#systemic

28 05, 2024

Karen Petrou: Why Regulators Fail

Eliza Allen2024-05-28T12:38:29-04:00May 28th, 2024|The Vault|

Last week, the House voted on a bipartisan basis to stick its collective fingers in the SEC’s eye over its cryptoasset jurisdiction. And, in recent weeks, the Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve has been forced to concede that the end-game capital rules that are his handiwork as much as anyone’s will get a “broad, material” rewrite. What do these two comeuppances have in common? Each results from regulatory hubris so extraordinary that even erstwhile allies abandoned the cause. For all MAGA fears about an omnipotent “administrative state,” these episodes show that those seeking sweeping change without plausible rationales are still subject to the will of the people even if the people’s will befuddles those in the government’s corner offices.

First to the SEC. Chairman Gensler’s position on cryptoassets over the past three years is that many ways to use them are securities and anything that’s a security is his for the enforcing. I’m not even going to venture a conclusion on who’s right or wrong when it comes to abstruse Supreme Court rulings on complex definitions. What underpins the SEC’s downfall – temporary though it may be – is that any question as big as what’s a cryptoasset and who can do what with it should be answered by rules subject to public notice and comment, not episodic enforcement actions meant to teach everyone else a lesson.

Most people would learn the lesson if a coherent regulatory policy spelled it out. When policy is set by whack-a-mole instead of …

20 05, 2024

Karen Petrou on: How FSOC Enables Systemic Risk

Eliza Allen2024-05-20T11:37:05-04:00May 20th, 2024|The Vault|

One can and should debate the extent to which nonbank mortgage companies (NBMCs) are as systemically-risky as FSOC says they are. But it’s indisputable that, if FSOC believed what it said, then the paltry and politically-improbable recommendations it announced are proof of only one unhappy conclusion: all FSOC can meaningfully think to do when it sees a systemic risk is figure out how to bail it out. This is certainly what taxpayers have learned the hard way and investors have come to expect. Or, as humorist Dave Barry pointed out after the mid-March systemic deposit bailout, “Eventually the financial community calms down, soothed by the reassuring knowledge that American taxpayers will, as always, step up and cheerfully provide billions of dollars to whichever part of the financial community screwed up this time.”

As we noted in our detailed analysis of FSOC’s report, the Council lays out the rapid-fire growth of NBMCs, the role regulatory arbitrage played in pushing banks to the sidelines of the residential-mortgage business that once defined so many charters, and the direct taxpayer and resulting systemic risk of NBMC liquidity shortfalls. Asked about this at Wednesday’s HFSC hearing, Acting Comptroller Hsu said that NBMC stress could lead to “widespread contagion risk” that could prove “severe.”

Could NBMCs be pulled off the brink under current law? In a little-noticed aside, FSOC says no because NBMCs lack the assets that would make viable orderly liquidation by the FDIC under its systemic authority even if the FDIC finally figured out …

22 04, 2024

FedFin on: Fed Systemic-Risk Assessment: Some Worries, No Troubles

Eliza Allen2024-04-23T16:37:21-04:00April 22nd, 2024|The Vault|

The latest Federal Reserve financial-stability assessment continues the Fed’s practice of detailing vulnerabilities without drawing bottom-line conclusions; the Board once did so, but ceased this practice after opining that the financial system’s risk was “moderate” shortly before the 2020 crash. The Board’s report now also says that it assesses vulnerabilities, not the likelihood of near-term shock. Survey respondents do make this assessment, with this report showing a striking increase in concerns about policy uncertainty in light of continuing inflation and the higher-for-longer rate outlook…

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

1 04, 2024

Karen Petrou: The Frightening Similarity Between Key Bridge and Bank Stress Tests

Eliza Allen2024-04-12T09:41:28-04:00April 1st, 2024|The Vault|

On Friday, the Washington Post reported that Key Bridge passed all its stress tests before it fell into the harbor. These were well-established protocols looking at structural resilience – acceptable, if not awesome – and, after 9/11, also at terrorist attack. That a giant container ship might plow into the bridge was not contemplated even though this has happened before in the U.S. and not that long ago. Which brings me to bank stress-testing and how unlikely it is to matter under actual, acute stress because the current U.S. methodology correlates risk across big banks in ways that can make bad a lot worse. Even more troubling, tests still don’t look over the banking parapet.

