Streetwise Professor

Like Freddie Krueger, I’m baaaaaack again, folks.  This time, more regularly, I trust.

Catching up on a few things that have caught my eye since last time-and like Freddie, I brought my knives.

1. The LIEBOR mess continues to metastasize.  It is now sucking in regulators.  Including Timmy! It appears that the dissembling about LIBOR, TIBOR, EURIBOR, etc., was the worst kept secret in the world’s financial centers.  And let’s pray that’s true.  If the Fed, the Bank of England, etc. DIDN’T know that there was a complete disconnect between the rates that banks reported to the BBA and the rates at which they were actually borrowing (or not)-now THAT would be a reason for panic.  In fact, they were all-bankers and regulators alike-operating pursuant to the Juncker Maxim: “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”
2. I detest manipulation of markets, and have made a life’s work of studying it, calling out manipulators, and now and again testifying against them.  But I find it disgusting to hear high government officials in high dudgeon on the subject, when they are in fact often the most outrageous and shameless manipulators.  The most flagrant example: the Lilliputians who are the collective “leadership” of the EU and the Eurozone.  For what else can you call their repeated fudges, misstatements, lies, etc. related to the latest “solution” to Greece’s problems, or Spain’s, or Italy’s, than “manipulation”?  How many billions have changed hands on the EUphoric rallies that occur after the announcement of such solutions, and on the, umm, “retracements” that occur when the truth comes out.  The agreement on a Spanish bailout, and banking regulation changes, that came out of the most recent Summit of the Lilliputians is only the latest example.  Look.  Europe is screwed.  Metaphysically.  The math does not work.  Cannot work. Even mores, the politics cannot work.  The core is empty.  No real deal is possible.  Accept it.  And once you accept it, mock any pronouncement of the next “solution”.  And for God’s sake don’t buy except on the theory that other suckers buy and you will sell out before they do.
3. FCM Peregrine Financial Group apparently absconded with $220 million of “segregated” customer money.  This is both shocking and depressing 10 months after MF Global.  The scheme has apparently been going on for at least two years.  But the CFTC allegedly gave all FCMs the full anal probe post-MF, and saw-like Sergeant Schultz-NOTHINK! So since they can’t find a rather banal fraud at a middling futures brokerage, it’s truly obvious that they have game to regulate the entire world, and every complex financial institution and complex derivative trade in it.  What could go wrong? No doubt that the Peregrine debacle will lead to calls for more regulation.  Regulation, the only human activity where failure is the primary justification for more of it.
4. The CEO of inter dealer broker GFI, Mike Gooch, has said that hedge funds need to become liquidity suppliers/market makers in order to fill the gap left by banks, post-Volcker Rule.  I predicted this would be the outcome in a couple of posts written soon after the rule was mooted.  There is a serious question here: will this really lead to greater stability during times of financial turbulence?  Given that credit to hedge funds-which comes largely from banks, by the way (funny thing, that!)-typically contracts severely during periods of such turbulence, their market making activities are likely to contract as well during such times.  Meaning that market liquidity supplied by hedge funds will be highly pro-cyclical.  Bank supplied market liquidity is too, but the ones subject to the Volcker Rule-you know, the ones who have sticky insured deposits-are likely to be able to resist these cyclical pressures better than hedge funds because their funding is not as fragile.  So yes, Mike, hedge funds will be needed to fill the gap left by the exit of prop trading banks, but they won’t be there precisely when needed.  Things will work just swell.
5. Gazprom was named the most opaque corporation in the world.  I am shocked and stunned.  It is allegedly the most profitable.  Again, no surprise: government enforced monopoly is a nice gig.  But the company has been forced to make price concessions on contracts to big customers.  It is fighting a rearguard action against the flood of gas being discovered around the world.  It won’t happen overnight, but government mandated monopoly or no, the company’s future is not bright.
6. The to-ing and fro-ing over privatization in Russia continues.  Putin allegedly threw a spanner into Sechin’s ambitions to acquire “privatized” assets, including electricity generators.  But his words are pretty weak: “That does not mean we should limit ourselves to participation by Rosneftegaz.”  So you could envision some competitors in the bidding process, and them prevailing enough times to give the impression that a real privatization is going on.  But this is likely to be a Potemkin privatization, and Sechin et al are likely to prevail.  Sechin certainly thinks so: “Russia’s most influential energy official, Igor Sechin, said on Tuesday the state-owned energy holding Rosneftegaz was given permission to invest cash on its balance sheet in comments which seem to contradict assertions by a top government official [Akardy Dvorkovich].” I would bet on Sechin.  Hands down.
7. There is a spate of bad news about the weakness in China’s economy.  I have been a China bear for going on three years, or more actually.  The first reason for my pessimism has always been China’s ramshackle and rigged financial and banking systems: this predates the crisis.  This post provides an excellent overview of the reasons to find that system “scary.” Yes, the Chinese government has papered over past problems, but there are limits to this, as there are to all things.  Indeed, as the economy has gotten larger, and in the aftermath of the crisis and the massive monetary and fiscal response thereto, the state’s capacity to continue to do this is very questionable.  The second reason is that, contra Tom Friedman or Ray LaHood, I adamantly do not believe that the allocation of capital by the state, directly, and indirectly through financial repression and a hugely distorted banking system, will end well.  In fact, I believe the exact opposite is true.  Suppressing price signals and allocating capital to cronies and state owned enterprises is a recipe for grotesque misallocations of capital.  In the short to medium term, it can lead to impressive GDP numbers.  But spending insane amounts on investment eventually leads to catastrophe if that investment doesn’t produce returns.  That, in a nutshell, is what China looks like to me.  And these two sources of pessimism feed off one another: when the investments don’t generate returns, and in fact generate losses, the banks and trust companies and insurance companies and whatever that provided the finance are toast.  When you force feed a goose, you can at least get good liver pate (but not in California!).  When you force feed investment, eventually you get a bust.

That’s all for now folks.  Catch you again soon. Promise.

