Statement of the Financial Economists Roundtable: How to Manage and Help to Avoid Systemic Liquidity Risk

In the summer of 2010, when legislative and regulatory responses were being finalized to address financial institution and market liquidity problems, the Financial Economists Roundtable, a group of prominent financial economists over 50 years old, convened with the aim of developing principles that would address both market‐wide and institution‐specific liquidity problems exposed by the 2007–2008 financial crisis. As summarized in this statement, the eight principles that came out of this meeting should be used to assess the strengths and weakness of not only the Dodd‐Frank legislation that was passed, but also of the regulatory proposals to implement the law as they continue to emerge. Among the eight principles endorsed, the Roundtable urges regulators to seek to ensure that:

• ? the failures of large complex institutions are independent events so as to minimize spillover effects;
• ? the interdependence of capital and liquidity requirements is recognized;
• ? such requirements are flexible and cost‐effective;
• ? central banks continue to provide lender‐of‐last‐resort lending against sound collateral; and
• ? the disclosure of institutions' risk exposures is timely and transparent.

The Roundtable also concluded that the crisis revealed critical weaknesses in the tri‐party repo market, and recommended consideration of reforms to the market that include moving such transactions to organized exchanges, and reducing dependence on the two private sector financial institutions that operate that market's infrastructure. Additional useful reforms would include limiting daylight overdrafts, imposing margin requirements on counterparties to limit systemic risk and prohibiting re‐hypothecation. Finally, the Roundtable believes that improved transparency of transactions and prices would enhance monitoring by responsible regulatory agencies.     

The global financial crisis—Market misconduct and regulation from a behavioral view

This paper explores the problem of the global financial crisis of 2008–9, using a behavioral perspective to examine in some detail the issue of governance failures. These failures are evident in the inadequate oversight/regulation provided by US financial market regulators, as well as the inability of financial market participants to adequately judge and assign risk measures to key financial instruments. In total, five elements of behavioral finance are shown to characterize the crisis. The paper shows how specific adjustments in government policy (dealing with market structural imperfections) and company governance (dealing mainly with risk management) can respond to the key elements of the crisis. It also points out that future financial crises cannot be avoided, so that mitigation is the only remedy to deal with such phenomena.     

Convertible Securities and Bankruptcy Reforms: Addressing Too Big to Fail and Reducing the Fragility of the Financial System*

Eliminating too big to fail should be the first priority of any regulatory reform. But this is easier said than done. As the crisis has taught us, when the systemic risks are perceived to be large, regulators will be very reluctant to close down insolvent firms or impose losses on creditors. So how do we reduce these risks so that regulators can credibly commit to a policy of allowing financial companies to fail and not resort to rescues or bailouts? The author proposes two complementary approaches to this problem: The first is to design capital structures with corrective mechanisms that kick in when a financial firm displays signs of trouble, but still has positive economic capital. To this end, the author endorses the Squam Lake Report's proposal that encourages financial firms to issue convertible debt with an “automatic” provision for converting to equity. In contrast to the Squam Lake proposal, however, the author argues that the conversion to equity should not depend on regulators' decisions and should take place before individual banks and the financial system are in full crisis mode. The second approach is to design a resolution mechanism that will close failing financial firms when early intervention has not led to the firm's recovery. The author argues that the best model for this mechanism is bankruptcy, because of its resolution of claims according to predetermined rules rather than regulatory discretion. However, certain forms of early intervention can also help to lower the costs of permitting firms to fail. For example, the Squam Lake idea that financial institutions be required to develop living wills should make it easier to unwind these firms in an orderly fashion and provide regulators with insight into the degree of systemic risk that these firms impose. The author notes that the challenges associated with getting the executives of healthy banks to plan for their own bankruptcy may indicate that a better use of regulatory resources might be to view the living will as one of the tools of prompt corrective action for firms that become undercapitalized but are still solvent. Once a firm has been declared undercapitalized, regulators would have greater bargaining power to insist on a serious plan for bankruptcy.     

