Economics of Contempt

In my previous post on the Volcker Rule, I admittedly glossed over the real issue in my second prediction. This issue is important, but it’s also reasonably complex (way too complex for some people, I suspect), and it requires some context and explanation to fully appreciate.

The statutory text of the Volcker Rule contained a glaring flaw: the statute prohibited proprietary trading by basically defining everything as “proprietary trading,” and then carving out exemptions for everything else. This was a colossal mistake for a variety of reasons, but the most important reason is that rather than having the regulators simply define “proprietary trading,” it put the regulators in the position of having to define every form of legitimate trading that banks do — underwriting, market-making, hedging, etc. Obviously, that’s a much, much more difficult task, and one that’s significantly more likely to lead to problems due to gaps — whether intended or unintended — in the proposed rule’s exemptions. It’s hardly a targeted solution to the problem of government-backed prop trading, to say the least. (I imagine the ultimate blame for this lies with someone in the Legislative Counsel’s office, although Merkley and Levin’s offices bear some blame here too, as they were clearly in way over their heads during this entire process.)

‘Flipping the Presumption’

The upshot of this is that it creates a presumption that all trades are prohibited prop trades, unless proven otherwise. What the banks want to do is to flip the presumption — instead of regulators scrutinizing whether each trade falls into one of the nine “permitted avtivities” exemptions, regulators would be scrutinzing whether each trade is a prohibited prop trade.

Whether flipping the presumption would dilute the strength of the ban on prop trading depends entirely on the quantitative and qualitative metrics that regulators ultimately use to identify prohibited prop trades. The right metrics would appropriately identify prohibited prop trades, while the wrong metrics could either identify too many trades as prop trades, or too few. But that’s where the debate would shift — or rather, should shift — if the regulators flipped the presumption. (The metrics described in the proposed Volcker Rule would, if anything, be overinclusive, and would require the regulators to apply some judgment to flagged trades — which I think is appropriate.)

Now, regulators only have so much discretion here. The statute is the statute, and flawed though it may be, regulators still have to work within its confines. But there are ways to effectively flip the presumption.

One way to do this is to define the main exemptions (market-making, hedging, and underwriting) very broadly, but include a carve-out for trades done for the “trading account” — which is, bizarrely, where the real definition of proprietary trading is located in the statute. The effect of this would be to allow regulators to focus on whether a bank’s trades exhibit the characteristics of trades done for the “trading account” (i.e., prop trades), based on the quantitative and qualitative metrics the regulators have identified, rather than focusing on whether each trade can fit into one of the defined exemptions. In other words, the presumption would be that a trade falls into the market-making or hedging exemptions, unless the regulators believe otherwise.

This is basically what I predicted the regulators would do in my previous post — although, crucially, I limited my prediction to the market-making exemption, and I said that the regulators would make this an “alternative” market-making test. A broader market-making exemption with a metrics-heavy carve-out for prohibited prop trading would go a long way toward: (a) alleviating concerns about the Volcker Rule’s impact on market-making without necessarily diluting the prop trading ban; and (b) making the regulators’ task a lot less daunting, and a lot less likely to cause unforeseen and unintended disruptions to the financial markets.

Since there's evidently a substantial amount of confusion surrounding Greece CDS procedures, I thought it would be helpful to post this:

The due date for comment letters on the proposed Volcker Rule has now passed. The comment letters are interesting for a variety of reasons. (I had the benefit of seeing draft versions of several of the comment letters, and I’ll just say that I’m amazed at the level of convergence they were able to achieve between the industry letters — both substantively and stylistically.)

Instead of trying to write a single, lengthy post with all my analysis of the competing arguments — an undertaking which I simply don’t have the time to complete — I’m going to sort of provide analysis as I go.