Barclays’ has copped to an attempted manipulation of LIBOR.  It has agreed to pay about $450 million to the UK’s FSA, the CFTC, and the USDOJ.  The CFTC filing states that Barclays had two motives for its actions.  First, when Barclays’ reports to LIBOR were high relative to other banks’ (which Barclays people referred to as having their head above the parapet) and thereby raising questions about the bank’s financial condition, it allegedly reduced reported rates in order to allay such fears.  Second, the bank’s traders allegedly influenced rate submissions, and conspired with traders at other banks to change their submissions, in order to advantage derivatives positions.

As I noted in 2008, when the story first broke, the second possibility created substantial legal liability for banks like Barclays that submitted the false reports.  Under the anti-manipulation law in effect in the US at the time, it was necessary to have specific intent to create an artificial price of something like the LIBOR-based Eurodollar futures contract.  The emails divulged today suggest such a specific intent.

Perhaps crucially, the Order only finds that Barclay’s attempted to manipulate, not that it had in fact succeeded.  This will be an important issue going forward.  To prove manipulation, and crucially, to collect damages, it will be necessary to show that Barclay and other submitters of LIBOR quotes indeed distorted the index, that is, they caused an artificial price in a futures contract based on LIBOR or some other interest rate like Euribor.

Proving this will be a very data intensive exercise.  Moreover, there are two distinct issues-the impact of manipulation on the final settlement price of the futures contract (which is based on LIBOR), and the impact of manipulation on futures prices prior to expiration.  The second issue will prove more challenging than the first because the connection is more direct in the final settlement price.  Even that will pose some issues, however, because of the necessity of identifying the “but for”, i.e., what interest rate should banks like Barclays have reported.   This will necessarily require looking at actual interbank transactions, raising the question of how many such transactions there will be during periods of time of money market stress starting in 2007.

These issues are not impossible.  Similar, and arguably even more challenging issues, were confronted in a class action lawsuit against those who misreported  natural gas prices to publishers like Platts.  (Full disclosure: I consulted with plaintiffs in that matter, and wrote a declaration in support of certain aspects of the plan of allocation of settlement monies.)

The whole fiasco does point out, yet again, the overriding importance of basing cash-settled indices on actual transactions, wherever possible.

This is becoming an important issue in oil markets as well, as “Price Reporting Agencies” like Platts and Argus are under great scrutiny.  But oftentimes the problem is not amenable to easy solution.  You can’t have a reliable transaction-based index that is not susceptible to manipulation if (a) there are few transactions, and/or (b) market participants have the option to report transactions.  Pharonic pronouncements from regulators that PRAs make bricks without straw are futile.

None of these issues are new.  I (and my colleagues at UH) dealt with them in 2003 in our efforts to create an “energy data hub” in the aftermath of the price reporting scandal post-Enron.  Voluntary reporting is extremely problematic.  Compulsory reporting (along the lines of one of the few salutary features of Frankendodd) is necessary (but not sufficient for some markets) to produce reliable price indices.  Arranging this on an international market like oil seems virtually impossible to implement, let alone enforce.

This is the longer explanation behind my rather cryptic quote from this WSJ article from last week.

Going back to LIEBOR, the Barclays $450mm coughed up is the first fine, but it won’t be the last one.   In the energy markets, the CFTC collected about $250 million: fines will be many multiples of that in LIBOR and Euribor and TIBOR and whatever.  And believe it or not, the really big money will likely be in civil litigation, and the battles will be much more intense there as well, IMO.

Luigi Zingales is a brilliant guy.  I find his advocacy in the FT of a return to Glass-Steagall less than brilliant.

Zingales identifies four reasons for supporting G-S.  Three are wildly implausible, the fourth hardly persuasive enough to justify a return to 30s-era regulatory structures.

The first reason is that it makes sense to restrict commercial banks’ participation in “very risky activities.”  There are at least two problems with this, when evaluated in the context of the financial crisis.

First, the investments and activities that put commercial banks at risk during each of the last two crises-mortgages and MBS in Financial Crisis I and sovereign debt in Financial Crisis II (the one currently ongoing, particularly in Europe)-were blessed by regulators as low risk activities.  They almost surely would have passed muster under Glass-Steagall.  There were other major banking crises under Glass-Steagall.  It is painfully clear that G-S is not sufficient to prevent banks from taking on risk in sufficient amounts to put individual banks and the banking system at risk.

Second, and I realize I am an apostate on this, although moral hazard is a concern associated with deposit insurance, funding and liquidity risk is as dangerous and arguably more dangerous.  Runs are more likely, the less sticky the funding.  Concentrating riskier activities in institutions like stand-alone investment banks that rely on wholesale markets rather than stickier insured deposits for funding increases the risk of destabilizing runs and makes the system more fragile.   It therefore seems extremely dangerous to allow the institutions with the riskiest funding hold the riskiest assets, and preclude the institutions with the safest funding not hold such risky assets.  Look for other means-such as risk-based deposit insurance premiums or capital requirements-to control the moral hazard problem.

Zingales’s second reason is that Glass-Steagall was simple.  Well, yes, the original bill was (as compared to Frank-n-Dodd or the Volcker Rule portion thereof) but there did grow up a thicket of regulations and interpretations and decisions around it.  This is inherent in any law that attempts to draw lines between activities: such laws generate efforts to engineer products that cross the lines in substance but seem to comply to the letter.  This generates a process of litigation, interpretation, regulatory challenge, etc.

And does anybody believe that if Glass-Steagall were to be brought back, it would be the same today as in the 1930s?  Glass-Steagall was simple in part because it was the product of simpler times  Financial markets are much more complicated today, and splitting the baby would be far harder.  Any attempt to do so would almost certainly result in a Son of Glass-Steagall that is far more complex, and far longer, than the nearly 80 year old original.

I have to say that Zingales’s third reason is cracked:

The third reason why I came to support Glass-Steagall was because I realised it was not simply a coincidence that we witnessed a prospering of securities markets and the blossoming of new ones (options and futures markets) while Glass-Steagall was in place, but since its repeal have seen a demise of public equity markets and an explosion of opaque over-the-counter ones.

