Banking

What risks should the state protect people from?

Michael Reddell Banking

Later yesterday morning, before major international markets opened for the week, the US authorities announced two steps in response to the failure of SVB Bank

  • first, depositors not covered by the FDIC (amounts in excess of US$250000) would in fact be completely covered, with the costs to be covered by levies (taxes) on other US banks,
  • second, a new Fed lending facility was set up, backed by the US Treasury, under which banks could borrow at market rate against securities that for these purposes would be valued at face value not market value.   For most longer-term securities issued in the last decade, market value is currently less than face value.

Legislative changes after 2008/09 were supposed to make bailouts much harder and less likely, but at the first real test – in respect of one failed bank that was 16th largest in the US (and another a bit smaller still) – there were significant elements of a bailout anyway. In respect of a bank that mostly had large deposits (this wasn’t an entity where just a few people had a bit more than $250K on deposit), all depositors were made whole. Most of the commentary suggests that had the assets been liquidated and depositors and other creditors been paid out what was left they’d probably have got back more than 90 cents in the dollar, and the FDIC resolution procedures could readily have allowed those larger depositors access to some portion of their money upfront (this incidentally is/was similar in this respect to the way the Reserve Bank’s Open Bank Resolution model was envisaged as working). The precedent value of this action suggests that in future any depositors at even a moderate-sized US bank are likely to be made whole (“what do you mean you aren’t going to bail out depositors in a failed bank in my district when you bailed out those Silicon Valley tech companies?”)

The main focus of yesterday’s announcement seems to have been to snuff out the risk of further bank runs. Signalling to depositors that they won’t lose their money (no matter how large and otherwise sophisticated they are) is one way of doing that. Another is providing ready access to liquidity for other banks, to signal that such banks would have no problem paying any requests for accelerated withdrawals that did arise. It bears some resemblance to a classic lender of last resort (a function of central banks that few have too much problem with in principle), except that whereas Bagehot counselled that central banks should lend readily on good collateral at a high price, yesterday’s announcement really only met the first element of that test. Much of the collateral has a market value less than the valuation being used to secure these loans (that isn’t good collateral, even if the bond itself is issued by the US government), and the loans are simply at normal market prices. It is, in effect, subsidised lending by the state.

Perhaps some might be inclined to pardon less than ideal policy responses when things have to be done in a rush. And I’m sure the weekend was pretty fraught for many relevant officials and politicians. But the US is a big country with huge bureaucracies and ample time and resources to have robustly war-gamed how failures and potential failures of significant-sized institutions would and should be handled, including thinking hard about the lessons from such exercises for future incentives. If state insurance of all deposits made sense, it made sense a couple of years ago, not just today. But that wasn’t the model adopted. It is hard to believe that lending on collateral using face rather than market value, at normal market rates, would ever make a lot of sense (at least outside some deep and severe systemic crisis where wholesale securities markets had become deeply dysfunctional).

Various people point out that the moral hazard is not complete. After all, SVB’s management will have lost their jobs (but not presumably past salaries and bonuses), shareholders will have lost their money (but not past dividends), and other creditors including any bondholders will not be made whole. But the benefits of yesterday’s bailout will also flow to the management, shareholders, and other creditors of other banks with somewhat similar (albeit typically less extreme) business models. And if the quid pro quo for the heightened moral hazard is supposed to be heightened regulation and supervisory intensity, how much confidence should people really have in that given the evident failure of supervisors and regulators in this case? Perhaps exemplary bank regulation might act as an adequate counter, but in the real world of US banking/regulatory politics?

I’m not one of those opposed to all deposit insurance. Well before the current government decided to introduce deposit insurance to New Zealand I was arguing for it as a second-best response because absent a limited deposit insurance system it seemed all but certain that in a stress event for any major bank (and perhaps some less major ones) in New Zealand, all creditors would end up being bailed out, and no one would have paid the Crown anything for the insurance that was being provided. Even in conjunction with Open Bank Resolution as an option in the toolkit there is still a high risk of a full bailout of creditors of the larger banks – partly because of the pressure that will almost certainly come from the Australian government – and at the margins actions like yesterday’s from the US authorities only increase that likelihood. Perhaps in truth, our deposit insurance scheme will end up only ever being practically relevant should banks like TSB or Heartland be close to failure (in terms of relative size comparisons they are our SVB).

There are people who believe that it is practically desirable, or at least unproblematic, to provide full deposit insurance. My stance is much closer to that of Peter Conti-Brown (professor of financial regulation and author of a stimulating book on various Fed governance issues) than to the former chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers.