In my first post, I’m going to do something which, in my professional capacity, I never get to do: make predictions. I do this without any inside knowledge or the regulators’ thinking, and with full awareness that it’s far too early to know exactly what the regulators will do. But if you don’t make firm predictions, then how are you supposed to say “I told you so” when you end up being right? With that in mind, here’s what I think will ultimately happen to a few of the key portions of the Volcker Rule:

1. The requirement that market-making activities be “related to clear, demonstrable trading interest of clients” will be completely scrapped. The industry will win this one, and for good reason. The “clear, demonstrable trading interest” standard is simply inconsistent with the statutory text, which permits market-making activities that “are designed not to exceed the reasonably expected near term demands of clients.” Client demand can be “reasonably expected” well before the demand is “clear” and “demonstrable.” The statute permits market-making desks to trade in anticipation of “reasonably expected” near-term client demand, so applying a “clear, demonstrable trading interest” standard would be plainly inconsistent with the statute.

To be honest, I don’t think the regulators ever truly intended to apply this standard. The language about market-making activities being “related to clear, demonstrable trading interest of clients” was included in the criterion for bona fide market making, and NOT in the criterion for “reasonably expected near-term demands of clients,” which was far broader. It’s probably a fair bet that different people wrote those two sections, and they were never properly reconciled before the regulators published the proposed rule. However, I also think that the criterion for “reasonably expected near-term demands of clients” will be broadened as well. While that criterion is broader than the “clear, demonstrable trading interest” standard, there’s still a reasonably strong argument to be made that the language in that criterion is too narrow, and doesn’t reflect congressional intent.

2. Regulators will keep the market-making exemption in the proposed rule, but will add a broader “alternative” market-making exemption that relies more heavily on trading metrics to identify prohibited prop trading. Admittedly, this one is a longshot. The industry wants the regulators to replace their current market-making exemption with a much broader exemption, described in the main SIFMA/Clearing House letter:

“We believe a business should be viewed as customer-focused, and therefore engaged in market making, to the extent it is oriented to meeting customer demand throughout market cycles. This can be evidenced by, among other activity, a focus on offering execution to customers, building relationships with customers and providing sales coverage, providing research to customers and participating in the interdealer market in order to serve customer demand.”

Now, this is clearly way too broad. But it does have the benefit (and, from the regulators’ perspective, the attraction) of being simple and inclusive enough to serve as a uniform standard of market-making across all asset classes. If the regulators press on with their current definition of market-making, which contemplates different standards for each different asset class, then the regulators will be drawn into endless battles over what constitutes permitted market-making in every single asset class and market. That’s a daunting task, and I can’t imagine that the regulators are looking forward to writing 50 different, customized definitions of permitted market-making. I’m sure a simple, uniform definition of market-making for all asset classes will look pretty appealing.

However, because the definition of market-making that SIFMA et al. propose is clearly far too broad (sorry guys, but “providing research to customers” ≠ market-making), the regulators will still need some other, non-definitional way to identify prohibited prop trades. And that’s where the trading metrics come in. The proposed rule already identifies several quantitative metrics that can be used to reliably distinguish between market-making and prop trading, and can also be used across the different asset classes.

I think the bargain that the regulators will end up striking here is to add a broader, uniform market-making exemption that relies heavily on quantitative metrics as an alternative to the market-making exemption in the proposed rule. This alternative market-making exemption would obviously have to be narrower than the definition that SIFMA et al. propose, but would still be broad enough to encompass all legitimate market-making across different asset classes.

3. The “trading account” exemptions will stand. The proposed rule excludes repos, securities lending, and positions taken for bona fide liquidity management from the crucial definition of “trading account” — which effectively means that those positions are exempt from the Volcker Rule’s prop trading ban. While Merkley and Levin (amusingly) tried to argue in their comment letter that there is “no statutory basis” for these exclusions, they failed to offer any, you know, actual evidence for their claims. That’s usually fatal to an attempted legal argument. The group “Occupy the SEC”¹ even tried to describe various scenarios in which banks could exploit the “trading account” exemptions to put on prop trades, but their examples tended to be inaccurate (in that they would not have legitimately circumvented the prop trading ban), or ultimately irrelevant.

At best, I think the repo and securities lending exemptions might be slightly revised to include an explicit “anti-evasion” clause. But past that, I think all three “trading account” exemptions will stand.

4. The regulators will issue a re-proposed Volcker Rule rather than a final rule. I think the changes will ultimately be too significant to go straight to a final rule, and that regulators will want another notice-and-comment period to get feedback on any changes.

