Making disorder the enemy is something of a distraction tactic. General rate of growth matters a lot more and much has been sacrificed in the name of trying to make the market look pretty at the cost of keeping the incentives properly aligned. Disorder is more of a code word for the wealthy and powerful being at risk of losing their social standing. The rest of us should be worried about general wealth and prosperity. Which, I might add, is maximised by the occasional dose of collapse in badly designed systems. Joseph Gentile has been given 2 goes now at wiping out his creditors; there was no need for that - the 2008 bailouts just gave him cover to go and get people wiped out a 2nd time.
The real question now is who is actually eating these losses? Is it old people with pensions? Because while it would be karmic justice to start wiping out elderly investors because they were the ones with political control ignoring all the problems building over the decades, but that would still be a huge problem.
They should have let 2000 or 2008 play out to their natural conclusions to minimise the overall damage. This one is a bunch of people going bankrupt in ways that could easily be predicted a decade ago. These losses have been created by Fed policy. And we'll probably find when the dust settles that they have once again stuffed everything up, there is no reason to believe this time is different. There have been bank crisises to safely assume that this time will not be different unless, miraculously, hindsight shows they changed tack.
Are you "ignoring all the problems" of today? Or do you just not have the "political control" to change things? What makes you think that "elderly investors" had more control during their lifetimes?
Boomers hold 53.2%.
Those figures are from 2020 - it's probably gotten worse since.
... And those wealth holders aren't just ignoring the problems of today; they're exacerbating them.
Ageism won't solve our problems - all of this is still very much a class issue.
But let's not pretend that as a generation, the Boomers didn't fail like no generation has ever failed. And let's not pretend they aren't still blaming the victim.
It's gotten better, because boomers are retiring and spending down their assets. …or, of course, dying of covid.
Millenials are pretty much on track actually: https://www.stlouisfed.org/institute-for-economic-equity/the...
Wealth inequality in the US is also down since 2019 because of wage growth at the low end.
Baby boomers outnumber other generations, and they successfully used their numbers to bend our political systems to benefit themselves at as they progressed through life.
Which I suppose is fine, that's democracy. But as they reach their twilight years and reflect upon the world they're leaving behind, I do hope they take some responsibility for the plights they've created for the younger generations.
It's perfectly reasonable for the government to step in and say "We'll back stop this now, but we're going to examine this and put in rules to make sure this can't happen again"- and that's what happened here. The reason JPMorgan can step in is because they have stronger regulations on them that have made them safer than last time.
We've just witnessed several of the largest bank failures in history happening this year. In an unexpected turn of events, Bitcoin is proving to be more stable than institutions like First Republic Bank (and Credit Suisse). We'll probably see a few more interesting names before this is through.
Run me through this "can't happen again" part. We've had banks for 300 years now and there is a financial crisis every decade or so these days. What is "this"? It seems to be happening quite regularly for something that can't happen again. The government has been all but force-feeding credit into markets for the last decade, that is hardly a strategy to build strong institutions. The US is at serious risk of being overshadowed by nominal Communists. My money is on the pension system bearing the brunt of this crisis.
What are the signs of regulatory success that we're supposed to be looking at? They seem to have taken an era of unprecedented prosperity and technological progress and done their best to bring that back to neutral.
If you're comparing to the depositors in FRB or CS or whichever bank, their money has been absolutely safe, way more stable than bitcoin - and government guaranteed.
>What are the signs of regulatory success that we're supposed to be looking at?
That in capitalism, individual companies are going to succeed or fail, and those that invest in them will take the gains or losses, but that the broader system still works. And that's basically what is happening so far.
To take your bitcoin example, whenever a crypto company fails, the question is always "Will retail customers get their deposits back" and the answer is... basically always no. That's not how we expect companies to work - the customer deposits are meant to be protected.
What is the value add of all these regulations? We could arguably replicate the system, more stably, if everyone just owned bitcoin and the government bailed out anyone who lost their keys. The regulations aren't doing anything useful.
The role of the regulators here is destabilising the system. We're running a live experiment between lightly and heavily regulated systems here; turns out that less regulation is more stable even with the waste of Bitcoin mining. That says a lot about what the market thinks of the regulators and their regulations - substantial value destruction, and a significant cause of instability. They caused this crisis by loading up the system with debt and risk through 0 interest rate policies.
The regulators are overseeing a system that is underperforming your definition of regulatory success. The unregulated system sees individual companies succeeding and failing but the broader system carrying on. Where the regulators are involved it seems quite likely that the government is going to have to step in and prop up the regulated system again because it isn't sound. Odds are good the bank failures won't end here if it is anything like '08.