I realize this is a newspaper oped, with tight space limits, but Luigi provides no serious evidence to support his realization that coincidence equals causation.  With respect to the demise of public equity markets, trading volumes have skyrocketed, and although there has been an increase in “dark markets”, such things existed in the glory days of G-S, just under a different name (“third markets”, for instance), and there are good economic reasons why this is so.  Moreover, some problems associated with equity markets are attributable to other regulations, notably Sarbanes-Oxley.

With respect to OTC instruments, Zingales’s characterization of cause and effect is muddled and ahistorical.  OTC derivatives began to grow rapidly in the 1980s, while G-S was still in force, but their growth was constrained by regulation.  However, it was legal uncertainty under the CEA that was the main problem, not Glass-Steagall.  This was addressed by the CFMA of 2000, rather than the Gramm-Leach-Bliley  (GLB-wouldn’t it have been funny if there had been a fourth co-sponsor with a name starting with “T”?) of 1999, which repealed G-S.  Commercial banks and investment banks both did OTC derivatives before GLB, and would likely continue to do them under Son of Glass-Steagall.  What’s more, they are constrained-over-constrained, IMO-by Frank-n-Dodd.

Zingales continues in a rather bizarre vein:

To function properly markets need a large number of independent traders. The separation between commercial and investment banking deprived investment banks of access to cheap funds (in the form of deposits), forcing them to limit their size and the size of their bets. These limitations increased the number of market participants, making markets more liquid. With the repeal of Glass-Steagall, investment banks exploded in size and so did their market power. As a result, the new financial instruments (such as credit default swaps) developed in an opaque over-the-counter market populated by a few powerful dealers, rather than in a well regulated and transparent public market.

But the IBs that got into trouble (Bear, Lehman, Merrill, Morgan Stanley) never had access to deposits post-GLB.  Not before, not after.  So the cause-effect link between the repeal of G-S and the explosion in size of IBs that Zingales posits (resulting from the the access to deposit funding for IBs inside CBs) never happened.

No one knows the exact cause (global imbalances, Fed looseness), but the financial system was flooded with funding liquidity in the 2000s.  That is what permitted the IBs to lever up and risk up, not a sudden access to insured deposits.

And by objective measures, markets were more liquid-substantially so-post-G-S.  Spreads were smaller.  Volumes were bigger.  The number of participants was larger: hedge funds proliferated, for instance.  Really, I don’t think anybody noticed the markets getting less liquid post-G-S.  If anything, the concern was that there was too much liquidity, too much trading.

And insofar as CDS are concerned, it is hard to believe that G-S would have (a) prevented the creation of these instruments, or (b) resulted in them being traded by something other than big dealer institutions.  Again, note that stand-alone IBs were major dealers in these instruments, and that they were first developed by a commercial bank (JP Morgan) prior to 1999.  In many respects, the disintermediation of banks by capital markets, a process that started and became quite pronounced under the G-S separation led banks into other, non-lending forms of intermediation.

I would also emphasize that there are intense economies of scale in responding to expansive regulation like Dodd-Frank, meaning that regulation can contribute strongly to consolidation in finance, with its consequent effects on competition, the number of market participants, and systemic risks.

Zingales’s history, in other words, isn’t history at all.

There’s another point here.  If G-S was that important, why didn’t its repeal lead to dramatic changes in market structure, with the demise of stand-alone IBs and the dominance of integrated, full-service universal banks with access to insured deposit funding?  Zingales’s narrative is inherently contradictory: he focuses on the metastasization of IBs post-GLB, but if you believe his story, the repeal should have caused IBs to shrink or die or get absorbed by commercial banks or turn themselves into universal banks funded substantially by deposits.  None of that happened.   Indeed, there were numerous studies in the mid-2000s, notably by the Fed, the Senate Banking Committee, and the St. Louis Fed that all concluded that GLB’s G-S repeal had very limited effects on the structure of US financial markets: most of the major changes in market structure had occurred in the 1975-1998 period.

It is also worth mentioning that the universal bank model that Glass-Steagall eliminated developed in a world without deposit insurance.  Indeed, Glass-Steagall created deposit insurance, which means that at least then implicit subsidies in deposit insurance couldn’t have caused the combination of investment and commercial banking.  Why should we believe that deposit insurance would cause such an integration today?  Especially in light of the fact that the elimination of G-S boundaries did not result in the absorption of investment banking into commercial banks.  Given the role that deposit insurance plays in Zingales’s narrative, this is a major problem for it.

Zingales also claims that the financial system was more resilient under G-S, and points to the contrast between the ’87 Crash (which was not followed by a financial crisis) and the ’08 debacle (which was) as an illustration.   I really don’t see any connection between G-S and how the broader financial markets fared post-Black Monday.  Zingales notes that commercial banks didn’t have problems post-Crash.  Well, investment banks didn’t either, for the most part.  The main difference is that in ’87, most equities were held by real money investors, not financial institutions: ditto the Dot Com crash.

In contrast, in ’07-08, the mortgages that cratered were held primarily by highly leveraged financial institutions-commercial and investment banks; many of these were destined to go to real money investors, but banks and investment banks were caught with them before they could securitize them and market them to real money.  Today, in Europe, sovereign debt is held mainly by leveraged financial institutions.  Banks today don’t hold huge amounts of equities, and an ’87-type event, where the crash originated in the equity market would probably have a similar result today.  The equity crash in ’08 was a response to the crash that was occurring in mortgages.  The events are very different.

And it is quite plausible that these two events were the direct result of regulations, notably the very favorable capital treatment of mortgages and MBS (especially those transformed into AAA securities despite the quality of the underlying collateral) and sovereign debt.

Luigi’s last point is that a divided financial industry is less effective in exerting political influence because commercial banks, investment banks, and insurers have divergent interests.  But again, commercial banks, investment banks, and insurers existed post-GLB.  There was not a wholesale shift to universal banking in the US.  Certainly this could have happened, post-GLB, but it didn’t.  The greatest impetus to consolidation was the crisis itself, when IBs either blew up or were absorbed into commecial banks.  Thus, again, the structural change that could have happened under G-S didn’t happen to that great an extent, meaning that the political economy didn’t change that much either.