****

¹ While “Occupy the SEC” should certainly be commended for engaging in the rulemaking process (which is where all the real action is), and for engaging in a substantive manner, I don’t think their Volcker Rule comment letter was terribly persuasive on any major point, and I don’t think it will ultimately result in many (or any) substantive changes to the final rule. Now, a lot of the letter’s problems were the result of this clearly being the authors’ first time writing a comment letter to banking regulators. So allow me to offer some constructive criticism (since I imagine there will be another notice-and-comment period for the Volcker Rule): For one thing, the letter contained far too many sweeping, conclusory statements, for instance about what did and did not contribute to the financial crisis, and these sweeping statements too often served as the sole basis for the group’s desired change. Regulators are not responsive to those kinds of arguments, to say the least. (In general, “a guy I read on Huffington Post said X contributed to the financial crisis” is not a winning argument at this level.)

Occupy the SEC’s letter also spent far too much time making tangential arguments that were often based on a simple misunderstanding of the proposed rule, which is a great way to kill a letter’s credibility and undermine its more legitimate arguments. Lehman’s use of Repo 105 was a scandal, but not one that was relevant to the proposed Volcker Rule. It’s absolutely imperative that you pick your battles in these comment letters — focus on the truly meaningful debates, and emphasize your strongest arguments. Also, your audience is the regulators, not other activists, so tone down the self-righteousness. Big-time. Regulators are professional civil servants, so they’re hardly responsive to letters that lecture them about their duty to the public.

Earlier this week, Joe Nocera wrote a puff piece on Karen Petrou of Federal Financial Analytics. In the piece, Nocera and Petrou repeat a frequently-heard — but nevertheless exceedingly superficial — argument that has always bothered me. From Nocera’s NYT column:

[Petrou] also points to a contradiction in the way the Too Big to Fail institutions are being dealt with. On the one hand, Dodd-Frank is very clear that if a big bank becomes insolvent, there can be no taxpayer bailout. It must be wound down, just like any other bank. Yet, at the same time, she says, the federal and international regulators are adding a host of special Too Big to Fail capital requirements and rules. “They are acting as if these institutions are still too big to fail. The two thrusts are incompatible.”

Oy. This is not a contradiction. Applying additional capital requirements and more stringent regulations to certain large financial institutions is absolutely not incompatible with ending Too Big to Fail — or with Dodd-Frank’s new resolution authority for large financial institutions.

The new resolution authority makes is easier for large financial institutions (known as SIFIs) to fail, which is the exact opposite of “acting as if these institutions are still too big to fail.” Moreover, the additional capital requirements and regulations for SIFIs in no way contradict the resolution authority. The purpose of the additional capital requirements and enhanced prudential regulations for SIFIs is to make it less likely that a SIFI will fail. The purpose of the resolution authority is to make sure that when a SIFI fails, it can do so without bringing down the entire financial system. These are not contradictory — they’re complementary.

These are pretty basic concepts of financial reform — I wrote a post way back in October 2009, before Congress even took up the financial reform bill, explaining how a SIFI regime and a new resolution authority would fit together. The fact that so many financially-focused pundits have yet to move beyond the “hey, if they’re ‘systemically important’ they must be TBTF!”-level of analysis is just sad.

Last night, Bloomberg reported that the Basel Committee was considering revising Basel III's new Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) to allow banks to use equities in their liquidity pools. This would be a relatively major change, and one which I consider ill-advised. (For background, I've written about the LCR several times before.) From Bloomberg:

"The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which coordinates regulations for 27 countries, may let banks use equities and more corporate debt, in addition to cash and sovereign bonds, to satisfy new short-term liquidity standards, said two people with direct knowledge of the plans who requested anonymity because the talks are private."