> whenever a crypto company fails, the question is always "Will retail customers get their deposits back" and the answer is... basically always no.
That is certainly true, but that is why the crypto ecosystem is outperforming the US dollar system here in terms of stability. People actually have to pay attention to what they do with their crypto.
A 6% raise in rates hasn't been accompanied by mass failures in crypto. Mainly because they deal with the problems by a string of small failures that wipe out an inconsequential number of people and keep the incentives correctly in place. The US regulators disrupted that natural market cleansing and look what it gets them - massive value destruction. And we aren't quite sure yet where the blow is going to hit.
Because we need to be clear. For depositors the value of the regulation is very clear - when crypto exchanges are unregulated when they blow up their depositors money isn't safe. When regulated banks blow up, the customer deposits stay safe thanks to regulations. The thing that caused instability isn't the regulations, it's rate changes.
The problem you have with crypto is very simple - you can't point at the value of bitcoin or FTT or ETH or Terra or Solana and say that it's safe, because alot of the time the people who were invested in it no longer have the asset! It's all well and good to say that BTC isn't down 100% but the people who had BTC on FTX don't have the bitcoin anymore so the nominal value of BTC is academic.
The regulations are so useless that the regulators have to roll in and start handing out money to fix their own mess. The system under low regulation is more stable - it works without intervention and rules changes. The regulated system the regulators keep having to make up new rules on the fly to cope with the fact that they are fundamentally destabilising the system and causing enormous losses of value to happen along the way by removing the feedback loops and protecting people from their actions at cost to the bystanders.
The regulations are net-negative value add and destabilising. The regulators are papering over that by unplanned cash infusions. Everyone in the regulated economy is assuming that the regulators fold and change the rules but they're all gambling on how the system will be broken. Nobody is behaving as though the regulations themselves are helping.
The point I'm making is if the rules are going to dissolve anyway, Bitcoin is a better system to go around bailing people out, because at least it is low-friction. It isn't exactly true, but superficially since Bitcoin can reliably preserve value in a way that the banks can't, we should bail out the bitcoin firms in preference to the banks. It is a more fundamentally sound system. We aren't see the sort of cascading failures that happen under the regulators. FTX goes bust and that is kinda it, whereas we've just had 3 huge banks go bust in a more regulated system - likely with more to come and high risk of a cascade of failures through the whole banking industry if the regulators follow the official playbook. Everyone agrees that following the regulations would result in systemic collapse in the event of a crisis. Compare and contrast to the Bitcoin ecosystem where something like Tether has survived at least 2 depegs and carries on like it is nothing. If the banks had that sort of resiliency against a run, this current crisis would not require a response. The reason they don't is because everyone is playing the regulators.
You say that the regulations are harming the system, but crypto gives us a perfect illustration of what happens without these regulations. You don't end up with companies that function better, you don't avoid duration mismatch, your exchanges go tits up and it turns out that the CEO was spending all the cash on his bahamian polycule. And you say FTX goes bust and that's it but that really only works because bitcoin is so tiny that when FTX goes bust it isn't all of our pensions and life savings on the line. And it wasn't just FTX, FTX was the last domino in a whole slew of failures over last summer - half of which it turns out were self-dealing and committing fraud.
The whole point is that the government can step in and backstop a system where it's tightly regulated what these banks are doing, they can't step in and backstop a system where your bank may literally just be taking your deposits and spending it all on bahamian parties.
There's just this massive disconnect between the unregulated world where a bank can be bust and pay back 99 cents on the dollar, and the deregulated world where a crypto exchange can be bust and it turns out it's only going to pay 10cents on the dollar, and it won't even do that because the CEO started siphoning off the remaining funds.
Bank Failures --> Glass-Steagall --> Repeal --> Bank Failures --> Dodd-Frank --> Repeal --> Bank Failures --> ...
The Fed had an extremely similar approach to what you propose in the late 20s, it was called liquidationism. It sparked the Great Depression, which was a terrible tragedy that destroyed millions of people’s lives, and through global aftereffects is arguably one of the main causes of Hitler’s rise to power.
Destroying the economy is very bad
By the time of Hitler's rise, hyper inflation was over and German economy was stable and beginning to prosper. Here is one paper covering it
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/10/19/debunking-...
According to Arthur Bryant the British court historian writing in Unfinished Victory (1940 pp. 136-144):
"even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands during the inflation.."
