GiGi’s Back!: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
One of the few compensations I get from a Biden administration is that I have an opportunity to kick around Gary Gensler–“GiGi” to those in the know–again. Apparently feeling his way in his first few months as Chairman of the SEC, Gensler has been relatively quiet, but today he unburdened himself with deep thoughts about stock market structure. If you didn’t notice, “deep” was sarcasm. His opinions are actually trite and shallow, and betray a failure to ask penetrating questions. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Not that he doesn’t have questions. About payment for order flow (“PFOF”) for instance:
Payment for order flow raises a number of important questions. Do broker-dealers have inherent conflicts of interest? If so, are customers getting best execution in the context of that conflict? Are broker-dealers incentivized to encourage customers to trade more frequently than is in those customers’ best interest?
But he misses the big question: why is payment for order flow such a big deal in the first place?
Relatedly, Gensler expresses concern about what traders do in the dark:
First, as evidenced in January, nearly half of the trading interest in the equity market either is in dark pools or is internalized by wholesalers. Dark pools and wholesalers are not reflected in the NBBO. Moreover, the NBBO is also only as good as the market itself. Thus, under the segmentation of the current market, nearly half of trading along with a significant portion of retail market orders happens away from the lit markets. I believe this may affect the width of the bid-ask spread.
Which begs the question: why is “nearly half of the trading interest in the equity market either is in dark pools or is internalized by wholesalers”?
Until you answer these big questions, studying the ancillary ones like his regarding PFOF an NBBO is a waste of time.
The economics are actually very straightforward. In competitive markets, customers who impose different costs on suppliers will pay different prices. This is “price discrimination” of a sort, but not price discrimination based on an exploitation of market power and differences in customer demand elasticities: it is price differentiation based on differences is cost.
Retail order flow is cheaper to intermediate than institutional order flow. Some institutional order flow is cheaper to intermediate than other such flows. Competitive pressures will find ways to ensure flows that are cheaper to intermediate pay lower prices. PFOF, dark pools, etc., are all means of segmenting order flow based on cost.
Trying to restrict cost-based price differences by banning or restricting certain practices will lead clever intermediaries to find other ways to differentiate based on cost. This has always been so, since time immemorial.
In essence, Gensler and many other critics of US market structure want to impose uniform pricing that doesn’t reflect cost differences. This would be, in essence, a massive scheme of cross subsidies. Ironically, the retail traders for whom Gensler exhibits such touching concern would actually be the losers here.
Cross subsidy schemes are inherently unstable. There are tremendous competitive pressures to circumvent them. As the history of virtually every regulated sector (e.g., transportation, communications) has demonstrated for decades, and even centuries.
From a positive political economy perspective, the appeal of such cross subsidy schemes to regulators is great. As Sam Peltzman pointed out in his amazing 1976 JLE piece “Toward a More General Theory of Regulation,” regulators systematically attempt to suppress cost-based price differences in order to redistribute rents to gain political support. The main impetus for deregulation is innovation that exploits gains from trade from circumventing cross subsidy schemes–deregulation in banking (Regulation Q) and telecoms are great examples of this.
So who would the beneficiaries of this cross-subsidization scheme be? Two major SEC constituencies–exchanges, and large institutional traders.
In other words, all this chin pulling about PFOF and dark markets is politics as usual. Furthermore, it is politics as usual in the cynical sense that the supposed beneficiaries of regulatory concern (retail traders) are the ones who will be shtupped.
Gensler also expressed dismay at the concentration in the PFOF market: yeah, he’s looking at you, Kenneth. Getting the frequency?
Although Gensler’s systemic risk concern might have some justification, he still fails to ask the foundational question: why is it concentrated? He doesn’t ask, so he doesn’t answer, instead saying: “Market concentration can deter healthy competition and limit innovation.”
Well, concentration can also be the result of healthy competition and innovation (h/t the great Harold Demsetz). Until we understand the existing concentration we can’t understand whether it’s a bug or feature, and hence what the appropriate policy response is.
Gensler implicitly analogizes say Citadel to Facebook or Google, which harvest customer data and can exploit network effects which drives concentration. The analogy seems very strained here. Retail order flow is cheap to service because it is uninformed. Citadel (or other purchasers of order flow) isn’t learning something about consumers that it can use to target ads at them or the like. The main thing it is learning is what sources of order flow are uninformed, and which are informed–so it can avoid paying to service the latter.
Again, before plunging ahead, it’s best to understand what are the potential agglomeration economies of servicing order flow.
Gensler returns to one of his favorite subjects–clearing–at the end of his talk. He advocates reducing settlement time from T+2: “I believe shortening the standard settlement cycle could reduce costs and risks in our markets.”
This is a conventional–and superficial–view that suggests that when it comes to clearing, Gensler is like the Bourbons: he’s learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.
As I wrote at the peak of the GameStop frenzy (which may repeat with AMC or some other meme stock), shortening the settlement cycle involves serious trade-offs. Moreover, it is by no means clear that it would reduce costs or reduce risks. The main impact would be to shift costs, and transform risks in ways that are not necessarily beneficial. Again, shortening the settlement cycle involves a substitution of liquidity risk for credit risk–just as central clearing does generally, a point which Gensler was clueless about in 2010 and is evidently equally clueless about a decade later.
So GiGi hasn’t really changed. He is sill offering nostrums based on superficial diagnoses. He fails to ask the most fundamental questions–the Chesterton’s Fence questions. That is, understand why things are they way they are before proposing to change them.