At a Senate Banking hearing today, Fed Governor Dan Tarullo confirmed this report. He also indicated that the Fed would support expanding the list of assets that are eligible for the LCR's liquidity pool. Here's Tarullo after being asked about the Bloomberg report (from the CQ transcript of the hearing):

We — which is to say the Federal Reserve — was one of the entities which asked internationally to take another look at liquidity coverage ratio.
...
And one of the — one of the precepts, I think, for the — for the renewed look was just the point that you were making, that if you're worried about the liquidity of a firm, what you're really asking is, how well is the liabilities and the assets of that firm matched so that in a period of stress it can cover its needs in a — over some period of time so that it has a plan for — it can develop a plan for longer run survival.

And what I have thought was that the 2008 period gave us a very good real life experiment to test what kinds of instruments actually do remain liquid even during a period of stress like that. For example, highly traded equities of large companies.

So that is in fact one of the motivations for the rethink, and I believe that once the international group at the Basel Committee that's looking at the LCR has finished its evaluation next year, that you will see some changes in things like what qualifies in assumed run rates and the like, to try to conform the requirements somewhat more closely to the experience we actually had in late [2008].

Tarullo, therefore, seems to be willing to allow banks to use certain large-cap equities in their liquidity pools. (Basel III's LCR requires banks to maintain large liquidity pools, which must be made up of "high quality liquid assets," so technically what Tarullo is saying is that certain large-cap equities should be included in the definition of "high quality liquid assets.")

Two points here. First, there's a reason that most banks don't currently include equities in their liquidity pools, and that the Fed applies higher haircuts to equities in its emergency lending operations. The reason is that equities are typically more volatile than other instruments (e.g., fixed-income). Allowing banks to use equities in their liquidity pools increases the risk that a bank will have a large shortfall in its liquidity pool on a given day. Presumably, if the Basel Committee makes this change, equities would be categorized as "Level 2" high quality liquid assets (which I explained here), which means a 15% haircut would be applied. But does anyone honestly believe that a 15% haircut is enough for equities — especially given the wild swings in the equity markets that we witnessed even in 2008? I'm not at all convinced that there's a large class of equities that would be truly liquid in a crisis, and certainly not a large enough class to justify the inclusion of equities in banks' liquidity pools.

Second, I'm disappointed to see Tarullo endorse the argument that we can determine which assets are truly liquid by looking at how they fared in the 2008 crisis. As I've noted before, this is a really stupid argument. It may be true that certain large-cap equities maintained their liquidity throughout the 2008 crisis, but there were also massive government bailouts in 2008 — not to mention the extraordinary amounts of liquidity that the Fed pumped into the financial system.

How much did those large-cap equities that Tarullo refers to rely on the Fed's extraordinary lending programs (directly and indirectly) to maintain their liquidity? The point of the LCR is to ensure that banks can survive a funding crisis without massive government bailouts. Contra Tarullo, 2008 is NOT a very good — or even an appropriate — guide. Regulators will simply have to accept that determining which assets are likely to remain liquid in a TARP-free crisis will require the application of judgment on their part.

This is a development worth watching.

The American Banker leaked part of a draft of the regulators’ proposed Volcker Rule (pdf) last week, which has caused quite a stir. The first thing to note is that the American Banker did not leak the most important part: the text of the proposed rule. Instead, they leaked the “Supplementary Information” (which I call just the “Supplement”), the core of which is a lengthy, section-by-section analysis of the proposed rule. In addition, the leaked portion does not include the Appendices to the proposed rule, which, from reading the Supplement, appear to be very important — Appendix B, for example, contains a “detailed commentary regarding how the Agencies propose to identify permitted market making-related activities,” which is a core issue.

First I’ll give some general thoughts on the proposed Volcker Rule, and then, because I’m such a generous guy, I’ll go ahead and highlight some of the most important pressure points in the proposed rule.

General Thoughts on the Proposed Volcker Rule

In general, the proposed Volcker Rule appears to be very good: it’s a serious effort by a group of smart, market-savvy people to draw a workable distinction between market-making and proprietary trading. The regulators recognize the importance of both market-making and hedging, but they also recognize (most of) the places where market-making and hedging can bleed into proprietary trading. And in those situations, the regulators realize that any effort to distinguish impermissible prop trading from permissible market-making or hedging will — quite appropriately — require a very fact-intensive inquiry. That said, I’m still going to have to withhold my final judgment until I see the actual text of the proposed rule.

