, if Gary Gorton is right, and shadow banking was first and foremost a mechanism designed to create informationally insensitive debt that could be posted as collateral, the potential increase in demand for collateral could catalyze a similar process.  This process is systemically risky because it increases fragility and creates substantial tail risks, as this new Gorton paper discusses.

There is also reason to doubt that this is a good use of capital, and could lead to lower growth.  Just what we need.  The cost-benefit trade-off appears particularly unfavorable with respect to collateral posting by long-only buy side investors (e.g., pension funds) and “end users” who do not pose substantial systemic risks.

So, do Ben et al get it?  My sense is that they do, although Bernanke was pretty inscrutable through the entire morning.

One person who obviously doesn’t get it, or is pretending that he doesn’t (which would be even more disturbing) is Gary Gensler.  October is sprinkled with major conferences, and Gensler has been doing the rounds.  Despite all of the advances in understanding of the complexity of the issues involved, Gensler continues to peddle his cartoonish morality play:

“While the crisis had many causes, it is evident that swaps played a central role,” Mr Gensler said. “Swaps added leverage to the financial system with more risk being backed by less capital.

“They contributed, particularly through credit default swaps, to the bubble in the housing market. They contributed to a system where large financial institutions were thought to be not only too big to fail, but too interconnected to fail. Swaps – developed to help manage and lower risk for end-users – also concentrated and heightened risk in the financial system and to the public.”

No recognition of the ability of firms to substitute swap-based leverage with other types of leverage, and their willingness to do so.  No acknowledgement of how mandates re-order priorities in bankruptcy, and the implications thereof.    No appreciation for the potentially destabilizing effects of rigid variation margin mechanisms, and the pro-cyclicality of these mechanisms.   And yeah, Gary: clearing mandates don’t concentrate risk and create their own interconnections.

Gensler is also still pushing the transparency nostrum.  He links the crisis of ’08 to the opacity of the swaps market.  Well, lack of pricing information was arguably an important problem with AIG in particular, his proposed cure–the SEF mandate–will have no effect on this.  The problem with the instruments that AIG bought wasn’t that they weren’t traded on transparent markets: it was that they weren’t traded.  Markets are not the Field of Frickin’ Dreams: If you build it, there’s no guarantee anybody will come.  Comparisons of markets for illiquid products to exchange traded futures are superficial and silly.

In sum, Gensler continues to say foolish things.  Is he a fool, or does he just believe his audience is?  He batters straw men.  He sticks to a cartoonish narrative of the events of 2008.  He pushes nostrums.  He ignores deep complexities, and the huge potential for unintended consequences of the policies he advocates.

Nonetheless, he is not shy about telling others what to do. @OTCderivatives tweets that Gensler said the CFTC should be “top dog” in IOSCO because of the size of US markets.   In London, he chided the Europeans for not including exchange traded derivatives in Emir:

It is critical, though, that those swaps traded on regulated exchanges also are subject to the clearing requirement to bring the benefits of clearing to swaps, regardless of where they are traded – on exchange or off exchange.

This will no doubt thrill the Germans, because an expansion of the Emir remit would also force open access to exchange CCPs.

But given that the Germans have been quite adept at slapping Timmy! around, I doubt that a mere agency head will give them much trouble.

[Interesting aside.  Risk Magazine’s Laurie Carver tweeted that Gensler blew him off to allow “other less aggressive journalists ask him comfy things.”   Go figure.]

To sum up.  Dodd-Frank has set off a very complex dynamic of unintended consequences, many of which will undermine the intent of the law.  One of the figures primarily responsible for implementation of Dodd-Frank has a very simplistic view of the world that ignores these complexities.  What could go wrong?

When I was in London last week, I went to a cafe that is located in what used to be the trading floor of the London Stock Exchange.  History-phile that I am, I thought I would take a picture of the quite attractive building.  I had my phone cam up and was just about ready to take the shot when I felt a burly hand grab my shoulder, and heard a gruff voice–“No photographs ‘ere, sir.”