And I’m not uninfluenced by having observed, and been involved with, our own NZ retail deposit guarantee scheme in 2008 where once guarantees were in place money flooded towards entities (notably South Canterbury Finance) that offered slightly higher yields. It isn’t a perfect comparison, since prudential supervision of finance companies wasn’t a thing at the time, but it is a useful cautionary experience nonetheless. And my perspective on bank runs is that generally they happen too late and too rarely, rather than seeing them as typically some random or fundamentally unwarranted event. The threat of a run is an important element in market discipline.

But I guess my wider caution is around the question that is the title of this post? What economic risks should the state be offering full protection against?

I can see a reasonable case for retail transactions balances being protected, even guaranteed. In that vein of course, people can choose to use Reserve Bank banknotes. More seriously, one reason why I have always been inclined to favour allowing the general public access to individual Reserve Bank settlement accounts (in modern parlance a CBDC) is precisely to provide such a credit risk-free option (even as, as I noted in my CBDC submission, I do not believe there would be a great deal of demand for such a product). But even then, an overnight Reserve Bank deposit account for transactions purposes might be free of credit risk and market risk, but it is hardly free of inflation risk (any more than a commercial bank deposit).

But if you or I have half a million dollars on deposit with a bank (let alone if an investment fund has $10m or $100m), there is no obvious public interest in the state guaranteeing that you will never lose the nominal value of your deposit. No doubt it would be tough to be substantially hair cut if your bank happened to fail and the assets came well short of covering 100 cents in the dollar but (a) you did have choices (under the proposed NZ system protection will be limited to $100K, so you have a reasonable option of spreading your deposit across five banks and securing full protection), and (b) there are so many other economic risks in life against which the state provides at most limited protection (all while providing a basic welfare system where entitlement in case of need is near universal, in the case of age universal).

I’ve already mentioned inflation. Out of the blue, quite in breach of their published targets, central banks in the last couple of years have delivered a quite unexpected 10 per cent boost to the price level. That is pure windfall gain if you have borrowed money in a conventional nominal loan, and pure windfall loss (not likely to be, or able to be, recouped) to those holding conventional nominal financial assets. Sensibly enough in macro terms, we don’t have price level targets, so no effort will be made to reverse these transfers, but for many the losses are real. For someone with $500000 in the bank, the real loss of purchasing power might be similar to many retail bank failure haircuts. It has surprised me a little – and is useful data after decades of low stable inflation – that more is not made of this arbitrary state set of wealth transfers.

House prices are falling at present in much of New Zealand. For many people – those of us without mortgages, and with a natural position long one (and only one) house – it doesn’t make much difference to anything. But there are plenty of people for whom it does – whether the owners of investment properties, or those who borrowed heavily at the peak of the most recent boom. If you had bought a house in Wellington 2 years ago rather than now you are perhaps 20 per cent worse off for that choice. And there is no state compensation scheme.

Share prices- and market values of Kiwisaver accounts – go up and down and no one proposes compensation (even champions of a capital gains tax are rarely keen on full offsetting of losses, which itself would still only offer partial compensation).

We have a system of accident compensation in New Zealand. I generally support it. It pays income-related compensation for loss of earnings, but only partially (80 per cent) and only up to a threshold (maximum liable income about $130000 per annum). Beyond that even for those risks, you are on your own (albeit with private options). And for many disabling conditions the state provides no specific insurance or compensation at all beyond the basic welfare system (and the health system itself of course). EQC cover is also capped.

Same goes for human capital or the fortunes of particular towns/regions. Or the real economic costs of a failed marriage. Many of these potential economic losses run far beyond the plausible scale of what an individual might have exposure to in a bank failure. And yet while we often sympathise individually, and support having in place a welfare system for basic support, we don’t as a society collectively attempt to compensate individuals for such losses. For most of such losses, no modern state – no matter how socialist in its reach – has ever really attempted to. We have debates at the margin – eg the government’s preferred social insurance scheme – but relative to many of the potential losses such instruments don’t really go very far.

So I struggle to see a strong principled case for treating larger bank depositors more generously. Yes, sometimes bank failures can appear to come from the blue, but they rarely do. Diversification is usually an option (and typically much more readily than you can, say, diversify your human capital or housing or relationship exposures), and so is private insurance. I suspect that few would really disagree as a matter of principle, and much just comes down to “its easier not to let any depositor lose their money” and associated fear of (the minority of ill-founded) bank runs, or “it is too hard to envisage our politicians even being willing to let big banks fail at all”, and living with the third-best consequences of that resigned stance. It isn’t a good place to be – especially when the beneficiaries of these resigned third-best policies will often be among the wealthier parts of society – although even as we try to change the politics, or create better options, there is no point pretending the politics are other than as they are.