Also, even though the WSJ keeps trying to gin up controversy over the proposed Volcker Rule allowing hedging on a portfolio basis, the regulators note in the Supplement that allowing hedging on a portfolio basis is “consistent with the statutory reference to mitigating risks of individual or aggregated positions” (emphasis in original). I explained this a couple of weeks ago; it is a faux-controversy. Moreover, prohibiting banks from hedging on a portfolio basis is a monumentally stupid idea in the first place — it would make risk managers’ jobs 100 times harder, introduce all sorts of new risks into banks’ books (counterparty risk would skyrocket), and dramatically raise hedging costs. This is one thing that the statutory text of the Volcker Rule actually got right.

Some Pressure Points in the Proposed Volcker Rule

Now, to the nitty-gritty of the proposed rule. Here some of the major pressure points in the proposed Volcker Rule that I see:

1. Hedges must be “reasonably correlated” to the underlying risk: In defining “risk-mitigating hedging activity,” the rule requires that the hedge be “reasonably correlated” to the underlying risk(s). The Supplement implies that the correlation must be reasonable at the outset of the hedging transaction, which is absolutely appropriate — a lot of times, you think a trade will be a good hedge when you put the trade on, but because of circumstances beyond your control, it turns out not to be a very good hedge (e.g., liquidity may unexpectedly dry up in either the underlying or the hedge, screwing up the normal correlation).

The real question here is: in normal market conditions, when does the correlation between the hedge and the underlying become “unreasonable”? In other words, how much leeway will banks have in determining how to hedge their books? Say a bank enters into a swap that only hedges 50% of the DV01 of the underlying bond. Would that be considered “reasonably correlated” to the underlying risk? (Obviously, I’m simplifying my examples for illustrative purposes.) After reading the Supplement, I strongly suspect that I know what the regulators’ answer would be: it depends on the particular facts and circumstances. If, for example, the swap was coupled with another transaction that hedged the remainder of the DV01 of the underlying bond, then both transactions would be permitted, because when viewed together, they were both part of a legitimate hedging strategy.

The Supplement also hints at what regulators would NOT consider to be “reasonably correlated” — it states that “[a] transaction that is only tangentially related to the risks that it purportedly mitigates would appear to be indicative of prohibited proprietary trading” (emphasis mine). I think it would be a stretch to say that regulators intend to consider any transaction that’s more than “tangentially related” to be a “reasonably correlated” hedge. But this at least indicates that regulators won’t simply accept a hand-waving, “trust me, they’re related” response to inquiries about the appropriateness of a hedge.

In the end, what we know is that a permissible hedge must be less than “fully correlated” but more than “tangentially related” to the underlying risk, and that if the appropriateness of a hedge is questioned, it will be a very fact-intensive inquiry. Which, by the way, is the way it should be.

2. “Additional significant exposures”: The proposed rule prohibits hedges that themselves introduce significant, unhedged exposures. However, the Supplement also states that:

“[T]he proposal also recognizes that any hedging transaction will inevitably give rise to certain types of new risk, such as counterparty credit risk or basis risk reflecting the differences between the hedge position and the related position; the proposed criterion only prohibits the introduction of additional significant exposures through the hedging transaction.”

There are actually three potential flashpoints in this prong. The first flashpoint is what constitutes “additional significant exposures.” How significant does the new risk that the hedging transaction is introducing have to be before regulators will require it to be hedged as well?

The second flashpoint is what constitutes mere “basis risk,” and what constitutes an impermissible residual risk. The Supplement says that a hedge that merely introduces counterparty or basis risk is permissible. Here’s what I would tell our trading desks if I were still working at an investment bank: start calling every residual risk a “basis risk.” Basis risk evidently doesn’t need to be hedged under the proposed Volcker Rule, regardless of how significant the exposure is. So if you want to profit from the price movement in a certain risk, then just partially hedge the risk with another transaction and call the residual risk “basis risk.”