To be sure, the Fed’s semi-annual financial-stability reports (see Client Report SYSTEMIC97) muse about risks that lurk outside the largest banks, and FSOC dutifully catalogs nonbank risk each and every year in a copious annual report (see Client Report FSOC29). Last year, FSOC also said a lot about what might someday be done to address it via systemic designation (see FSM Report SIFI36). But what’s being done, not just said, about nonbank risk even as inter-connections become ever more entwined? Not much in the U.S. even though other national regulators are taking meaningful steps first to know where it lies and then to curtail it.

For example, the Bank of England and Australia’s Prudential Regulatory Authority are quickly moving past bank-centric stress testing, with Australia importantly looking not just within the financial …

25 03, 2024

Karen Petrou: How the FDIC Fails and Why It Matters So Much

Eliza Allen2024-03-25T11:45:45-04:00March 25th, 2024|The Vault|

Last January, we sent a forecast of likely regulatory action and what I called a “philosophical reflection” on the contradiction between the sum total of rules premised on unstoppable taxpayer rescues and U.S. policy that no bank be too big to fail. Much in our forecast is now coming into public view due to Chair Powell and Vice Chair Barr; more on that to come, but these rules like the proposals are still premised on big-bank blow-outs. I thus turn here from the philosophical to the pragmatic when it comes to bank resolution, picking up on a stunning admission in the FDIC’s proposed merger policy to ponder what’s really next for U.S. banks regardless of what any of the agencies say will result from all the new rules.

Let me quote at some length from the FDIC’s proposed merger policy:

“In particular, the failure of a large IDI could present greater challenges to the FDIC’s resolution and receivership functions, and could present a broader financial stability threat. For various reasons, including their size, sources of funding, and other organizational complexities, the resolution of large IDIs can present significant risk to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF), as well as material operational risk for the FDIC. In addition, as a practical matter, the size of an IDI may limit the resolution options available to the FDIC in the event of failure.”

In short, the FDIC wants to block most big-bank mergers because it can’t ensure orderly resolution of a large insured depository …

4 12, 2023

Karen Petrou: Why Curbing Banks Won’t Curtail Private Credit

Eliza Allen2023-12-04T11:03:15-05:00December 4th, 2023|The Vault|

Last Wednesday, Sens. Brown and Reed wrote to the banking agencies pressing them to cut the cords they believe unduly bind big banks to private-credit companies. The IMF and Bank of England have also pointed to systemic-risk worries in this sector, as have I. Still, FSOC is certainly silent and perhaps even sanguine. This is likely because FSOC is all too often nothing more than the “book-report club” Rohit Chopra described, but it’s also because it plans to use its new systemic-risk standards to govern nonbanks outside the regulatory perimeter by way of cutting the banking-system connections pressed by the senators. Nice thought, but the combination of pending capital rules and the limits of FSOC’s reach means it’s likely to be just thought, not the action needed ahead of the private-credit sector’s fast-rising systemic risk.

One might think that banks would do all they can to curtail private-credit competitors rather than enable them as the senators allege and much recent data substantiate. But big banks back private capital because big banks will do the business they can even when regulators block them from doing the business they want. Jamie Dimon for one isn’t worried that JPMorgan will find itself out in the cold.

Of course, sometimes banks should be forced out of high-risk businesses. There is some business banks shouldn’t do because it’s far too risky for entities with direct and implicit taxpayer backstops. This is surely the case with some of the wildly-leveraged loans private-credit companies …

29 09, 2023

Karen Petrou: How a Shut-Down Stokes Systemic Risk

Eliza Allen2023-09-29T11:41:22-04:00September 29th, 2023|The Vault|

Although there’s been some talk of what a government shut-down does to the SEC, there’s lots, lots more to worry about. Risks are out there, risks that should be taken very, very seriously by the Members of Congress who seem to think that more chaos stokes their political fortunes. Perhaps it does, but it could well do a lot of damage to their finances, not to mention those of all the voters who might well bear a reasonable grudge.