Moreover, to the extent that the activities of financial institutions are siloed, as under G-S, they are not competing with one another in the marketplace.  This also limits their need to compete with one another in obtaining favorable legislation or regulation.  Each can focus its efforts on obtaining favorable laws and regulations pertaining to its silo.  Commercial banks focus on favorable rules for commercial banking activities; insurers focus on favorable rules for insurance; investment banks on favorable rules for broker-dealer and securities underwriting.  There is no Galbraithian “countervailing power” mechanism operating that pits investment banks against commercial banks when they are functionally separated a la G-S, because the very separation of these activities means that the firms in one segment are not competing for rents against firms in the other segment.

In brief, it appears that Luigi is aiming his argument at a world that could have arisen after the repeal of Glass-Steagall.  A world in which there was a decisive move to universal banking in the US, resulting in the disappearance of stand-alone investment banks.  Some certainly predicted that outcome in 1999, but it didn’t occur.  There were some changes in market structure, but only modest ones.  It is passing strange that Zingales attributes the growth in investment banks to a law that, under the most straightforward interpretation of his argument, should have led to their demise.  Most importantly, the mechanism that Zingales posits-the availability of cheap insured deposits to fund risk taking by investment banks-didn’t work that way in practice.  Risk taking was funded through the wholesale markets which were awash in money.  That was the vulnerability of the system.

Zingales’s history about the evolution of equity markets, OTC derivatives markets generally, and CDS markets in particular, is also suspect.

So when reading this article, a Mark Twain quote came to mind: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Global regulators are lumbering towards announcing proposals on the margining of non-cleared swaps, though they will miss the original G-20 deadlines:

Global regulators said on Wednesday they will issue proposals in coming weeks on rules to encourage banks to put derivative trades through a central clearing house, but they won’t be ready for the G20 summit in June.

. . . .

The FSB said it will issue a consultation paper on setting globally agreed margin rules for trades that are cleared directly between two parties rather than through a central clearing house.

“Momentum on OTC derivatives has accelerated in recent months,” FSB Chairman Mark Carney said at a news conference in Hong Kong.

The FSB is expected to push for a minimum margin that banks must post on derivatives trades that aren’t processed through a central clearing house. The aim is to provide an incentive for trades to be centrally cleared, or at least ensure there is a lower risk of an uncleared trade running into difficulties.

Here we go again.  Regulators believe they know how to determine the risks of transactions, and price those risks.

This of course worked out so well with Basel II, which deemed that mortgage loans and mortgage backed securities and sovereign debt were low risk and provided incentives for financial institutions to invest in them.

How’s that working out?

The clearing proposals in particular are frightening for at least two reasons.  First, they are predicated on the view that clearing necessarily mitigates systemic risk, a highly misguided view as I’ve pointed out here for years. Second, and relatedly, the very policy of attempting to encourage the movement of transactions to CCPs will tend to increase the riskiness of CCPs by leading them to clear products that are not well-suited to clearing, thereby increasing the riskiness of CCPs.  And because these CCPs are systemically important, this creates systemic risks.

It is also interesting to note that this one regulatory effort my be undermined by another one.  The New! Improved! Basel Rules will set capital requirements for exposures to CCPs.  The prevailing belief is that this will result in low risk weights (2 percent) on exposures to CCPs.  But an analysis by JP Morgan suggests that actual risk weights are likely to be far higher:

New capital rules outlined under Basel III are designed to incentivise the use of a CCP by levying a relatively small 2% risk weight against a bank’s exposure to a clearing house. This charge is much lower than the punitive charges proposed against traditional bilateral non-cleared trades and is designed to make clearing more financially attractive.

However, in-depth research by JP Morgan analyst Kian Abouhossein and his European banks team has cast doubt on this presumption. Taking a hypothetical clearing house that is only 45% funded against its theoretical capital requirements, they argue that the move towards central clearing could in fact prove far more costly under the new rules than initially thought.

This is because the new Basel III rules are expected to require a higher risk weight for exposure to central counterparties that may be regarded as underfunded; the rules will also levy a higher charge depending on whether the ultimate counterparties to the trade are clearing members, or clients of clearing members. Banks that clear trades on behalf of clients will also be required to take credit valuation adjustment charges against those clients which represent a measure of potential loss in the event that client counterparty goes bust.

In summary, JP Morgan finds therefore that the proposed floor 2% risk weight can only be attained under specific circumstances. In reality, the bank argues, the real risk weighting could shoot up dramatically.

So on the one hand, global regulators are trying to encourage the movement of trades to CCPs, but other global regulators are devising rules that will (unintentionally) make CCP exposures extremely expensive.

I am sure this process of setting prices for counterparty risk will turn out just swell, and lead to an efficient allocation of  these risks.

All these various efforts to regulate margins and capital weighting for counterparty exposures are a species of centralized price control.  All such schemes are doomed to failure.  Doomed.  The regulators lack the information to determine the right prices, and are in fact at an information disadvantage relative to private actors, so these schemes inevitably result in substantial losses arising from adverse selection problems.  Moreover, it is grimly ironic that these schemes are touted as a means of reducing systemic risk, when in fact they are far more likely to create systemic risks.  As I’ve noted repeatedly (and as others, such as Roberta Romano have also pointed out), these regulated pricing schemes tend to encourage everyone to load up on the same risks, and it is these correlated risk exposures that create systemic risk.

These global Sorcerer’s Apprentices believe that they are preventing the next crisis.  It is more likely that they are casting the spell that will bring it about.

As I’ve written before, there is good HFT and there is bad HFT.  The crucial policy choice is how to encourage the former and discourage the latter.

As I’ve also written extensively, going back to the very first days of the blog, many of the problems with electronic trading are best addressed by exchange pricing policies.  In particular, to the extent that abusive trading strategies involve distinctive patterns in orders and cancellations, exchanges can devise pricing structures that make it costly, and perhaps prohibitively so, to utilize these strategies.  Exchanges can also implement pricing strategies that encourage beneficial HFT strategies that increase market liquidity.  Although it would be stretching it to say that exchanges internalize all of the costs and benefits associated with deterring abusive and promoting constructive HFT strategies, they certainly have a far more powerful incentive to get it right, and far better information and knowledge, than does a regulator.