Anyway, here’s [0] an article that disagrees with Bryant’s stated claim.
[0] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/fiscal-destruction-confiscato...
A key difference here is that bond and equity holders are wiped out, which helps reduce moral hazard.
The broader concern is the privatization of profits while losses are absorbed by the government/public.
It seems like people just say this happened no matter what actually happens?
Equityholders are always wiped out when the government takes over a bank or business. Not sure about bondholders, but the point of backing up a bank is to prevent losses to the public of their bank accounts and payrolls.
For something like covid airline bailouts, equityholders got support but that's because the airlines have unions, not because the government loves airline shareholders.
SVB failed so quickly the Fed couldn't go through their usual process. The Fed had to throw out the rules and effectively stare that FDIC limits don't matter and all deposits are fully insured.
They were then so concerned about First Republic failing quickly after SVB that they in all likelyhood helped orchestrate a $30B deposit by major banks to help provide liquidity. That move is extremely odd and really looks a lot like market manipulation and collusion. They also must have known that was a short term measure to delay the failure until they could let the smoke clear and find a buyer, banks would have provided First Republic loans or invested in the bank if they had any faith in it's long term viability, depositing cash is just a show of force.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/343/
While much of wage growth is being driven by a plague-induced labor shortage and in response to the above. Cranking the interest rate dial to 11 solves very little besides impoverishing workers to preserve the dysfunctional status quo for the wealthy and business owners. This is quite obvious in how they’re handling all these bank failures.
[0] formerly known as Turkey
If inflation is caused by rapid wage growth, then pushing to cool that growth can help. If, on the other hand, inflation is caused by widespread corporate greed increasing prices to juice profits, trying to cool wage growth won't touch it, and will instead make the situation worse.
Price changes are a potential side effect of inflation, but prices can be impacted by plenty of other factors including changes in supply and demand. Price changes alone are a pretty meaningless measure without context. Factor in how easily the inflation measures are manipulated and the numbers aren't even reliable measures.
[1] https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...
That is, unless, of course, the mosquito swarm is a useful excuse to actually do the collateral damage you want.
All accounts are whole on Monday as usual, the Fed simply backed everything and decided it was safer to figure it out later given concerns over contagion.
Apparently the FDIC funds are not entirely liquid either so the fed extended them a short-term loan to provide the liquidity. At the end of the day the shortfall on the sale got covered by the FDIC funds and the loan from the FED came through on the basis of the FDICs fund and the fact that they then owned all of SVBs assets(they were named the receiver).
The FDIC managed the entire thing, backed all the maneuvers with their 128bn fund, is independent and reports to the POTUS, and is entirely funded by deposit insurance fees on the financial industry. The FED had its own opinions on the whole situation I'm sure, and provided a short-term liquidity loan to the FDIC, but it's a bit misleading IMHO they way their involvement is discussed.
I hadn't seen any reports confirming a Fed loan but that seems like about the only way it could have worked.
I wasn't aware of any of this until a few weeks ago had to research. As a disclaimer and promotion of independent research haha.
So you are saying that the decision to invoke the systemic risk exception and cover all depositor funds despite the least cost rule was an independent decision of the FDIC and not, as the law requires, a decision made by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the President, backed by supermajorities of both the Fed board and the FDIC board?
Strange that that’s not what the joint Treasury/FDIC/Fed press release said.
The “least-cost rule” is not a self-imposed FDIC rule, its a rule Congress imposed in 1991 after bank failures in the 1980s were felt to have been managed to expensively when the FDIC used funds to allow banks to stay open or otherwise protected uninsured depositors and creditors.
> and given they could just “throw it out” as they see fit.
They can’t. There is an exception available to the least cost rule, but that exception – the systemic risk exception – cannot be invoked by the FDIC, it can be invoked only by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the President, and with the support of 2/3 of the FDIC Board of Directors and 2/3 of the Federal Reserve Board.
The loss of confidence (and people losing their jobs) would make that much worse for the economy than finding some more money somewhere else; because banks work on confidence, telling people you have their money stops them from withdrawing it, which means you don't need to actually give them it.
I do get why they did it, I was simply pointing out that they changed the rules in the middle of the game.
Pretty close to the Bear Stearns path if you ask me ! When Bear Stearns was bought by JPM, there wasn't an immediate collapse of everything - no contagion or anything. On the surface that is.
The underlying problems of this crisis are still there - JPM buying (or ... being forced to buy) FRC doesn't solve any of those problems. It's just buying time.
