#capital proposal

6 11, 2024

FedFin Assessment: Trump II Financial-Policy Outlook

2024-11-06T10:55:18-05:00November 6th, 2024|The Vault|

Given the likelihood of a Trump win, we turn in this report to our outlook for federal financial policy in a very different Administration than the one that has set it for the last four years.  We will refine this outlook when final tallies determine Congressional control, but slim margins will dog both parties and thus significantly complicate the legislative outlook.  Congress, like the White House, will also be preoccupied with nomination battles, immigration, geopolitical risk, and acute fiscal-policy challenges in areas such as the new president’s budget, planned tax breaks, and tariffs.

The full report is available to retainer clients. To find out how you can sign up for the service, click here and here.

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16 09, 2024

Karen Petrou: What’s Next for the Capital Rewrite

2024-09-16T11:24:36-04:00September 16th, 2024|The Vault|

Few, if any, regulatory agencies are omniscient.  More than a few think they are, but more often than not regulators who fail quickly to see the error of at least some of their ways are regulators who lose a lot more than they might otherwise have lost.  Which brings us to the capital proposal and what next befalls this troubled standard after Michael Barr’s belated recognition that something had to give.

In the near term, we’ll see action by the FRB, FDIC, and OCC to clear a revised proposal along with the Fed’s quantitative impact survey for another round of public comment.  I have to believe Fed Vice Chair Barr cleared the revisions he previewed last week with his allies at the OCC and FDIC and is confident that the Fed board will mostly agree with him up to the point of issuing a reproposal, if no further.  As a result, a reproposal Mr. Barr said will amount to about 450 pages will soon be upon us.

Is this the last word?  Having relearned humility the hard way, Mr. Barr promises it is not.  What else might have to change to get a final U.S. version of Basel’s end-game standards across the goal line?

I would guess a lot more than would have been the case had the Fed and other tough-rule advocates more quickly recognized policy and political reality.  One key, if seemingly-technical, point on which to give is the pesky “output floor.”  Basel imposed the output floor because …

10 09, 2024

FedFin on: Barr Bows to Capital Reality

2024-09-10T16:44:00-04:00September 10th, 2024|The Vault|

Noting that the Basel process reminded him of the need for “humility,” FRB Vice Chair Barr today laid out next steps for the contentious end-game capital proposal.  In short, it will be entirely re-proposed with many specific changes to the current proposal (see FSM Report CAPITAL230) and a request to commenters to argue for still more over the planned sixty-day comment period.  The re-proposal as it now stands along with changes to the proposed GSIB surcharge (see FSM Report GSIB22) would cut the hike for GSIBs under the new standards by about half to nine percent and the impact for FBOs is now said to be minimal.  The impact on covered regional banks is also considerably less, likely now…..

The full report is available to retainer clients. To find out how you can sign up for the service, click here and here.…

4 03, 2024

Karen Petrou: The Madness of a Model and its Unfounded Policy Conclusion

2024-03-04T11:50:02-05:00March 4th, 2024|The Vault|

As the pending U.S. capital rules head into their own end-game, there is finally a good deal of talk about an issue long neglected in both public discourse and banking-agency thinking:  the extent to which higher bank capital rules accelerate credit-market migration.  Simple assertions that more capital means less credit are, as I’ve noted before, simplistic.  One must consider how banks reallocate credit exposures to optimize capital impact and, still more importantly, how the credit obligations banks decide to leave behind take a hike.  Now comes a new paper the Financial Times touts concluding that, thanks to shadow banks, “we can jack up capital requirements more.”  Maybe, but not judging by this study’s design.  Even with considerable charity, it can be given no better than the “very creative” grade which kind primary-school teachers accord nice tries.

The paper in question is by Bank of International Settlements staff.  It looks empirically – or so it says – at what it calls the U.S. banking sector’s share since the 1960s of what it lugubriously calls “informationally-sensitive loans.”  It documents a lot of numbers said to demonstrate lower bank lending share, using a model founded on both erroneous data and wild leaps to conclude in a fit of circular reasoning that more nonbank lending explains why there is less bank lending.  In the study’s words, “intermediaries themselves have adjusted their business models.”  What might have led banks to decades of technological intransigence and strategic indolence is neither clearly explained nor verified.