Exchanges around the world, and in different asset/instrument classes, are indeed responding to development.  The latest is the Oslo Bors:

Oslo Bors will issue punitive charges to traders if they send too many orders into the exchange that do not result in deals being done, as the industry seeks to crack down on the practice of “quote stuffing”.

. . . .

Bente Landsnes, chief executive of Oslo Bors, said: “A market participant does not incur any costs by inputting a disproportionately high number of orders to the order book, but this type of activity does cause indirect costs that the whole market has to bear.

“The measure we are announcing will help to reduce unnecessary order activity that does not contribute to improving market quality. This will make the market more efficient, to the benefit of all its participants.”

Oslo Bors’s action is just another example of organizational and strategic innovation in response to a technological shock.  With many exchanges introducing such strategies, they will learn from each other’s experiences, and use this knowledge to refine their strategies.

The demands for regulatory actions against HFT will no doubt continue despite the actions of exchanges to price utilization of their systems in ways that promotes liquidity and deters abuse.  This is because, as is almost inevitably the case with regulation, many of the demands for intervention are self-interested efforts to hamper more efficient competitors.  HFT has undercut many traditional liquidity suppliers, and made their skills obsolete.  As surely as day follows night, and as reliably as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, this process of creative destruction is leading those on the destroyed end of the process to importune governments to hamstring those on the creative end.

And spare me the nostalgia for the old floor days.  There was a lot of corner cutting-and worse-on the floor, and many abusive HFT strategies have clear parallels in abusive strategies that were used by floor traders.

In a very ironic twist, this debate brings to mind two conversations, held more than ten years apart, with a legendary trader.  In the circa 2000 conversation, he welcomed the advent of electronic trading because he believed that electronic trading leveled the playing field.  He said he was tired of “getting raped by the floor.”  In the circa 2011 conversation, he lamented the rise of HFT, because he couldn’t make money in the new electronic age.

That’s creative destruction at work.  Yes, the innovations are not always-in fact, never-entirely beneficial.  But remember that these innovations destroy incumbents, and are especially effective at doing so when they result in substantial efficiency gains. Thus, the innovations that reduce costs most often generate the greatest hostility-and hence the most insistent demands for regulation by those the innovation displaces.

Since the innovations often do have some negative consequences or uses, those crying for regulatory intervention often have examples to bolster their case. But as the actions of Oslo Bors and other exchanges illustrate, market participants have an incentive to devise means that mitigate and perhaps eliminate the negative effects of the innovation.  Market participants also have legal recourse to attack others.  The proper scope for prescriptive regulation is limited to those effects that market and legal responses to the innovation cannot address.  And even then, it is imperative to be circumspect about regulatory responses, given the susceptibility of regulators and legislators to self-interested efforts to hamper competition and more efficient competitors.

Dogs chase cars.  Investors chase yields.  Especially in low yield environments.  And the consequences of “succeeding” in the chase is often the same for dogs and investors: they get crushed.

Many financial disasters occur in low yield environments, as investors despairing of finding the kinds of returns they expect in low risk instruments, pile into higher risk ones-especially ones with a lot of embedded short options.  Orange County and Gibson Greetings are two examples from the early-to-mid-1990s.

And we may be seeing a similar phenomenon in the Morgan loss.  Many big banks are swimming in deposits, and looking for places to invest the money.  That’s what Morgan’s CIO was doing:

The unit made a deliberate move out of safer assets such as US Treasuries in 2009 in an effort to increase returns and diversify investments. The CIO’s “non-vanilla” portfolio is now over $150bn in size.

Moreover, this is apparently an issue with all major banks (though you might want to take this statement with a grain of salt, coming as it does from Dimon, who, er, has something of a stake in the matter):

JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said on a conference call with analysts on May 10 after announcing the loss that all banks have “these fairly large portfolios” that invest excess cash. Dimon had encouraged the unit to boost earnings by buying higher-yielding assets, including structured credit, equities and derivatives, ex-employees said in April.

But have no fear! The Fed is studying the problem:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s $2 billion trading loss has prompted the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to examine how banks in its district are managing cash after receiving a flood of deposits since the credit crisis, according to a person familiar with the matter.

New York-based JPMorgan’s trading loss, announced last week, occurred in its chief investment office, which oversees about $360 billion, the difference between deposits and what the bank lends. The New York Fed is reviewing the structure of investment units and similar businesses at other banks it regulates, said the person, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and declined to be identified.

This pegs the irony meter.  Hell, it breaks it.  This problem is a consequence-unintended, surely, but still a consequence-of deliberate Fed policy to flood the market with liquidity.  You can defend that policy, but the Fed has to live with the reality that yield chasing is the inevitable consequence of ZIRP.  Indeed, it has long wanted to rejuvenate the mortgage and securitization markets, and that necessarily entails risk. The Fed appears to be doing its best Captain Renault impersonation here, expressing Shock! that banks are taking on risk in a low interest rate environment deliberately created by the Fed.

So, one wonders if in its “study”, the Fed will realize that the underlying fault is not in the banks, but in itself.

Yesterday’s news was dominated by the Facebook IPO.  I don’t have much to say about Facebook qua Facebook or IPOs: not my area.  I will just say that it is hard to justify the valuation.  The only rationalization I could provide is that the $100 billion plus market cap is the premium on the option to monetize its huge base of users.  I say option, because its clear that the existing sources of revenues can’t support the stratospheric evaluation.  There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty about the ability to devise such a monetization strategy, and that can support some high option-driven valuation-but $100+ billion?  I’m skeptical.  (And if there are doubts about the ability to monetize Facebook’s user base, what does one even say about Twitter?)

I will comment on companies associated with the IPO that are closer to my comfort zone: NASDAQ and the underwriters, specifically Morgan Stanley.

The IPO was beset by technical hitches, with a delayed opening, difficulties in handing the avalanche of orders in the opening process, and a consequent delay in sending out trade confirmations-something that is guaranteed to generate extreme angst among those trading the stock.

The post-open trading was also chaotic, with crossed and locked markets.