In the longer term, though, I expect additional consolidation because of the fact that the government has all but instructed CFOs to move to larger banks through their statement that only "systemically important" institutions will be bailed out.
https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/en/ins...
You can't insure against a sure thing, so it's not actually possible to hedge everything. I don't think SVB necessarily could have done this; there might not've been a position without duration risk for them that actually made them any money.
We’ve also set a precedent for future recessions/shifts towards hawkish policy: if you’re a bank exec, be as reckless as possible while demand for loans is high and shift that value to yourself with stock incentivizes and bonuses. Markets are defined by activity at the margins so if it’s not you, it’ll be whichever other bank is ballsy or poorly managed enough to do it. You can even pass on some of the gains to consumers, who will know it’s unsustainable but that their deposits are protected, so you can write and hold as many unprofitable loans as possible on your books. When the music stops the only people screwed are shareholders and all the people whose money you devalued.
Or, the precedent is that the Fed gets scared of raising rates and basically ends up letting banks tell them if they’re allowed to raise rates. Which will mostly be answered with “no”
The only way the monetary supply changes is when a bank loan begins or ends, or when the Fed buys or sells something, because those are the only cases in which a transaction occurs with more or less money across all parties after it completes. In all other transactions money is just moving from one account to another (but the Fed issues money, so their account is special in that it can create or destroy any quantity).
Reality is a bit more complicated than this, but when a bank gets a deposit for $100 that becomes both a bank asset ($100) and liability (they need to be able to pay out $100 on short notice). Loaning the money out to another account in the bank, you’ll notice that the bank now has $200 in liabilities, $100 in cash assets, and a loan for $100 paying some interest and principle over time. Those loans can be valued at some price between starting and ending based on risk, duration, and rates.
When the Fed raised rates, those previously issued loans at lower rates become less valuable. Now the bank has the same amount of liabilities but less valuable assets. Banks can lend from each other to make up for short term liquidity problems, but if the situation gets bad enough, nobody will lend to the bank anymore and they can only look at their balance sheet in terms of their current asset prices (which may have fallen a lot compared to the full value they were using for accounting) and liabilities. Shortly thereafter they become unable to meet liabilities and are considered to have failed and enter receivership (basically bankruptcy).
The monetary supply then changes in one of two ways: it decreases by any amount that depositors lose due to the bank not having it (they end up with an account with less dollars) or it increases by any new money loaned/printed to shore up the failed bank’s balance sheet so it can be sold off to other banks (since in aggregate it has negative value, it can’t completely sell off as-is). I don’t know exactly what financial trickery backs FDIC insurance but I suspect it’s not new-money. What is monetary supply inflation is when the failed bank exercises the new Fed backstop to cover losses past FDIC, because this lets them sell some debt-based-instruments at coupon value (amount ultimately due) rather than fair-market-value (amount if you tried to sell it right now) to the Fed (remember, them buying stuff means more money gets created). And that is why these bank failures are causing everybody with cash to be effectively bailing out depositors: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/feds-new-banking-ba...
It seems to be. Fingers crossed.
And we have solutions to keep it from happening again this way. I’ve seen smart proposals. One I like is banks get to choose: HTM securities are liquid and marked to market or inviolable in value, in which case they’re held at face but do not count as liquid. (One can also do something fancy in between, but that seems to invite trouble.)
>> slaw 51 minutes ago
>> only estimated $13 billion will be printed
> JumpCrisscross 46 minutes ago
> Not printed. FDIC would levy a special assessment on its
> member banks, including JPMorgan, if those costs are
> realised. (Note that up to $40bn of enterprise value [1]
> was also just destroyed.)
"Equivalent exchange."[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/fdics-special-fee-make-ba...
No, the liquidity coverage ratio defers to GAAP for all asset values, and doesn’t discount Level 1 assets [1]. So a U.S. Treasury is considered comparable to unrestricted Federal Reserve balances [2].
My proposal is screw GAAP, for liquidity calculations, your assets are market valued every quarter. If there is legitimate concern about an asset not having a market, it isn’t a HQLA.
[1] https://www.occ.treas.gov/news-issuances/federal-register/20... page 61471
[2] https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publicati...
This is explicitly stated in the Basel 3 rules
https://www.bis.org/basel_framework/chapter/LCR/30.htm?infor...
30.40 footnote 1, for example.
You can be insolvent and still meet LCR because LCR is based on average 30 days outflow. So if you have 600B of liabilities and 300B of assets but all those assets are HQLA 1 and your net outflow for LCR is calculated at 100B you have a 300% LCR and yet are very much insolvent.