I thought this ironic, given that one is photographed pretty much everywhere on the street in London.  They can photograph you: you can’t photograph Them, I guess.

This came to mind when I read about the NY Fed’s plan to monitor “key bloggers” and various social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) for conversations mentioning the Fed.  More ominous than the passive “listening” part of the program is the active “influencing” part, intended to “identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers.”

“Reach out” sounds so innocuous.  Brings to mind old ATT ads: “reach out and touch someone.”  But there is always reason to be concerned that the Fed’s touch will not be a light one.  We don’t need the government doing much more outreach and “influencing”, thank you very much.

I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but the potential for mischief here is large, especially given the government’s (and the Fed’s) proclivity to rationalize ever greater intrusions on privacy and liberty as essential for national security.  One can see the Fed convincing itself that to fight “rumors” and “speculation” that call into question the stability of the financial system, it is necessary to exert pressure on those that need to get their minds right, to make sure they get with the program.

This was illustrated by an interaction with an executive from a major French bank that has been in the news of late (which one hasn’t?) who went ballistic when someone else in the conversation asked what financial blogs I read, and I mentioned FTAlphaville and heaven forfend Zerohedge.  I mean ballistic. The Gallic spit was flying before  he turned on his heel and left in a huff.

Yes, there are potentially multiple equilibria in these markets, and social media and blogs can in theory coordinate shifts from good equilibria to bad (“run away!”) equilibria.  But it is quite ominous that the Fed appears to be contemplating the creation of systems and measures that could be used to manipulate information flows.

Hey.  Maybe I’ll ask Ben about this when I see him next week.  Maybe that’s a great way to get SWP at the top of the list!

No, it’s not all Kudrin all the time here at SWP.  I know there are those of you looking for your clearing fix.

A brief thought about an unintended destination on the Road to SEFdom–a vertical silo.

Long time readers will know that my transactions cost economics-based analysis predicts that dominant execution venues will vertically integrate into of post-trade services, including clearing and settlement.  Many dominant markets are already “silos” and others are moving in that direction.  The days of an execution venue obtaining post-trade services from a “horizontal” CCP or settlement provider (like LCH.Clearnet) are numbered except when regulation (like RegNMS) socializes order flow.

Horizontal, independent clearers (or settlement providers) can survive in an OTC market, where there is no centralized execution venue.  Vertical integration economizes on transactions costs and double-marginalization costs when there are back-to-back monopolies (and near monopolies).  No execution venue, no back-to-back monopoly problem.

That’s where the SEF mandate comes in.  By forcing exchange-like execution of swap transactions, there is a very real possibility that a dominant execution venue will emerge–and that the resulting frictions in the dealings between that venue and its clearer will lead to a merger between them (or some sort of long-term, exclusive contract.)

Whether this outcome occurs depends on the rules for SEFs.  There is likely to be a proliferation of SEFs early on, but rules for SEFs will determine whether a handful or one survive for a particular instrument class.  If SEF regulations (a) require them to operate auctions (rather than, say, RFQs), and (b) do not impose obligations on SEFs to direct orders to other SEFs offering better prices, then network effects will lead to tipping to a single venue.  Conversely, if there are SEF order handling rules analogous to RegNMS, multiple SEFs may survive.  Under the first alternative, integration is likely to occur.  Under the second, the likely outcome is for multiple SEFs to be served by one horizontal CCP.

SEF rules are still up in the air, and I have not seen any discussion of inter-SEF obligations–or lack thereof.  In contrast to SEC, CFTC has no tradition of even contemplating, let alone imposing, order handling rules.  The issue has never really come up.  I think the presumption in the agency is there will be rigorous competition among SEFs, but that conclusion depends crucially on SEF rules.  In particular, rules relating to the way SEFs compete.  If SEFs are required to operate auction-like mechanisms, and are under no obligation to direct orders to markets displaying better prices, markets will tip to a single SEF.  This will lead to integration.  If regulators impose order handling obligations, multiple SEFs will survive, and integration is far less likely.