This suggests that despite its extraordinary efforts to prepare, NASDAQ had insufficient capacity to handle the huge interest in Facebook.  This, in turn, harkens back to an issue that was the subject of the first SWP post, almost 6.5 years ago: exchange capacity and capacity outages.  I seriously doubt it would be efficient for NASDAQ to invest in sufficient capacity to handle such an extreme case without any hitches.  That is, in an efficiently scaled system, there should be occasions when capacity is maxed out. It doesn’t make sense to build capacity to handle all contingencies.

The benefit from investing in the additional capacity to handle the FB IPO would redound almost exclusively to FB and those who wanted to participate in the IPO opening.  It doesn’t make any commercial sense for NASDAQ to pay for that.  The investment is pretty much specific to FB, so if it wanted the additional capacity, it should have paid for it.

This raises another issue that I’ve discussed from time to time, although in a slightly different context: the pricing of exchange services.  What should NASDAQ have charged to handle the IPO, and what price would FB have been willing to pay to reduce the likelihood of SNAFUs?  This raises some interesting industrial organization issues as well, as in this context it involves the arms-length negotiation of a specific investment.  Integration is often the efficient response to such a situation, but that appears problematic to me in this context.

Insofar as the secondary market trading is concerned, this is an example (the Flash Crash being another) of the implications of the SEC’s “information and linkages” market structure choice inherent in RegNMS.  This approach results in fragmentation and locked and crossed markets during periods of extreme market activity.

The alternative is a central limit order book, but a CLOB would likely have experienced different problems, likely similar to those experienced in the NASDAQ open, since the huge amounts of trading activity likely would have taxed and perhaps overwhelmed the CLOB’s capacity.

Again, the exceptional nature of the FB IPO would have likely stressed any market mechanism.  What happened yesterday is how the information-and-linkage approach behaves under stress-fragmentation and crossed markets.

On to Morgan Stanley.  It is evident that the underwriters-of whom MS was the leader-bought large quantities of stock to support the $38 issue price.  The exact total amount, and the amount bought by any of the underwriters, is not known, but it could represent billions of dollars.  The underwriters can’t afford to grant free puts for very long, so it is quite possible that Facebook will trade below the issue price, thereby imposing losses on the underwriters.

This experience triggered my historical reflexes, and I thought about the experience of another legendary underwriter-Jay Cooke. There are some superficial similarities between Cooke and MS.  I don’t take them too seriously, but one can hear echoes.

Cooke was the lead underwriter of another innovative entity with a dicey revenue model: the Northern Pacific Railway, of which Cornelius Vanderbilt said “you can’t build a railroad from nowhere to nowhere.” Jay Cooke & Company underwrote sales of the railroad’s bonds, and ended up taking ownership of large quantities of them, in anticipation of selling them-and selling them particularly to Europe.  But it proved unable to market the bonds, due in large part to economic shocks emanating from Europe: there were several bank failures in Europe in Vienna that spread to other European countries.  Moreover, there was a monetary shock emanating in Germany-namely, that country’s decision to cease minting silver coins-that had averse consequences for the US. Furthermore, Germany demanded a large reparation from France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, which was also financially destabilizing.

Once Cooke & Company’s depositors became concerned about the company’s inability to market the bonds, a run commenced, and the firm suspended and went into bankruptcy. This sparked a broader financial panic in the US-the Panic of 1873.

So, in both 1873 and 2012 a big investment bank takes a large position in a company with a highly speculative revenue model, against the background of financial crisis in Europe.

We saw what happened in 1873.  We will see what will happen in 2012.  Almost certainly the outcomes will be quite different, because even if MS took a multi-billion dollar stake in Facebook, this is not a bet-the-company investment in the way that Cooke’s foray into the NPRR was.  It may cause some discomfort for MS and its shareholders, but likely nothing more than that.

And of course, the biggest difference between 1873 and 2012 is that there was no Fed in 1873. Again, I do not consider it at all likely that Morgan Stanley would be mortally harmed even if Facebook stock falls well below $38, but if it were the post-Lehman-we’re-not-going-to-let-that-happen-again-Fed would no doubt ride to the rescue, raising the question: would it take Facebook shares as collateral?

This seems like a highly speculative question, and perhaps even an idle one, but in these times one cannot rule out anything, no matter how fantastical it appears.

Addendum: The most likely reason why the Fed would be taking FB shares as collateral is if Europe well and truly implodes, and threatens to take down US institutions along with it.  The risk of a FB position alone is not great.

The Morgan trade that has roiled the bank, and arguably more important, the politics of banking, is coming into clearer focus.

What transpired appears to be a classic collection of trading and hedging SNAFUs.  There are two different issues that should be distinguished.  The first is the motive for the trade, the second is its structure.  The underlying motive makes sense at an abstract level, but the structure was FUBARed.  But once the structural issues are considered, one must seriously consider whether the motive, however attractive in the abstract, is at all feasible, especially for a behemoth like Morgan.

Morgan was apparently looking for a systemic risk hedge, something that would protect its huge exposure to corporate default risk against a Eurocrisis, a dramatic weakening of the US economy, etc. In the abstract, this is a laudable goal.  In the abstract.

Given this objective, it put on a trade in tranches of the IG.9 credit index.  These tranches are very sensitive to credit conditions.  What’s more, their valuation and risk are highly dependent on correlations.

Crucially, given the sensitivity of the tranches to credit conditions, to maintain the desired hedge Morgan had to dynamically manage the position.  It managed the risk by selling protection on the IG.9 index.  Crucially, the structure of the position required Morgan to sell protection as credit rallied.

And credit indeed rallied, due to the ECB’s aggressive actions at the end of 2011.  So Morgan had to go into the market big time, and sell more and more protection.

By doing so, it ran into all the curses that beset dynamic hedges, especially somewhat dirty ones in which what is being hedged (the tranches) and the instrument being used to hedge them (the index) have different sensitivities to parameters-correlations, in this instance-that are themselves moving randomly, and moving a lot.

The hedging instrument was relatively illiquid, meaning that it was prohibitively costly to adjust the hedge in response to every move in the relevant prices and parameters.  But given the structure of the position, failure to adjust continuously gives rise to hedging errors that work against the position. Its value was also buffeted by changes in the crucial parameters.