The third flashpoint has to do with when the “additional significant exposure” must be hedged. The Supplement states that if a hedge introduces a significant new exposure, then the exposure must be hedged “in a contemporaneous transaction.” Assuming that regulators will allow banks some time to hedge the new exposure, the question becomes how much time will they have to hedge the new exposure? An hour? A day? A week? I strongly suspect that the regulators’ answer will be that banks will have to hedge the new exposure “as fast as humanly possible” (not in those words, obviously — the legislative language will probably be something like “as quickly as technologically practicable.”)

3. “Bona fide liquidity management”: This is where I would go first if I was trying to circumvent the Volcker Rule. The statutory text of the Volcker Rule defines proprietary trading in a very roundabout way, such that the real definition of proprietary trading is in the definition of a “trading account.” However, the proposed rule provides an exclusion from the definition of a “trading account” for accounts that are use “to acquire or take a position for the purpose of bona fide liquidity management, so long as [five] important criteria are met.”

The reason I would go here first if I was trying to circumvent the Volcker Rule is that if a trade could fit under the “bona fide liquidity management” exclusion, there would be no need to bother with any of the more complicated “permitted activities” exceptions, and evidently, no need to report nearly as much, if any, quantitative trading data to regulators.

The proposed rule requires that trades done under the liquidity management exclusion be done according to a “documented liquidity management plan” that meets five criteria. But none of the five criteria in the proposed rule appear to me to be prohibitive if a bank wanted to use the liquidity management exclusion for prop trades. The plan has to “specifically contemplate and authorize any particular instrument used for liquidity management purposes” — fine, just write a liquidity management plan that contemplates the use of a (very) wide range of instruments (a lot of instruments have reasonably liquid markets in normal times). The second criterion basically requires that an instrument used for liquidity management not be used “principally” for prop trading purposes, which is easy, since prop trading is prohibited regardless of whether it’s the “principal” purpose of the instrument.

The third criterion requires the liquidity management plan to be “limited to financial instruments the market, credit and other risks of which are not expected to give rise to appreciable profits or losses as a result of short-term price movements.” This criterion simply can’t be enforced terribly stringently — even Treasuries, which are the core of any serious liquidity pool, often experience significant short-term price movements. Fourth, the plan would have to limit liquidity management positions to “an amount that is consistent with the banking entity’s near-term funding needs.” This also can’t be seriously enforced, because it would directly conflict with Basel III’s new Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR), and cautious liquidity management in general. Finally, the plan would have to be “consistent with the relevant Agency’s supervisory requirements ... regarding liquidity management.” Seeing as the new liquidity rules set a floor on a bank’s liquidity management, and not a ceiling, using instruments that don’t qualify for the LCR in a broader liquidity management plan would certainly still be “consistent with” the regulators’ liquidity requirements.

4. “Near term” / “Short term”: The statutory text of the Volcker Rule effectively defines a proprietary trade as any trade done “principally for the purpose of selling in the near term.” While the Supplement doesn’t provide much detail on what constitutes “near term,” it does hint at an answer: 60 days or less. The proposed rule will apparently include a rebuttable presumption that any account used to take a position that is held for less than 60 days will be considered a “trading account.” Therefore, it stands to reason that accounts which are used (exclusively) to take positions that are held for longer than 60 days will not normally be considered “trading accounts,” and thus not subject to the Volcker Rule. But, of course, I strongly suspect that the regulators will say that this determination is ultimately going to be based on the particular facts and circumstances of the trade.

Anyway, there are a few more pressure points like this in the Supplement, but that’s all I have time for right now.

No need to beat around the bush here: Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” is a terrible book. It’s not even remotely accurate, and contains surprisingly little new, original information.

The fundamental problem is that Suskind is stunningly ignorant of basic macroeconomics, financial markets, the financial crisis, and financial regulations — basically, all the subjects you’d need to understand in order to write a competent book about the Obama administration’s economic team. It also contains so many patently absurd, completely unsourced assertions that it’s really not a question of whether Suskind makes up some of his material, but rather how much of his material is made up.

