Position Limits: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
On Thursday, the CFTC voted along party lines to approve a proposal on position limits. The party line vote reveals a salient fact: the proposal represents a virtual abandonment of the Commission’s earlier proposals (2011, 2013, 2016). Indeed, virtually all of the features that I criticized in the earlier proposals are gone, and the current proposal largely mirrors the recommendations of the Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee that I served on (before being uninvited by current EEMAC chair Dan Berkovitz). (More on EEMAC below.)
Most importantly, limits outside the “spot month” (which is actually just a few days for some commodities) for energy and metals commodities are gone. Good riddance. They remain for nine legacy ag futures contracts (corn, cotton, and the like), but the any-and-all limits have been expanded substantially.
The rule expands hedging exemptions beyond the prior proposals, and in doing so meets the objections of companies like Vitol. Interestingly, the proposal tidies up the definition of a “bona fide hedge” and makes explicit, rather than implicit, the principle that bona fide hedges are solely for the reduction of price risk.
The Commission did eliminate the “risk management” hedging exemption for swaps dealers, based on an interpretation of Congressional intent and a reading of statute that limits hedging to the management of risk of physical commodity positions. On principled grounds, I object to this. A swap dealer buying an oil swap from an E&P firm facilitates the hedging of a physical position, and hedging that swap via the futures markets serves a classical risk transfer function. A dealer selling an index swap to a pension fund isn’t hedging a physical risk, but it is still serving a risk transfer function and the distinction between physical commodity hedges and non-physical hedges is rather Talmudic.
The practical effect is unknown. In terms of index swaps, most swap dealers are out of the nearby contract when an index (e.g., GSCI) rolls, which is well before the spot month for energy and metals that make up the bulk of most indices. Hedges of the ag portion of these swaps could be affected by the any-and-all limits and the elimination of the risk management exemption, but the dramatic increase in the size of these limits may well greatly reduce any impact. A dealer hedging a swap with payments based on final settlement prices of say NYMEX crude or natural gas could be impacted by the elimination of the exemption, but the spot month limits may be large enough to cushion the impact here as well.
The most interesting feature of the proposal is its rather tortured attempt to address the “necessity” issue that derailed previous proposals in court.
The most important aspect of this is that it appears that the Commission has essentially conceded that a necessity finding is, well, necessary. That raises the issue of the criteria for establishing necessity.
One criterion could be that a limit is necessary only if the risk of speculation causing unwarranted price fluctuations is sufficiently great.
An alternative criterion is that a limit is necessary as long as the risk of unwarranted price fluctuations exists at all, if the contract is important enough.
The Commission took the latter approach, and limited its limits to commodities it deemed were sufficiently important (measured by volume and open interest) so that any unwarranted price fluctuation could lead to impairment of price discovery and risk transfer on a large scale. The closest that the Commission came to taking likelihood of disruption into account is its restriction of the limits to physical delivery contracts that could be cornered or squeezed. This is a logical problem (cash-settled contracts give rise to manipulation too) but this is of secondary importance. But it could be read to limit the Commission’s interpretation as to the source of unwarranted fluctuations to market power manipulation, which would be a good limitation indeed.
A sufficient statistic to infer that the Commission conceded much in its necessity finding is Dan Berkovitz’s freak out on the issue in his dissent.
As a manipulation-related aside, I will note that the spot month limits are justified by the notion that a position in excess of deliverable supply is necessary to execute a market power manipulation (i.e., a corner or squeeze). I have some recent research (which I’ll post and write about soon) showing that this may be a sufficient condition, but not a necessary one. Meaning that the limits will not be sufficient to eliminate market power manipulation.
The recent proposal, assuming it is finally approved as a rule in something resembling its current form, represents the end of a saga that has had a major influence on my life. I began writing about the speculation issue when it became a source of renewed political controversy in 2006. I wrote my first major post in response to a Senate Permanent Subcommittee Report (large authored by Dan Berkovitz) on oil speculation in August 2006.
As oil prices spiraled upwards in 2007 and 2008, I wrote more about the issue, and gained more notoriety. This resulted in my testifying before the House Ag Committee in July 2008 (a day or two before oil prices reached their all time high) and led to a WSJ oped.
Then the Financial Crisis happened, and I focused more on clearing issues, with periodic forays into the speculation debate. But Frankendodd included a provision on speculative position limits in commodities, and the CFTC rolled out a proposal in 2011.
I wrote a comment letter on the proposal. That letter (and others I wrote subsequently) were sufficiently important that in the final rulemaking and in later proposals it or other things I’ve written were cited dozens of times (my name gets 50 hits in the 2016 proposal).