The way we live now: Financialization and securitization

Securitization is a global multi-trillion dollar market that embodies financialization. Prior to the recent financial crisis, securitization fueled an unsustainable increase in mortgage credit. As the recent financial crisis reveals, securitization increased credit market volatility and was heightened by a reliance on debt and incentive schemes that focused on short-term profits. As extensive global reform of the securitization market takes place, there are serious reservations about the sustainability of securitization. In this paper I provide a critical perspective on securitization through a number of lenses. The story of securitization comes down to the globalization of finance and the declining importance of banks. I provide an historical assessment of securitization as well as its rise and fall over the last four decades. I also provide a critical perspective on the role of ethics and risk management in securitization in the context of the recent financial crisis. Finally, as many agencies reconsider the future of securitization, I discuss whether all assets are necessarily suitable candidates for the process.     

Whither Capitalism?*

The global financial crisis and policy responses to it have led many to question their fundamental belief in market‐based capitalism. In the U.S., the epicenter of the crisis and poster child of capitalism, signs of creeping nationalization of the financial system have raised fears that the basic model is being turned inside out. In this essay, the author argues that, with more than 90% of the U.S. private sector still operating “largely as a free‐enterprise system,” concerns about nationalization and government involvement in the marketplace are greatly exaggerated. More troubling are the diminishing prospects for a prompt post‐crisis normalization of fiscal and monetary policy, and for a decisive and transparent exit strategy from the present “policies of crisis containment.” In the absence of such decisiveness and transparency, the debate over the efficacy of market‐based capitalism will continue. The longer‐run challenge is to learn from the crisis and take measures designed to limit risk‐taking to acceptable levels in today's global financial environment, with its continuous cross‐border flow of information, trade, and human as well as financial capital. Making Wall Street the villain is the path of least resistance in a politically charged environment, but any fix must be grounded in shared responsibility. As the author says in closing, “Governance, or the lack thereof—both within the private sector as well as by those charged with regulation and oversight—proved to be the weak link in the chain. Fix that, and capitalism will be just fine.”     

The Global Financial Crises of 2007–2010 and the future of capitalism

This paper presents an analysis of the 2007-2010 Global Financial Crisis which started with the sub-prime crisis in the U.S. and became global very fast. It argues that the financial system in the United States is a complex interlocking structure of markets, institutions and regulators. The causes and culprits of the crisis, the misaligned incentives of participants and exogenous events such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, precipitated failure in key markets: commodities, sub-prime housing, equities, and credit. One of the strategic consequences of this crisis is that the US will lose its dominance in world power, the frequent crises and vulnerabilities of the Neoliberalism and examines the future of capitalism. Of the alternatives to economic system, the capitalism is the most viable economic system. However, it must adopt real and efficient allocation of resources to maximize welfare of all parties and seriously address the income inequality. It must reject crony capitalism, enact true financial regulation of institutions and markets, end corporate socialism and address the system’s structural deficiencies.     

Credit risk transfer in U.S. commercial banks: What changed during the 2007–2009 crisis?

Following the debate on the role of credit risk transfer (CRT) in exacerbating the 2007–2009 crisis, this paper investigates the usage and effects of loan sales, securitization, and credit derivatives in U.S. commercial banks over the last decade, with special emphasis on the financial crisis. We find that in times of severe funding constraints, the need to raise financial resources becomes the principal incentive behind CRT. We document some beneficial effects of CRT on the economy, since the funds released through CRT are subsequently invested by banks to sustain credit supply, also in recession. However, we report higher overall riskiness in banks that engage intensively in loans sales and securitization, which translates into higher default rates during the crisis. Interestingly, the benefits and drawbacks of CRT are much stronger for loan sales and securitization than for credit derivatives.     