Curiously, the articles slamming Suskind’s book almost all cite a series of minor errors (e.g., saying Tim Geithner was the “chairman” of the NY Fed rather than the “president”) in order to demonstrate Suskind’s incompetence. The book is riddled with much more major errors — errors which provide the foundation for his cooked-up narrative. To give you a flavor of what I’m talking about, here are a few representative examples.

Suskind’s Ignorance of Basic Macroeconomics/Monetary Policy

On page 22, Suskind claims that the idea of making interest rate cuts the primary tool of monetary policy was “an innovation of previous Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.” Yep, no central banker had ever thought to make interest rate cuts their primary policy tool before Greenspan. It gets worse though. Suskind then claims that Fed interest rate cuts only stimulate the economy because they “prompt everyone, everywhere, to roll over debts of all kinds by replacing whatever is on their balance sheet with its equivalent.” That’s it. Interest rates are cut, everyone refinances all their loans, and that’s it. No new loans being made, no inflation, nothing. This is what he thinks monetary policy is (and he repeats this several more times in the book, so it’s clearly how he thinks monetary policy works). This is not some trivial detail, either — how can Suskind be expected to understand the decisions that were being made if he can’t even understand how the Fed works on the most basic level?

Suskind’s Ignorance of the Repo Market

On pages 72–73, Suskind’s complete ignorance of the repo market causes him to badly misinterpret something Tim Geithner said to him — an interpretation which he then uses to further his very unflattering portrait of Geithner.

First of all, Suskind simply asserts, without any sourcing at all, that in August 2007, Geithner had only a “passing familiarity” with the repo market. The idea that the president of the NY Fed had only a “passing familiarity” with repos is absurd on its face. One of the NY Fed’s primary functions is implementing monetary policy, and one of the main ways it does this is by entering into — you guessed it! — repos. Did someone tell Suskind that Geithner only had a “passing familiarity” with repos? Clearly not, or else he would have sourced it, even anonymously. No, it’s clear that Suskind simply made it up in order to further his fictitious unflattering portrait of Geithner.

Ironically, Suskind then proceeds to demonstrate his own ignorance of the repo market, in a discussion of Countrywide’s difficulties securing repo financing in August 2007. From the book (emphasis on the comically wrong parts added):

“That was really interesting,” Geithner later reflected, “because Countrywide had no idea what its exposure was, no understanding of what it had gotten into. And the fact that the market was unwilling to fund Treasuries if Countrywide was a counterparty was the best example of how fragile confidence was and how quickly it turned.”

Translation: the market would not even lend Countrywide cash to buy Treasury bonds, the safest investment in the firmament. CDOs, MBSs, or similar types of mortgage-based collateral that Countrywide was using to roll over its repo loans were suddenly seen as impossible to value or sell in August 2007, meaning that it was illiquid. The whole point of collateral is that it can be taken — the way the repo man repossesses your car after too many missed payments — and sold in liquid markets for cash. Collateral that is illiquid is no collateral at all. Countrywide’s intended use for the borrowed funds — to go out, like Sal Naro, and buy Treasuries and shore up its balance sheet or to use them as collateral for emergency bank loans — was irrelevant. Its collateral was no good.

Geithner, at the time and looking back, saw this strictly in terms of confidence.

No, no, a thousand times no! Suskind completely misinterpreted what Geithner was saying. Countrywide wasn’t trying to use CDOs and MBSs to fund its repo book — it was trying to use Treasuries as collateral on repos, and counterparties were still refusing to roll over Countrywide’s repos. That’s why Geithner said it was “really interesting” — because market participants had become so scared of counterparty risk that they wouldn’t even lend against Treasuries (which in theory shouldn’t happen). Suskind evidently doesn’t know that Countrywide originated the subprime mortgages that went into the MBSs and CBOs; it wasn’t the end investor in the CDOs. But Suskind uses his horrible misinterpretation to paint Geithner as naïve and in denial about the depth of the problems in subprime MBSs and CDOs. (“Silly Geithner, he thought it was just a confidence problem!”) There’s a mistake like this on practically every page of the book (his misinterpretation of a memo by UBS’s Robert Wolf is classic in its utter wrongness too), and it all contributes to a narrative that, at the end of the day, is simply false.