Has anybody thought this through?  Are order handling rules even on the table?

Javier Blas at FT was a standup guy about the sentence in his article on the Singleton that made it sound like I had criticized the CFTC for not inviting those taking contrary views to the August confab about speculation and the Singleton paper.  In response to my venting (who? me?), the sentence has been corrected in the online version to make it clear that I did not make any such claim, and the version online now contains this text:

“This article has been corrected since original publication to reflect that only Philip K.Verleger has criticised the CFTC’s move to invite academics, mainly with one point of view.”

I appreciate the rapid and gracious response.

I have a warm spot in my heart for German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, because of his periodic slapdowns of Timmy!  (I think there is another slapdown-ready opportunity arising, given Timmy!’s–and Obama’s–recent penchant for giving the Euros gratuitous advice on dealing with their existential crisis.)

But he said a couple of things recently that give me pause.  First (h/t R) is this speech:

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that while markets are the most efficient means of creating wealth in an economy, they can also be irrational and therefore need regulation.

“Markets are the best means of finding solutions, but they’re not always rational” and can destroy themselves, Schaeuble said today in a speech in Berlin. “That’s why they need rules and bounds.”

It is the job of the government to create an order that promotes, rather than hinders, moral behavior, Schaeuble also said at an event organized by the Catholic Academy in Berlin.

On an abstract level, that’s not really objectionable, because only some anarchists deny the need for market rules.  (Anarchocapitalists believe that rules shouldn’t be imposed, but created by cooperation and consent.)  The questions are: What rules are the right ones?  Where should the bounds be set?  Who decides?  How?

In this speech, Schaeuble gave an example of how he answers these questions, and those answers suggest that his pro-market rhetoric is boilerplate camouflaging another statist control freak:

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Wednesday called for regulating all innovative financial products and urged banning so-called over-the-counter trade.

“We must apply the rules of transparency to all market participants–hedge funds and private equity funds,” Schaeuble said at an event sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Catholic Academy ahead of a planned state visit to Germany by Pope Benedict XVI.

“We should ban OTC trade where possible, because we don’t have transparency (in these markets). And then we should try to regulate all innovative financial products. We cannot achieve everything through regulation, but we can try to tighten the rules.”

Another slave to the god of transparency.   Like that will solve everything.  And apparently a market in which consenting adults make mutually advantageous transactions about which they don’t reveal everything is far worse than no market at all.

I would further note that there is no perfectly transparent market.  Futures and stock exchanges have a great deal of pre-trade and post-trade price transparency, but the identity of traders is concealed: the markets are anonymous, and the buyer does not know the identity of the seller.  Thus, even on exchanges not everything is transparent.  OTC, the buyer typically knows the seller, but there is less pre- and post-trade transparency.  There are trade-offs involved, and different mechanisms have developed to permit market participants to choose which kinds of transparency rules work best for them.  The side-by-side existence of exchanges and OTC markets gives choices that can accommodate differences in the costs and benefits of alternative forms and levels of transparency across market participants.

And if transparency is such an unalloyed good in markets, Herr Schaeuble, does the same principle hold for governments?  Is Germany’s government a paragon of transparency?  Do you conduct all of your discussions and decisions in the full public glare?  Does your government have secrets?  Does Europe’s?  Is this a good thing?

We all know the answers to those questions.  It would be quite illuminating to hear why secrecy–very incomplete transparency–is acceptable and even necessary for governments that wield vast coercive powers, but some modicum of secrecy is completely unacceptable for private actors who cannot coerce anybody.

Schaueble’s remarks, and the place where he delivered them, suggest a typical European conservative mindset that is ambivalent, at best, towards markets and individual choice.  Hayek’s essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative” provides an illuminating analysis of this mindset.

So please confine yourself to putting the (verbal) boot into Timmy!, Wolfie.  There are enough control freaks about, thank you.