Missing elements in US financial reform: A Kübler-Ross interpretation of the inadequacy of the Dodd-Frank Act

The success of any treatment plan depends on how completely the problems it targets have been diagnosed. The precrisis bubble in securitization can be traced to incentive conflict that allows national safety nets to subsidize leveraged risk-taking. Safety-net subsidies encouraged regulation-induced innovations that enabled firms to take hard-to-monitor risks and to make themselves politically, administratively, and economically difficult for government officials to fail and unwind.This paper summarizes the incentive conflicts that led creditors and internal and external supervisors to short-cut and outsource due diligence. The Dodd-Frank strategy of reform does not adequately acknowledge or address these conflicts. The key step needed is to develop an effective statistical metric for measuring the ex ante value of safety-net support in the aggregate and at individual institutions. To accomplish this, government and industry need to rethink the informational obligations that insured financial institutions and their regulators owe to taxpayers as de facto investors and to change the way that information on industry balance sheets and risk exposures is reported, verified, and used. Without reforms in the practical duties imposed on industry and governmental officials and in the way these duties are enforced, financial safety nets will continue to expand and their expansion will undermine financial stability by generating large rewards for creative and aggressive risk-takers that are smart enough to cash in their share of safety-net benefits before they evaporate.     

Demand for fair value accounting: The case of the asset revaluation boom in Korea during the global financial crisis

When the fair value accounting (FVA) option for property, plant, and equipment was introduced in the midst of the global financial crisis, a significant proportion of Korean firms elected FVA. We attribute this unusual boom in asset revaluations to the nation's culture of government intervention and civilian compliance, which was particularly espoused during this period of financial turmoil, and a foreseeable option to switch back to historical cost accounting. We find that among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are low, public firms opt for the FVA option more often than private firms, suggesting that the need to communicate fair value information with diversified equity holders is more important than the need to do so with creditors. In contrast, among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are high enough to warrant such unfavorable dispositions as new debt freezes and monitoring by regulators, we find no difference in the FVA choice between private and public firms. These findings imply that during the global financial crisis, private firms that rely heavily on debt financing have a strong incentive to utilize FVA to comply with government guidelines for the debt‐to‐equity ratio and to ease a potential hold‐up problem by influential creditors.     

On the optimal regulation of financial guarantees

This paper examines the economic basis for the regulation of financial guarantees or commitments by a third party to provide payments in the event of default. It is argued that regulators can serve as monitors who minimize information or agency costs. However, in the U.S. markets private rating agencies provide such a monitoring function so that regulation is warranted only in the event that there are problems with these private monitors. In addition, since guarantees are directly linked to securitization, regulatory actions that encourage securitization tend to encourage the growth of financial guarantees.     

Securitized banking and the run on repo

The panic of 2007–2008 was a run on the sale and repurchase market (the repo market), which is a very large, short-term market that provides financing for a wide range of securitization activities and financial institutions. Repo transactions are collateralized, frequently with securitized bonds. We refer to the combination of securitization plus repo finance as “securitized banking” and argue that these activities were at the nexus of the crisis. We use a novel data set that includes credit spreads for hundreds of securitized bonds to trace the path of the crisis from subprime-housing related assets into markets that had no connection to housing. We find that changes in the LIB-OIS spread, a proxy for counterparty risk, were strongly correlated with changes in credit spreads and repo rates for securitized bonds. These changes implied higher uncertainty about bank solvency and lower values for repo collateral. Concerns about the liquidity of markets for the bonds used as collateral led to increases in repo haircuts, that is the amount of collateral required for any given transaction. With declining asset values and increasing haircuts, the US banking system was effectively insolvent for the first time since the Great Depression.     

Greenspan's Retrospective of Financial Crisis and Stochastic Optimal Control

Alan Greenspan argues that the crisis was unpredictable and inevitable, given the ‘excessive’ leverage of the financial intermediaries. I focus upon the housing sector, which has been at the origin of the financial crisis because the value of the financial derivatives ultimately depended upon the ability of the mortgagors to repay their debts. The uncertainty concerns the capital gains – housing price appreciation – and the rate of interest. I explain why the application of stochastic optimal control (SOC) is an effective approach to determine the optimal degree of leverage, the optimum and excessive risk and the probability of a debt crisis. I show that the theoretically derived early warning signal of a crisis is the excess debt ratio, equal to the difference between the actual and optimal ratio. The excess debt of households starting from 2004‐05 indicated that a housing crisis was most likely.     