Moreover, Morgan’s very size worked against it.  Dynamic hedges chase the market: you are buying when prices rise and selling when prices fall.  This is how you pay for the hedge.  But when for a bank as big as Morgan, its hedging trades exacerbated the adverse price movements.  This made the hedge far more costly than a standard model, which presumes that prices move exogenously and are not affected by the trades of the hedgers, would predict.  Morgan’s price impact was revealed by the divergence (“the skew”) between the price of the index and the prices of the underlying credits.

Morgan found itself trying to navigate between the Sybil Scylla of holding an unbalanced position that subjected the bank to market risk (in movements in the index as well as to movements in the crucial parameters) and the Charybdis of massive transactions costs inherent in trading in relatively illiquid markets in immense size.  And in its attempt to navigate that divide, it apparently was bashed by both monsters.

Moreover, once it was in the position, there was-is-no obvious way out, especially given the fact that now everyone and his extended family is aware of Morgan’s predicament.

Looking at all this reminds me of the portfolio insurance debacle on Black Monday, 1987, when dynamic hedging strategies blew up spectacularly.  Morgan has been a one bank portfolio insurance wrecking ball.  A poster child for what can go wrong with dynamic hedges that make sense in a frictionless, complete markets, BSM world, but which can go horribly, horribly wrong in messy reality, where markets are incomplete and illiquid.

Indeed, all of the potential problems with dynamic hedges were/are present in spades for this particular transaction.  Most notably, dynamic hedges are major liquidity users.  Morgan was trading in relatively illiquid products.  Moreover, the risk that Morgan was hedging against was also correlated with liquidity, which is a wrong way risk from hell (which portfolio insurers also found out to their dismay in ’87).  The position was also highly sensitive to parameters-correlations that are (a) hard to estimate accurately, and (b) quite volatile, especially in the very conditions that Morgan was purportedly hedging against.  Furthermore, all of these problems were exacerbated to an extreme extent by the size of the positions and the trades.

A couple of broader points deserve comment.

First, this episode indicates that there is a source of scale diseconomies in banking.  You can be too big for your own good-and your own safety.  So what is to be done about that?  Of course the immediate response-as predicted here-is to pile on more regulations, something that the administration is pursuing furiously, in its tried-and-true let-no-crisis -go-to waste fashion.  But the market imposes its own discipline.  Morgan’s stock price has fallen substantially, its credit rating has been cut, and its financing costs have risen.  These all limit the bank’s ability to grow further, and indeed will likely lead to some contraction in its size. Moreover, the demonstration effect will lead the markets to evaluate the costs of size across financial institutions generally, leading to adjustments in the cost of capital based on updated information about the real costs large entities incur to manage risk.

Second, although hedging against systemic risk sounds superficially attractive, Morgan’s experience, and a little reflection, suggests that the ability to do so is chimerical.  Systemic risks, by definition, affect everybody in the system.  They can’t be diversified away.  Everybody wants to shed them, so they are priced in equilibrium.  You have to pay to get rid of them.  Morgan apparently underestimated the cost of paying other market participants to take on this risk from them.  In part, this was because the need to trade dynamically in order to put on the hedge meant that there wasn’t a sticker price, paid up front, to get someone to take on the risk.  Instead, the cost was paid day after day, via the market chasing, slippage, and transactions costs associated with the trading strategy.  Like portfolio insurance, it looked cheap on the white board or the computer screen, but turned out far more expensive in reality.

This is particularly true for a big, systemically important institution that has to trade in large size to implement such a strategy.  This size magnified all of the pitfalls of dynamic hedging.

In essence, Morgan put on the trade because it wanted to shrink its exposure to certain risks.  It did so by implementing a dynamic trading strategy, which turned out to be a very costly way of doing that.

So how can big banks shrink their risk exposures, if not via dynamic derivatives trading strategies? By getting smaller.  By shrinking their balance sheets.  The market price responses to Morgan’s revelations are likely to lead to that very result, not just for Morgan, but for other big banks as well.  Just as portfolio insurance implemented by dynamic trading shrunk significantly once its true costs were realized, the same thing is likely to happen here.

Attempting to regulate bank activities via Talmudic-and often nonsensical-distinctions between “hedging” and “prop” trades is a fool’s errand.  Hedges can go horribly wrong.  Moreover, quite perversely, regulatory burdens actually tend to create compliance overhead costs that tend to encourage size; the advantage that big institutions have influencing regulators accentuates this effect.  Some combination of capital requirements (with devilish details) and market discipline is a better way to control bank size.

Which means that there is a positive externality to Morgan’s struggles.  Its travails demonstrate vividly the costs of size.  Morgan apparently underestimated the cost of managing risk exposure, and its big loss not only is making it aware of the true cost, but is educating the market as well.  This will affect the cost of capital not just for Morgan, but for all banks, and in a way that will impose a cost on size and complexity.  It is unlikely that this higher private cost will reflect completely the social costs of size, but it is certainly to be welcomed.

The J.P. Morgan situation continues to metastasize.  As I suggested in my first post, its biggest effect is regulatory/political.  Yes, $2 billion is a lot of money, but it in no way threatens JPM in the slightest.  But the political and regulatory aftershocks are massive. This has changed the entire financial industry regulatory/political dynamic.

The contention focuses on the Volcker Rule, and in particular the “portfolio hedging” exemption. Look.  Financial institutions are portfolios of assets and liabilities.  From a systemic risk perspective, you care about the probability that the value of a big bank’s portfolio of assets will fall below the value of its liabilities-or that funders fear that it might, and hence refuse to rollover the firm’s debt, leading to a liquidity crisis.  What you should care about is the risk of the portfolio.

Derivatives trades are typically the most efficient and rapid way to adjust that portfolio risk up or down.  To evaluate a particular derivatives trade, you have to evaluate its effect on the risk of the entire portfolio.  It makes no sense to evaluate a derivatives trade as a “hedge” solely by pairing it up against another individual transaction.  This is particularly the case when you are talking about macro risks, like broad conditions that affect creditworthiness of entire continents.  Why wouldn’t you hedge macro risks with macro hedges?

So the questions become: How do you evaluate the effect of a trade on the risk of a portfolio? Does the return justify any additional risk (for risk minimization is decidedly not the appropriate objective function)? Can regulators evaluate the risk better than financial institutions themselves?

