Tag: bank capital

That’s the Whole Point

By James Kwak

The Wall Street Journal reports that the federal financial regulators may yet again carve a  loophole in the Volcker Rule. This time, the issue is whether banks subject to the rule’s proprietary trading prohibitions can hold collateralized loan obligations (CLOs)—structured products engineered out of commercial loans, just like good old collateralized debt obligations were engineered out of residential mortgage-backed securities during the last boom.

The reason to prohibit positions in CLOs obvious: it was portfolios of similarly complex, opaque, risky, and illiquid securities that torpedoed Bear Stearns, Lehman, Citigroup, and other megabanks during the financial crisis. The counterargument is one we’ve heard many times before: If banks are forced to sell their CLOs, they will have to do so at a discount, which will “have a material negative impact to our capital base,” in the words of one banker.

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The Cost of (Equity) Capital

By James Kwak

For years, the world’s largest banks have been up in arms over threats by regulators to increase their (equity) capital requirements. Making banks hold more capital, they argue, will force them to reduce lending and will increase their cost of funding, making credit more expensive throughout the economy. One of the chief defenders of the megabanks has been Josef Ackermann, CEO of Deutsche Bank until last year and also chair of the Institute of International Finance, which claimed that higher capital requirements would reduce economic output by a whopping 3.2 percent.

Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig have been tirelessly debunking the myth that higher capital levels will force banks to curtail lending and torpedo the global economy, most recently in their excellent new book, The Banker’s New Clothes. Some of the arguments against higher capital requirements are simply incoherent, like the idea that banks would be forced to set aside capital instead of lending it. (Capital is the difference between assets and liabilities, not cash that you put somewhere for safekeeping; were it not for reserve requirements, which are something else, a bank could lend out 100 percent of the money it can raise.) 

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Thomas Hoenig Read All of Basel III . . .

By James Kwak

. . . and doesn’t like what he sees. In a post for the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, the former president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank echoes some of the issues raised by Andrew Haldane, which I discussed earlier. The core problem, for Hoenig, is that Basel III “promises precision far beyond what can be achieved for a system as complex and varied as that of U.S. banking.” Banks were able to arbitrage the risk-weighted capital requirements of Basel II? Well, we’ll close all of those loopholes, one by one. But this cannot be done, given the incentives and power imbalances at work: “Directors and managers . . . will delegate the task of compliance to technical experts, and the most brazen and connected banks with the smartest experts will game the system.”

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Bipartisan Push For More Equity In Big Banks

By Simon Johnson

Proponents of the status quo in the financial sector just cannot catch a break.  Early August is supposed to be a time when regulators and markets slow down, or perhaps even take a break, but this year the news continues to be dominated by mismanagement or worse inside complex financial institutions.

It’s time for a new approach to bank capital.  As proposed by two U.S. Senators, this is not a panacea, but it would have a dramatic effect on big banks and how they operate.

Earlier this week, Standard Chartered, a large global bank (about $600 billion in total assets) based in the UK, was accused of breaking US law in its dealings with Iran and other countries with financial sanctions imposed by the US.  The complaint, lodged by New York’s Department of Financial Services, suggests that the bank’s executives deliberately intended to deceive regulators.  Continue reading “Bipartisan Push For More Equity In Big Banks” →