Suskind’s Ignorance of the Difference Between Creditors and Equity Holders

Finally, in the chapter on Geithner’s alleged refusal to resolve Citigroup (which very clearly never happened) Suskind writes:

Geithner, on this point, would not budge. Debt was sacrosanct. No creditor would suffer. Bair was equally intransigent. Secured creditors, such as equity holders, of course, wouldn’t be wiped out, but they had to face consequences for lending money to an institution whose recklessness had led to its demise. They must, she said, “face some discipline.”

Yes, you read that right: Suskind does not know the difference between secured creditors and equity holders. He apparently thinks that in a resolution of Citi, equity holders “wouldn’t be wiped out” (“of course,” he says). Again, this is not a trivial mistake — this is enormously important, because the entire debate over what to do with Citi revolved around the distinction between creditors and equity holders. The FDIC was (allegedly) advocating putting Citi’s commercial bank subsidiary into receivership, which would haircut creditors, whereas Geithner was advocating the stress tests, which in a worst-case scenario would lead to the government diluting equity holders, but not haircutting creditors.

This demonstrates quite clearly that Suskind lacked the knowledge or ability to understand the central dispute in his own book — the dispute that made headlines all over the country. How can Suskind be expected to understand what happened in this dispute if he couldn’t even understand what the dispute was about in the first place?

The answer, obviously, is that Suskind’s account of the dispute is not credible. (Bolstering that conclusion is the fact that the meeting in which Obama allegedly ordered the resolution of Citi has been reported on several times before, and every other journalist reported that Obama decided against resolving Citi.)

Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the financial crisis, or financial markets in general, would be able to catch 90% of Suskind’s mistakes/fabrications, so I don’t know how anyone who knows this material could possibly consider Suskind’s book credible. His account of the financial reform debate was, if possible, even more riddled with fundamental misunderstandings and mistakes, which renders his telling largely false. I was as close to the financial reform debate as anyone, and Suskind’s account is simply not what happened.

In any event, don’t waste your money.

I want to smack down this particular bit of misinformation before the regulators release their proposed Volcker Rule, so that they don’t get hammered for absolutely no reason.

Last week, the WSJ ran a story claiming that a draft version of the regulators’ proposed Volcker Rule would substantially weaken the original law, because the draft rule defines “hedging” on a “portfolio basis.” The problem with this story is that it’s 100% wrong. From the article (emphasis mine):

At issue is how regulators and banks define “hedging,” or trades designed to offset risk taken by a bank, usually on behalf of customers.

The law originally defined hedging narrowly as trades tied to specific bets.

Actually, no. The law did NOT originally define hedging narrowly as trades tied to specific bets. Here’s how the law defined “risk-mitigating hedging activities,” which are exempt from the prop trading ban (emphasis mine):

“(C) Risk-mitigating hedging activities in connection with and related to individual or aggregated positions, contracts, or other holdings of a banking entity that are designed to reduce the specific risks to the banking entity in connection with and related to such positions, contracts, or other holdings.” (Dodd-Frank § 619(d)(1)(C))

As you can see, it was the original law that defined hedging on a portfolio basis. This means that the regulators had no choice but to define hedging on a portfolio basis — the regulators are simply interpreting and fleshing out the original law, and the original law said that banks can permissibly hedge on a portfolio basis.

The law said that the hedges have to be “designed to reduce specific risks,” but risks can be — and, in fact, almost always are — faced on a portfolio basis. Interest-rate risk, for example, is typically measured and hedged on a portfolio basis — banks don’t hedge the interest rate risk on each Agency MBS they hold in inventory individually, because that would be horribly inefficient; instead, they measure the interest-rate risk of their entire Agency MBS portfolio, and hedge that. (And in reality, this “specific risks” limitation is meaningless anyway, because if a transaction wasn’t designed to reduce a specific risk, then it wouldn’t be a “hedge” in the first place, now would it?)

So, clearly, the original law explicitly stated that banks are allowed to hedge on a portoflio basis. The fact that the regulators’ draft rule allows banks to hedge on a portfolio basis does not weaken, dilute, or otherwise change the scope of the Volcker Rule one bit.