And there’s the rub. Morgan’s story is thats new risk measurement model deemed the trade as risk reducing.  But the trade didn’t perform as the model said it should.  So Morgan went back to the old model, which showed it to be far riskier than the new model.  Under this interpretation, risk was assumed unintentionally, due to incorrect modeling.  That’s quite a different thing from a speculative punt.

There are many ways that could have occurred, some of which reflect discreditably on Morgan, others not.  My guess is that the new model was seriously wrong about correlations.  These are devilish hard to get right generally, and in credit particularly.  Moreover, any VaR-type model almost always fails to capture properly the effect of position size on risk.  These models take price processes as exogenous, but if you are big enough that’s not true.  The big trader’s actions can themselves cause the model to give wildly misleading results.  Any risk model has flaws, but these flaws are less severe for price takers than price makers.

And as for alternatives to VaR, such as conditional expected loss measures, please.  They are just different ways of representing the same underlying information, and rely on the same assumptions. I guarantee that if Morgan’s VaR-esque new model underestimated risk, any other metric, such as conditional expected loss, would have done so too if it was based on the same underlying distributional assumptions and parameter estimates. Indeed, some of these estimates are more sensitive to distributional assumptions than VaR, because they depend on modeling of behavior of the tails.  They tend to go further beyond the available data than VaR models.

And could a regulator do any better? Yeah.  Right.  Get serious.

Can simple rules, such as “any trading position must be shown to reduce a specific transactional risk” uniformly lead to better results?   Not, in my opinion, when you are talking about complex financial institutions with diverse portfolios.  Indeed, although trades characterized as “portfolio hedges” can be used for “speculative” purposes (though again speculative trades can be justified if the return is sufficiently large), constraining the ability to manage risk can lead to riskier and less profitable banks, rather than safer ones.

In brief, the “hedge vs. speculation” distinction is simplistic. As a result, things like the Volcker Rule, which are predicated on that (and related) concepts, are not going to reduce systemic risk, and are in fact likely to increase it.

Jamie Dimon of course attacked the Volcker Rule vociferously.  Which is why the big loss is such a political issue.

Dimon is personally in a very bad spot.  Very bad.  He has already executed the vertical chop: those involved in the trade 3 levels down the org chart have resigned or been fired.  The fate of the entire London office is up in the air.

Dimon is between the devil and the deep blue sea.  If he admits that he had hands on involvement, he is directly culpable-and if his subordinates must go, why shouldn’t he?  Conversely, a claim of ignorance is hardly creditable to him.  But it is probably the best of the two alternatives, and it seems to be the one he is taking.

Along these lines, Dimon said something quite stunning on Sunday (h/t R):

He said he didn’t know if his firm broke any laws or U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule.

He didn’t know whether laws had been broken. A clear confession that he doesn’t really know what went on in London-or is pretending not to know.  Knowing what went on exactly in London is hard: knowing whether a crime was committed should be easier than that.

This is not a good position for a CEO to be in, especially one like like Dimon.  Given the intense scrutiny that he and Morgan will face, and the frenzied political environment in an election year, and the Occupy insanity, he is in a very vulnerable position.

There is little new to report on the multi-billion JPM loss.  The big question is what position JPM has remaining, what it plans to do with it.  The bank probably has the staying power to hold on for awhile, and can avoid dumping it on the market a la Amaranth/Brian Hunter or LTCM.  But as Jamie Dimon admitted yesterday, this will expose the bank to considerable volatility going forward.

The exact transaction/transactions at issue is/are unknown, so it is impossible to make a definitive evaluation.  What is known does permit some conclusions, however.

The first is that whatever the position is, it is big.  And size is often a liability.  The bigger the position, the bigger a liability it becomes.  Market judo uses your size against you.  For if things don’t go your way, it is hard to exit a big position, and even attempting to do so can exacerbate your losses.

Reading this, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry (h/t R):

Senior traders and dealers described Iksil as a “bright guy”, who was faithfully executing strategies demanded by the bank’s risk management model but who may have simply misjudged the amount of liquidity in the markets.

How many traders could have this as their epitaph: “He Simply Misjudged the Amount of Liquidity in the Markets”?

You can just imagine the Wily Coyote moment. You try to get out of a position and find out you have just run over the cliff and there is nothing to catch your fall, as liquidity disappears from beneath your feet just when you need it.

A couple of other points.

First, there is a lot of pixels being strewn about as to whether the Morgan trade was a prop trade or a hedge, and how this relates to the Volcker Rule.  Well, that’s a big part of the problem.  There is no hard and fast line.  As Holbrook Working pointed out long ago, what is conventionally called hedging is really speculation on the basis.  And if your basis position is big enough, and the basis is volatile enough, you can lose a lot of money.

The first member of the billion dollar club-Metallgesellschaft-was allegedly hedging.  It wasn’t doing basis trades, per se, but had a huge calendar spread position. Ditto Amaranth. LTCM’s “convergence trades” (that became divergence trades) were essentially basis trades that could be characterized as hedges.

It’s all about size and capital and correlation and volatility.  The right (or should I say wrong) combination of those factors-and particular a good dose of sh*t happens-can create a lot of risk, and result in big losses.

This is why much of the discussion of the Volcker Rule is quite beside the point.

Second, there is the question of when things went pear shaped, and when Jamie Dimon knew they were going pear shaped. He was very contrite about, and critical of, the trade yesterday.  He vigorously defended it in April.  If he got the bad news sometime between the defense and the criticism it’s one thing.  If he defended the trade in April knowing that it was already losing, or was substantially riskier than he let on, and that the firm was looking for the exits, it’s quite another.

If it was the latter, you can imagine his dilemma. If he failed to defend the trade vigorously, it would have no doubt resulted in a self-fulfilling disaster, as everyone would have anticipated the impending unloading of the position and traded against it.  But if in defending the trade he made misleading or knowingly inaccurate statements, he would face serious legal problems.

Again, right now there are only questions.  But no doubt there will be intense scrutiny that will lead to many uncomfortable political and legal moments for Dimon, and for JP Morgan as a whole.