UPDATE: Meant to include a mention of the NZ government’s choice – incredibly, on the advice of both the RB and The Treasury – to bail out all policyholders in AMI when that insurer failed after the Christchurch earthquakes. Not only were there no risks of contagious runs – insurance just isn’t like banking – but even if you thought there was a case for bailing out the less-wealthy policyholders, how could it possibly have been a wise, or priority, use of public money to be bailing out people with insurance on a high-end house who, at worst with a severe haircut, might have had to lower their housing sights.

I mean, in this country – as no doubt most – you can be charged by the state for serious offences and a couple of years later acquitted, or wrongfully imprisoned for multiple years and still find it a major hurdle to get serious economic compensation. (To be clear, I do favour erring on the generous side when mistakes are made when the coercive powers of the state are exercised in such ways.)

Banks, housing lending, and fixing housing

Michael Reddell Banking, Housing

In my post yesterday about the Reserve Bank’s FSR and the subsequent press conference conducted by the Deputy Governor I included this

The sprawling burble continued with questions about whether banks should lend more to things other than housing – one veteran journalist apparently being exercised that a large private bank had freely made choices that meant 69 per cent of its loan were for houses. Instead of simply pushing back and noting that how banks ran their businesses and which borrowers they lend to, for what purposes, was really a matter for them and their shareholders – subject, of course, to overall Reserve Bank capital requirements – we got handwringing about New Zealand savings choices etc etc, none of which – even if there were any analytical foundation to it – has anything to do with the Bank. 

Someone got in touch about the 69 per cent line and suggested that it must be a sign of something being wrong, going on to suggest that the Reserve Bank’s capital framework and associated risk weights was skewing lending away from agricultural and (in particular) business lending.

My summary response was as follows:

I guess where I would come close to your stance is to say that if we had a properly functioning land market producing price/income ratios across the country in the 3-4 range (as seen in much of the US, incl big fast-growing cities) then the share of ANZ’s loan book accounted for by housing lending would be much less than 69%, and in fact the total size of their balance sheet would be much smaller.  But my take on that is that the high share of housing loans is largely a reflection of central and local govt choices that drive land prices artificially high, and then we need financial intermediaries for (in effect) the old to lend to the young to enable houses to be bought.  The fault isn’t the ANZ’s and given the capital requirements in NZ there is little sign that the overall balance sheet is especially risky, and therefore should not be of particular interest to the RB (except perhaps in a diagnostic sense, understanding why balance sheets are as they are).  I’m (much) less persuaded that there is a problem with the (relative) risk weights, given that every comparative exercise suggests that our housing weights are among the very highest anywhere (and, in effect, rising further in October).

But to elaborate a bit (and shift the focus from one particular bank) across the depository corporations as a whole (banks and non-banks) loans for housing are about 62 per cent of total Private Sector Credit (and total loans to households are about 64 per cent). A large chunk of the balance sheets of our financial intermediaries are accounted made up of loans for housing.

The gist of my response was that that shouldn’t surprise us at all, given the insanity of the land use restrictions that central and local government impose on us, rendering artificially scarce – and expensive – something of which there is an abundance in New Zealand: land. If, from the perspective of the economy as a whole, relatively young people are buying houses from relatively old people (or from developers) the higher house/land prices are the more housing credit there needs to be on one side of banks’ collective balance sheets and – simultaneously – the more deposits on the other. If median house prices averaged (say) $300000 – as they do in much of the (richer) US – there would be a great deal less housing credit in total.

One other way to look at the stock of housing credit is to compare it to GDP – in effect, all the economic value-added in the entire country. Since the GDP series is quarterly and the credit data are monthly, I haven’t shown a full time series chart here. The data start from December 1990, and then only for an aggregate of housing+personal loans (but personal loans are small in New Zealand). So I’ve shown lending to households in Dec 1990, in mid-97 (roughly the peak of the business cycle), Dec 2007 and Dec 2019 (two more business cycle peaks), and March 21 (for which we have credit data, but only an estimate for GDP).

lending to households

There was a huge increase in the stock of lending, as a share of (annualised) GDP over the first 17 years of the series. What I’ve long found interesting is how little change there was over the following full business cycle (there were ups and downs in between the dates shown), and then we’ve had a bit of a step up in the last year or so (and even if house prices stay at this level, future turnover will tend to further increase housing debt expressed as a share of GDP).

Since real house prices have more than tripled since 1990 it is hardly surprising the stock of housing debt (share of GDP) has increased hugely. Were real house prices to, for example, halve then we might over time expect to see the stock of housing debt drift gradually back – it could take decades – towards say the 1997 sort of number.