Held-to-maturity securities' fair value, under GAAP, is amortized cost [1][2]. From an accounting perspective, this sort of makes sense. From a liquidity perspective, it does not.
This is specific to the American implementation of Basel III because it incorporates GAAP.
[1] https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/loa...
[2] https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2015/02/availa....
>Held-to-maturity debt securities are reported at amortized cost. This is due to the securities being held to collect contractual cash flows. As such, it would not be appropriate for an investor to recognize interim fluctuations in fair value through a fair value model since those fluctuations will not be realized by the investor.
That is, HTM debt are not reported at fair value in GAAP. The fair value in that case would be the mark to market value (provided sufficient liquidity). The LCR requires HQLA be valued at fair value.
I think the confusion here is that HTM securities are in fact treated differently when calculating capital adequacy requirements, which are not the same as LCR! Your second link (which btw predates the start of LCR in the US) is about capital adequacy requirements.
Previously banks would only buy on the open market unless a specific lot of securities was put up for sale. The Fed was concerned that future increases in interest rates would be delayed if banks didn't immediately increase the cost/rates of securities to match so they wanted to be a direct player in the market. If the Fed can raise rates and then immediately start offering securities at the higher pricethe open market would have to follow suit.
Unfortunately that's exactly what banks did in 2020/2021 when they were handed piles of cash. Now those securities are a risk and here we are. Without that rule change banks would have found other places to park the cash, they wouldn't have been able to load their books with too many low yield government securities.
FDIC isn't taxpayer funded though, right? It's funded by insurance paid by banks. Personally I haven't given a dime to a bank my whole adult life other than mortgage interest, so I'm confident saying I'm not bearing the cost of FDIC covering depositors.
> the ones that knowingly took dangerous risks got a defacto bailout
Depositors, the only ones who got "bailed out," were not informed of whatever investment choices were made by these banks. Occam's razor: Do you think they would have gotten any depositors at all if they'd advertised "There's a small chance our bank will fail and you'll lose everything if interest rates go up by about 400bps from their current all-time low"? Also these banks weren't paying like, insane 15% interest rates or something -- they may have been a bit better than average, but not in too-good-to-be-true territory.
No, you shouldn’t. Duration is stress tested at the larger banks. The smaller banks lobbied to be exempted from liquidity coverage ratios in 2017 and got it, which is a large part of why we are in this mess. There is no evidence the Fed is constrained by bank balance sheets. (This could change, regionally, with CRE write downs. But again, money being destroyed.)
Then why do we read this: “Fed’s Bank Tests Overlooked Risk of Rapid Rise in Interest Rates”.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-15/fed-s-key...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/business/economy/fed-sili...
[2] https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publicati...
In 2007 the failures were amongst investment banks and there was no statutory authority to do an orderly liquidation (there is now) and the Bush admin was seemingly disinterested in responding. Thus a panic ensued.
This time we're applying well-tested and reliable procedures and they're working as expected.
I see no reason why FRC couldn't have just gone on...shown a quarterly loss from time to time, lose and/or gain depositors, shrink or grow...
its as if it was "decided" that this bank will be sold off for literally 1 penny on the dollar
when the crisis deepens, The Fed will lower rates and all of FRCs bonds will be in the green again...and JPM got them for free
The fed and regulators have to provide their current receivership terms (depositors will be made whole) to prevent banks runs and a liquidity collapse. Without these terms FRB would have collapsed long ago, as would have many other regional banks in the panic that would ensue as everybody takes their money to a TBTF bank.
The fed can only let you use those terms when you’ve failed, because otherwise they’d be massive money printers and accelerate inflation greatly (for the part that’s not funded by existing insurance terms, or bank fees, which btw are gonna have to go up each time this happens). And the Fed can’t let banks like FRC continue to operate after receivership because it’s essentially bailing out shareholders and execs with public money.
If, then when.
This is the gamble. With JPM getting them for free, the bonds pay out on a long enough time horizon OR if the federal reserve slows or changes direction.
That is to say... everything is orderly until it's not.
The pull into oblivion is quite agreeable to people, for some reason.
What are you talking about? This is contagion from FTX/Silvergate/SVB/Signature/Credit Suisse, all of which have failed in recent weeks.
SVB joined that party de novo. Silvergate and FTX were coupled. Signature was to both crypto and SVB. First Republic to SVB. I haven’t seen a great source for linking First Republic and Credit Suisse, though I could see some shared funding channel being shrapnelled.