What …

29 01, 2024

Karen Petrou: The Risks New Capital Rules Can’t Cure

2024-01-29T09:29:45-05:00January 29th, 2024|The Vault|

Part one of my end-game assessment was last week’s memo laying out the growing odds that the agencies will be forced to issue a new proposal which hopefully makes better sense than the current one.  Part two here points out how the agencies have so tightly wrapped themselves around the capital rule’s axle that they are unable to see how many even more critical challenges are going unaddressed.  Risks overlooked are often risks even the toughest capital rules cannot contain because the cost of new capital rules actually contributes to the arbitrage and risk-migration accelerating the pace of systemic-risk transformation.  This is a negative feedback loop if ever there were one.

The new capital rules will be outdated by the time they are finalized because financial institutions of all persuasions will take advantage of every bit of regulatory-arbitrage opportunity within and across borders.  That the banking agencies and FSOC aren’t even thinking about how this might happen makes it still more likely that they will.  This is not to say that no changes to capital rules are warranted.  Some changes are overdue, but capital rules crafted in a vacuum will not stand up to real-world circumstance.

The collective book reports issued by the Federal Reserve in its semi-annual systemic forecast and the FSOC’s annual reports are remarkably backward-looking.  Focused more on not saying anything too frightening and bolstering ongoing initiatives, these tomes have long been and sadly still are poor auguries of risks to come perhaps all too soon.

Even …

11 12, 2023

Karen Petrou: Unicorns, Zombies, and Capital Regulation

2023-12-11T10:23:04-05:00December 11th, 2023|The Vault|

As was again clear at last week’s Senate Banking hearing, credit availability is much on the mind when it comes to LMI communities and small business.  This makes a good deal of sense given the capital proposal’s unintended consequences, but it’s only part of the story.  When start-up ventures are unable to get bank loans, they turn to the capital market.  This is often necessary due to the start-up’s risk, but in recent years it’s also been driven by hundreds of billions of investor dollars desperately chasing higher yields as the Fed year-in, year-out kept real rates below zero.  Now that rates are finally, really positive, yield-chasing funds have evaporated.  As the New York Times made clear, unicorns have turned into zombies.  Some of the walking dead deserved to die long ago, but the flood of capital-markets funds exiting this sector also strands ventures that could and should have been vital innovators.  Had these entities been buoyed by bank loans as soon as they were viable, many would still be walking.

Not every zombie is an innovator we’ll sorely miss.  Many bet big on not-so-critical products such as still more scooters.  However, one sector left high and dry – early-stage biomedical research – is literally a matter of life and death.

In February of 2021 when the economy was growing but real yields were negative, the total enterprise value of approximately 700 publicly-traded biotechs was $598 billion.  As of the latest data, this is down to $213 billion …

20 11, 2023

Karen Petrou: The Fate of the End-Game Rules Does not Lie in the FDIC’s Hands

2023-11-20T12:16:01-05:00November 20th, 2023|The Vault|

It’s a hard fact of life that nothing good comes to federal agencies caught up in scandal even when scandal is misplaced.  So the real question for the FDIC is whether the bad already all too evident at the divided banking agency will grow still worse, threatening the FDIC’s ability to participate in pending rulemakings or, even worse, resolutions.  It likely will be no accident if the FDIC comes unglued and the capital and other proposals fall apart.  I think new rules will proceed, but the FDIC’s threat is far from out of the blue.

Is this cynical?  I prefer to think of it as an observation born of experience, but this is a city about which Harry S. Truman famously said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

FedFin reports last week tracked Marty Gruenberg’s travails before Senate Banking and then again at House Financial Services, with Ranking Member Waters surprisingly aligning herself with her usual GOP enemies when it came to castigating Mr. Gruenberg over sexual-harassment problems at the agency reported by the Wall Street Journal as the week of hearings broke two days before.

And, as the hearing went on, Mr. Gruenberg found himself in even more of a pickle.  In another uncoincidental moment, Chairman McHenry got wind of 2008 allegations against the chair, allegations Mr. Gruenberg belatedly recalled when prompted by yet another poke from the Journal.  Now, Mr. McHenry has opened a formal investigation even as a statement from GOP members of …

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