But the impact of the letter on my life went beyond that. Gene Scalia–son of Justice Antonin Scalia, and now Secretary of Labor–retained me to write a declaration criticizing the inadequate cost-benefit analysis in the proposal (it being something required under the law.)
Perhaps most importantly, Blythe Masters at J. P. Morgan liked it, and called to tell me so. She then proposed that I write an analysis of the systemic risk of commodity trading firms for SIFMA. I did–and came up with the wrong answer. So SIFMA spiked the report. But word leaked out, which prompted Trafigura to retain me to write a study (with a subsequent follow-on study) of the economics of commodity trading firms.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that this study proved to be very influential, perhaps because of the lack of competition: writing on the sector was, and remains, very sparse. I have traveled, lectured, and taught around the world based on people wanting to hear what I wrote about in that piece.
The study was also the hook for the New York Times hit piece on me in December, 2013. See! I took money from evil speculators while writing in opposition to limits on speculation! Never mind that I had been consistently opposed to limits years before, and never mind that Trafigura (and other oil traders) are not speculators and use the futures markets mainly for hedging.
(As an aside, I am convinced, but cannot prove, that Gary Gensler was the moving force behind the piece. After all, why else would the NYT devote front page space to an obscure academic? And under the theory of there-are-no-coincidences-comrade, comments on the 2013 revised proposal were due in January, 2014. So December 2013 was the perfect time to kneecap a gadfly. By the way, Gary, how’s that gig as Treasury Secretary working out. Oh. Right. Well maybe you can chair Hillary’s legal defense fund.)
Asides aside, other than frightening my aged parents this article actually was all for the good. It validated me as an influential voice. It also got many very reputable people to rush to my defense, including Thomas Sowell, one of my long-time heroes.
The article raised its head a few years later when I was serving on EEMAC, and was asked to write the (Frankendodd-mandated) report on the committee’s deliberations. I was the dutiful scribe, and honestly recorded the committee’s adamant opposition to the then-outstanding proposal (which included all the bad features jettisoned in the new proposal).
This caused Elizabeth Warren to lose her [insert vulgar metaphor of your choosing here]. This article in particular cracked me up (and still cracks me up): Why Elizabeth Warren Is On the Warpath This Week.
Well, why was she on “the warpath”? Well–me, now that you ask:
The committee, which was established by Dodd-Frank, has nine members. Though it is supposed to express a “wide diversity of opinion” and “a broad spectrum of interests,” eight of the nine members represent companies or industries with a financial interest in killing the position limits rule, or have a personal financial interest themselves.
. . . .
The recent inclusion of Craig Pirrong on the committee is perhaps the most flagrant example. Pirrong, who co-wrote the first draft of the report with James Allison, is a professor of finance at the University of Houston, who has been paid by several industry participants and trade groups for his research into commodity speculation. He was also a paid research consultant for the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, the very group that got the initial rule overturned by the courts.
The CFTC report relies mostly on Pirrong’s research and a presentation he made to the committee last year, which did not include the opinion of anyone who believes in the dangers of excessive commodity speculation. In fact, 10 of the 13 witnesses at EEMAC meetings came from industry, two were representatives of CFTC, and the other was Pirrong. The meetings never mentioned that there would even be a final report. [Er, it’s in the law, you knobs.]
As Public Citizen’s Tyson Slocum, the only non-industry committee member and the only one to dissent from the recommendation, points out, Pirrong was not on the committee until after he co-authored the report. Pirrong “is so new to the EEMAC,” Slocum wrote in a minority dissent, “that I only learned he was a member when he was listed as a co-author.”
This kerfuffle warranted another mention in the NYT, and I’ve been told that Warren used it (and me) in a fundraising pitch.
I’m so proud. One’s enemies are the best comment on one’s character.
What cracks me up is that it wasn’t a right-wing snarkmeister like me that included “Warpath” in the title of an article about Liz Warren. It was the (by then) far-left New Republic. Freudian slip? Whatever, it’s hilarious.
Alas, understandably but not commendably, Commissioner and EEMAC chair Christopher Giancarlo buckled under the political pressure and withdrew the report. But this was almost certainly a non-event: the proposal was dead in the water, and was only salvaged by saving major pieces overboard. And I’ve sailed on.
What a long strange trip it’s been. The speculation debate has had a first-order impact on the arc of my life for more than a decade. Although the Commission proposal will likely put an end to one chapter of that debate, as I wrote in my first piece in 2006, speculation controversy is a hardy perennial, and will no doubt recur the next time some major commodity price spikes or craters. And maybe I’ll be around to draw more fire–and deliver some–when that happens. And until then, I’ll keep Truckin’ on whatever fits my fancy.
Nota bene: I’m not a Dead Head by any means. But if the song fits . . . Well, not the drugs part!