Allocating Shareholder Capital to Pension Plans

This article discusses the corporate challenge of providing retirement income to employees while limiting the costs and risks of pension plans to the companies themselves by addressing five main questions:

• ? What are the major issues and challenges surrounding pensions? Although the pension shortfalls have been the focus of attention, the author argues that the more serious concern is the risk stemming from the mismatch between pension assets and pension liabilities— that is, the funding of debt‐like liabilities with equity‐heavy asset portfolios.
• ? To what extent do the equity market and equity prices reflect the shortfall in value and the mismatch in risk? While the author describes some evidence of the market's ability to capture pension risk, analysts' P/E multiples and management's assessments of cost of capital may still be distorted by failure to take full account of the risks associated with pension assets.
• ? How should management analyze and formulate strategic solutions? Without offering specific solutions, the author presents a framework for analyzing the problem from a strategic perspective that can be used in formulating a company's pension policy. In particular, the article recommends that companies take an integrated perspective that views pension assets and liabilities as parts of the corporate balance sheet, and the pension asset allocation decision as a critical aspect of a corporate‐wide enterprise risk management program.
• ? If a company chooses to make a major change in its pension policy, such as a partial or complete immunization accomplished by substituting bonds for stocks, how would you communicate the new policy to the rating agencies and investors?
• ? What are the major issues to be thinking about when contemplating a change from a DB plan to a defined contribution, or DC, plan? The author argues that DC plans without some corporate oversight or responsibility for results are not a long‐term solution.

     

The sub-prime crisis: A central banker's perspective

The crisis is not yet over; the housing market continues to deteriorate and there are spill-overs into other markets. Growth is declining, with potentially self re-enforcing mechanisms between financial markets and the real economy coming into play. A local problem became a global crisis because of poor risk management, lack of transparency and excessive leverage. Not only does the capital base need re-building, but also incentive schemes need reconsideration.     

Principles of Financial Regulation: A Dynamic Portfolio Approach

Economists seeking explanations for the global financial crisisof 1997–99 are reaching consensus that a major factorwas weak financial institutions, which resulted in part frominadequate government regulations. At the same time many developingcountries are struggling with an overregulated financial system—onethat stifles innovation and the flow of credit to new entrepreneursand that can stunt the growth of well-established firms. Inparticular, too many countries are relying excessively on capitaladequacy standards, which are inefficient and sometimes counterproductive.The author argues that financial systems can be reformed successfullyusing a "dynamic portfolio approach" aimed at managing the incentivesand constraints that affect not only financial institutions'exposure to risk but also their ability to cope with it. Thearticle sets out general principles of financial regulationand shows how the dynamic portfolio approach can help countriesdeal with the special problems that arise during the transitionto a more liberalized economy as well as those that arise indealing with a financial crisis similar to the 1997 crisis inEast Asia.      

The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System*

In these excerpts from The Squam Lake Report, fifteen distinguished economists analyze where the global financial system failed, and how such failures might be prevented (or at least their damage better contained) in the future. Although there were many contributing factors to the crisis—including “agency” problems throughout the financial system and a bankruptcy code poorly suited for reorganizing financial firms—at the core of the problem is a potential conflict between the risk-taking proclivity of financial institutions and the interests of the economy at large that must be managed at least in part through more effective regulation. The Squam Lake Report provides a nonpartisan plan to transform the regulation of financial markets in ways designed to limit systemic risk while preserving—to the extent possible and prudent—the economies of scale and scope that justify the existence of today's large financial institutions. To reduce the risks that large banks will fail, the authors call for higher capital requirements based on more effective assessments of the risks of bank assets and liabilities, as well as a new systemic regulator that should be part of the central bank. To reduce the costs of failure when it occurs, the authors propose that banks be required to create “living wills” laying out their plan to sell assets or shut down operations in the event of financial trouble. As part of that plan, regulators are urged to “aggressively encourage” banks to issue “contingent” debt capital securities that convert into equity.     