Where’s the systemic scary place? Or, better said, places? Some are right in front of us; others lurk in the closet waiting to pounce.

What worries me the most in the immediate future is the ability of bad actors to exploit what could be lightly- or even unguarded portals into critical financial market infrastructure. There are of course many, many bad actors out there with the sophistication and/or state sponsorship quickly to test and then attack critical points in the payment, settlement, and clearing systems and/or the grids on which they rely.

As I discussed on Tuesday, not all providers of critical financial market infrastructure are under the hopefully-eagle eyes of the federal banking agencies which, funded outside federal appropriations, will remain open. Some fall under the SEC or CFTC, agencies that will be hobbled, and some critical providers are wholly outside the regulatory perimeter. Even if their nodes of market access seem small, disruption has a bad habit of migrating at lightning speed. Even if power outages are …

18 09, 2023

FedFin on: Large-IDI Resolution Plans

Arezou Rafikian2023-09-19T18:09:58-04:00September 18th, 2023|The Vault|

Although a pending FDIC/FRB proposal imposes a raft of new requirements for resolution plans from IDIs with over $100 billion in assets, the FDIC has also issued a freestanding proposal doing the same, also setting information-filing standards for IDIs below $100 billion but above $50 billion. Aspects of the resolution-plan filing standards for large covered IDIs (CIDIs) echo and in some cases allow reliance on aspects of the joint rule with the Fed, but the FDIC notes that this rule is, as required by the Dodd-Frank Act, focused on financial stability. Its own IDI resolution rules now and as proposed instead address how the FDIC is to meet its own statutory requirements (e.g., least-cost resolution). The NPR mandates many new planning or filing requirements to achieve its goals, most notably adding new severability standards that may require new inter-affiliate or -branch firewalls that reduce operating efficiencies and, when it comes to broker-dealer or other entities, lead to indirect resolution requirements not mandated by functional regulators.

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

7 09, 2023

FedFin on: Living-Will Requirements

Arezou Rafikian2023-09-07T16:39:01-04:00September 7th, 2023|The Vault|

In conjunction with proposing a new long-term debt (LTD) requirement for categories II, III, and IV banks, the Fed and FDIC are pursuing other ways to enhance resolvability. Among these is new guidance for large domestic and foreign banking organizations that requires U.S. banking organizations and foreign banking organization (FBO) intermediate holding companies (IHCs) along with all their insured depositories when any is over $100 billion to file resolution plans. These are also redesigned to make the plans much closer in substance to those mandated for GSIBs.

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

22 08, 2023

FedFin on: GSIB Surcharge

Arezou Rafikian2023-08-23T10:19:58-04:00August 22nd, 2023|The Vault|

As anticipated in the wake of recent bank failures, the FRB has proposed a significant revision to the current rules calculating systemic-risk scores that lead to GSIB designation. These indicators are used not only for GSIB designation or a higher surcharge, but also for categorizing U.S. and foreign banks for other purposes and thus would also bring some banking organizations into categories subject to very strict prudential standards. The Board estimates that the overall impact of the changes to the surcharge and risk-scoring methodology are small and, regardless, warranted to enhance systemic resilience and consistency. It also estimates that the interaction of this new approach with certain liquidity and TLAC standards is generally minimal. However, the Fed has not assessed the relationship of scoring revisions to one way to calculate the GSIB charges, nor does the Board assess the cumulative impact of all of the changes proposed here in concert with its sweeping revisions to U.S. capital rules for all banking organizations with assets over $100 billion. It is also unclear how these changes in concert with all the others interact with the stress capital buffer applicable to large U.S.-domiciled banking organizations…

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