Regulation Confronts Reality In the Commodity Markets. Reality Is Losing.
Following the commodities markets today was like drinking from a fire hose. Many big stories, with “up” and “down” being the operative words. Alcoa split up. Shell announcing that it was giving up on its Arctic plans after its controversial test well failed to find commercially viable reserves. Oil price down around 3 percent, etc.
But the biggest news items were Glencore’s continuing downward spiral, and ESMA’s release of its technical recommendations for application of MiFID to non-financial firms, including commodity firms.
Glencore’s stock was down hard at the open, and at one point was down 31 percent. It’s CDS are now trading up-front (always a bad sign), and the spread widened from an already big 550 bp to 757 bp. At conventional recovery rates, this gives a (risk neutralized) probability of default of better than 50 percent. The Biggest Loser was Glencore’s CEO, Ivan Glasenberg, AKA, Ex-Glencore Billionaire.
The CDS are now trading wider than when Glencore had it s last near-death experience at the height of the financial crisis. Arguably the firm’s situation is worse now. It cannot attribute its woes to stressed financial market conditions generally, in which pretty much everyone saw spreads blow out to one degree or another. This is unique to it and the mining sector. It is a verdict on the firm/sector.
Moreover, in 2008 the firm was private, and Glasenberg and the other owners were able to stanch the bleeding by injecting additional capital into the firm. The ominous thing for Ivan et al now is that they tried that again a couple of weeks ago (along with announcing other measures to reduce debt and conserve cash) and it only bought a temporary respite before the blood started gushing again.
Moreover-and this is crucial-Glencore 2015 is a very different creature than Glencore 2008. It was more of a pure trader then: it is a mining firm with a big trading arm now. This means that its exposure to flat prices (of coal and copper in particular) is much bigger now. In fact, most commodity firms saw little drop off in profits in 2008-2009, and several saw profits increase. The fundamentals facing trading firms in 2008-2009 were not nearly as bad as the fundamentals facing mining firms today. That’s because their flat price exposures weren’t large, and margins and volumes (which drive trading profits) are not as sensitive to macro conditions as flat prices. Given the lack of any prospects for a rebound in flat prices, Glencore’s prospects for a recovery are muted.
Some tout Glasenberg et al’s trading acumen. But it is one thing to be able to sniff out arbs/relative mispricings and structure clever trades to exploit them. (Or to hold one’s nose while doing deals with dodgy regimes around the world.) It is something altogether different to predict where prices are going to go. Glencore made a bet on China, and now that bet is not looking good. At all.
In a nutshell, this is pretty much out of Glencore’s hands. It is along for the ride.
The irony here is that Glasenberg sold the Xstrata merger and the new business model as a way of using the less cyclical profitability of the trading venture as a way of dampening the cyclicality of the mining operation. As it is developing, an extremely adverse cyclical downturn in the mining operation is impairing the viability of the trading operation. How the trading operation can flourish within a financially distressed corporation is an open question. Maybe the company will have to pull an Alcoa, and separate the trading from the mining operations, to keep the latter from dragging down the former.
A key takeaway here relates to the other story I mentioned: ESMA’s release of its recommendations regarding the application of MiFID to non-financials. The objective is to mitigate systemic risk. I was always skeptical that commodity traders posed any such risk (and have been making that argument for 3+ years), and so far the Glencore meltdown is supporting that skepticism. There has been no evidence of spillovers/contagion from Glencore to financial institutions, or to the broader market, a la Lehman.
But ESMA has proposed Technical Standards that would impose the full panoply of CRD-IV capital requirements on commodity traders (and other non-financial firms) that cannot avail themselves of an exemption (on which I will say more momentarily).
- If firms cannot make use of an exemption under MiFID II, capital requirements under the new banking regulatory framework will apply to them. This new framework consists of Regulation EU No 575/2013 (CRR) and Directive 2013/36/EU (CRD IV), repealing Directives 2006/48/EC and 2006/49/EC. While CRD IV is addressed to CAs and includes, inter alia, qualitative provisions on the Internal Capital Adequacy Assessment Process (ICAAP) and the Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process (SREP), the new CRR imposes quantitative requirements and disclosure obligations pursuant to Basel III recommendations on credit institutions and investment firms, including own funds definition, minimum own funds requirements and liquidity requirements. However, under Article 498(1) of CRR, some commodity dealers falling within the scope of MiFID are transitionally exempt from the CRR’s provisions on own funds requirements until 31 December 2017 at the latest, if their main business consists exclusively of providing investment services or activities relating to commodity derivatives.