What is the systemic risk exposure of financial institutions?

I compare the performance of three measures of institution-level systemic risk exposure — Exposure CoVaR (Adrian and Brunnermeier, 2016), systemic expected shortfall (Acharya et al., 2016), and Granger causality (Billio et al., 2012). I modify Exposure CoVaR to allow for forecasting, and estimate the ability of each measure to forecast the performance of financial institutions during systemic crisis periods in 1998 (LTCM) and 2008 (Lehman Brothers). I find that Exposure CoVaR forecasts the within-crisis performance of financial institutions, and provides useful forecasts of future systemic risk exposures. Systemic expected shortfall and Granger causality do not forecast the performance of financial institutions reliably during crises. I also find, using cross-sectional regressions, that foreign equity exposure and securitization income determine systemic risk exposure during the 1998 and 2008 crises, respectively; financial institution size determines systemic risk exposure during both crisis periods; and executive compensation does not determine systemic risk exposure.     

Securitization and systematic risk in European banking: Empirical evidence

Using a unique dataset of 592 cash and synthetic securitizations issued by 54 banks from the EU-15 plus Switzerland over the period from 1997 to 2007 this paper provides empirical evidence that credit risk securitization has a positive impact on the increase of European banks’ systematic risk. Baseline results hold when comparing estimated beta coefficients with a control group of similar non-securitizing banks. Building several sub-samples we additionally find that (a) the increase in systematic risk is more relevant for larger banks that repeatedly engage in securitization, (b) securitization is more important for small and medium financial institutions, (c) banks have a higher incentive to retain the larger part of credit risk as a quality signal at the beginning of the securitization business in Europe, and (d) the overall risk-shifting effect due to securitization is more distinct when the pre-event systematic risk is low.     

Contrasting Worldviews at Bank and Securities Market Regulators

Bank and securities regulators operate with different attitudes about the appropriate regulation of financial institutions and markets. Bank regulators’ prudential oversight protects depositors from worrying about the repayment of their bank claims. In contrast, securities market regulators tend to presume that security markets (almost) always clear quickly at prices close to the asset's fundamental value. These regulators seek to assure full disclosure of information, which facilitates active securities trading. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) investor protection duties are tailored to the financial sophistication of individual investors.     

Statement of the Financial Economists Roundtable* Reforming the OTC Derivatives Markets

In investigations of the causes of the crisis, a major focus has been the role of derivative securities, particularly credit-default swaps (CDS). Despite widespread claims to the contrary, however, the 51 economists who signed this statement begin by asserting that CDS and other derivatives contracts were not a primary cause of the financial crisis. At the same time, derivatives markets are said to play an important economic role by shifting risks from businesses and individual investors to parties more willing (and generally better able) to bear them. But, as illustrated during the crisis, derivatives also can be used to transmit risk in ways that have the potential to pervade the entire financial system. With the aim of limiting systemic risk associated with the use of derivatives, the statement recommends the following:

• • measures that encourage migration of more derivatives transactions to central-clearing facilities, including higher capital requirements and stricter criteria (including segregation) for the collateralization of positions that are not cleared;
• • data reporting and repository requirements designed to help regulators and market participants to understand systemic risk exposures in the financial system;
• • post-trade price transparency for all sufficiently standardized OTC products;
• • continued migration of trading in actively traded OTC products to exchanges.

Finally, although the economists support regulations against market manipulation, they oppose potential restrictions on speculative trading, including the holding of “naked” CDS, while affirming that both hedging and speculation are important and socially beneficial activities in our financial system.