- Moreover, firms falling within the scope of MiFID II will be considered to be financial counterparties rather than non-financial counterparties under Article 2(8) of EMIR. Therefore, they will not be able to benefit from the clearing thresholds or the hedging exemption available to the latter under Article 10 of EMIR. An additional consequence of being classified as a financial counterparty will be that the trading obligation (i.e. the obligation to trade derivatives which are subject to the clearing obligation and sufficiently liquid on trading venues only, cf. Article 28 of MiFIR) would apply in full without being subject to a threshold.
So, even if you aren’t a bank, you will be treated like a bank, unless you can get the exemption. Apropos what I said the other day about impoverished carpenters, hammers, nails, etc.
To get an exemption, a firm’s non-hedging derivatives business must fall below a particular threshold amount, e.g., 3 percent of the oil market, 4 percent of the metals market. ESMA recommends that hedges be determined using EMIR criteria. The big problem with this is that only months ago ESMA itself recognized that the EMIR framework is unworkable:
- It appears that the complex mechanism introduced by EMIR for the NFC+ [Non-Financial Company Plus] classification has so far led to significant difficulties in the identification, monitoring and, as a consequence, possible supervision of these entities by their competent authorities.
- As a result, in the context of the revision of EMIR, ESMA would see some merit in the simplification of the current framework for the determination of NFC+.
- One route that the Commission may wish to explore is to move from the current two-step process (Hedging/Non Hedging and clearing threshold) to a one-step process, where counterparties would qualify as NFC+ when their outstanding positions exceeds certain thresholds per asset class, irrespective of the qualification of the trades as hedging or non-hedging. This idea is further developed in Section 4.2 which addresses the way in which NFCs qualify their transactions as hedging and non-hedging.
In other words, ESMA judged that it is impossible for regulators to distinguish firms’ hedging derivatives from its speculative ones. Given these difficulties, just a few months ago ESMA recommended jettisoning the entire mechanism that it now proposes to use to determine whether commodity firms are exempt from MiFID, and the associated capital and clearing requirements.
Makes perfect sense. In some universe.*
At the very least the ESMA plan will impose a huge compliance burden on firms who will have to justify their categorizations of derivatives positions as hedges or no. Given the complexities of risk management (e.g., managing risk on a portfolio basis means that saying what trade is a hedge is difficult, if not impossible, the rapid and frequent adjustments of positions inherent in most trading operations, etc.) this will be a nightmare.
So the good news is: You can get an exemption from capital and clearing requirments! Yay!
The bad news is: The entity proposing the exemption says that the process for getting the exemption is unworkable, and you’ll have not just a compliance headache, but a compliance migraine.
So at the very same time that the financial travails of a big commodity firm cast serious doubt on the systemic riskiness of these firms, European regulators advance regulations intended to fix this (non-existent) problem, and are doing so in a way that they themselves have cast serious doubt on.
Put differently: regulation is confronting reality in the commodity markets at this very moment, and reality is coming off second best.
* It also hardly inspires confidence that ESMA fails basic arithmetic. Note that the threshold in oil is 3 percent, then consider this from its Briefing on Non-Financial Topics: “If a firm’s speculative trading activity is less than 50% of its total trading, it may be MiFID II exempt providing its market share is less than 20% of each threshold in the market share test e.g. 0.8% for metals, 0.3% for oil etc.” Um, last time I checked .2 x 3%=0.6%, not 0.3%.
The more I think about it, the clearer it seems to me that the stupidity has a large systematic component. Yes, the rules make no sense, but they are costly and we are imposing them on the banks. Ergo, to make it up to them (banks), we’ll impose them on your competition. So, it’s fair.
Comment by Krzys — September 28, 2015 @ 8:07 pm
@Krzys-I’ve long said that government/regulation is the biggest systemic risk, because in its mania for uniformity it imposes the same stupidity on everyone.
What’s sort of interesting to me is the startup world has discovered networks. All kinds of startups are trying to put together two sided networks. The entire Bitcoin network solves the “Byzantine General Problem”. But, in our own way commodity trades already had solved those problems with things like “good to the last drop.”
As soon as massive regulators really entered the business and put their fingers in the pie, it seems things get continually worse. Maybe it’s time to go back to good to the last drop?
Comment by Jeffrey Carter (@pointsnfigures) — September 29, 2015 @ 4:52 am
To go back to an old discussion we had, the systemic risk gang is really an attempt to hobble the independant (free) the traders with the same crapola as the un-free traders in the banks, but without their ability to fund (no matter how many Chinese walls exist). It is not just reality losing, but a power grab succeeding.
Comment by Sotos — September 29, 2015 @ 9:07 am