Implicit in the journalist’s comment was a suggestion that lending to housing somehow limits how much lending banks do for other things. That generally will not be so. Banks (as a whole) are generally not funding-constrained – not only do loans create deposits (at a system level) but international funding markets are available (and used to be very heavily used, when NZ had large current account deficits). Of course, there is only so much capital devoted to New Zealand banking at any one time, but in normal circumstances capital flows towards opportunities.

But what has the empirical record been? The Reserve Bank publishes data for business lending from banks/NBDTs (which isn’t all business borrowing by any means – between funding from parents and the corporate bond market) and for agricultural lending.

Here is how the full picture looks

sec lending

For what it is worth, intermediated lending to business in March was exactly the same as a share of GDP as it was in December 1990. For younger readers, December 1990 was just a couple of years into banks working through the massive corporate debt overhang that had built up in the few years immediately following liberalisation. Farm credit, of course, has increased very substantially – again particularly over the years leading up to 2007/08 with the wave of dairy conversions and higher land prices.

On the business side of things, it is worth bearing in mind that business lending (share of GDP) was consistently weak throughout the last business cycle. Some will argue that banks had some sort of structural bias against business but even if so (a) over that decade or so there was no growth in the stock of housing lending as a share of GDP, and (b) there is little compelling evidence that systematic and large unexploited profit opportunities were going begging over that decade. It seems more likely that the markets – including banks – financed the profitable opportunities that were around, but there just weren’t many of them.

So my story remains one that if central and local government were to free up land markets and house price to income ratios dropped back to, say, 3-4 then over time the stock of housing debt (share of GDP) would shrink, a lot. There are some stories on which much cheaper house prices generate fresh waves of business entrepreneurship etc with workers able to flock to those opportunities, but I don’t find those stories convincing in New Zealand (in the aggregate). But simply repressing the financial system some more – the agenda the Reserve Bank and the government have been pursuing for several years now – will not change those business opportunities one iota.

(This post hasn’t tried to deal with the riskiness of the housing loans. My take on that is really the same as the Reserve Bank’s – at least when it isn’t champing at the bit to intervene. Capital requirements (and actual ratios) are high – materially higher than they were – and they are calculated in a fairly conservative way, with risk weights on housing that are fairly high, including by international standards. For what it is worth, the ratings issued by the agencies seemed aligned with that interpretation. )

That we have such a large share of total credit for housing isn’t, prima facie, a banking system problem – banks will follow the opportunities that (in this case) bureaucratic distortions create, and our central bank has demanding capital standards and in APRA one of the better banking regulators around – but rather just another indicator of how warped our housing market has been allowed – by governments – to become. But we knew that already. In fact, governments knew it to, but they prefer to try to paper over cracks, hide behind ever more pervasive RB controls, rather than tackle the core issue.

On which note, a couple of months ago the Wellington magazine Capital asked if I would contribute an article on what might be done to fix the housing market, with a Wellington focus. I wasn’t really familiar with the magazine – having previously seen it only in hairdressers, takeaway outlets and the like, for readers to glance through while they wait – but I said yes, and looking through the edition I picked up this week it looks like a mix of fairly geeky material (eg a whole article on lead-rubber bearings) and the lifestyle stuff.

Since I didn’t give them my copyright, many readers are out of Wellington. and the issue with my article seems to have been on sale for a while now here is the piece I contributed.

Free up the land: unravelling the unnatural housing disaster

Michael Reddell[1]

April 2020

New Zealand house prices, even adjusted for inflation, have more than tripled over the last 30 years.  The persistent trend was unmistakeable even before the latest surges.   Million-dollar houses were once the rare exception in Wellington, but now are almost the norm in too many suburbs.  The Wellington region median house price is now perhaps 10 times median income, putting home ownership increasingly beyond the reach of an ever-larger share of those in their 20s and 30s.

Most of the talk is loosely about “house” prices but what has really skyrocketed is the price of land in and around our urban areas; whether land under existing dwellings, or potentially developable land.  And this in a country with so much land that all our urban areas cover only about 1 per cent of New Zealand.

It is scandalous, perhaps especially because it is an entirely human-made disaster.   Land isn’t scarce, and hasn’t become naturally much more scarce, even as the population has grown.  Instead, central and local governments together have put tight restrictions on land use.  They release land for housing only slowly and make it artificially scarce, not just in and around our bigger cities but often around quite small towns.   And if there is sometimes a tendency to suggest it is “just what happens”, citing absurdly expensive (but much bigger) cities such as Melbourne, San Francisco or Vancouver, nothing about what has gone on is inevitable or “natural”.   

The best way to see this is to look at the experience in the United States, where there are huge regions of the country – often including big and growing cities – where price to income ratios are consistently under 4.    Little Rock, for example, is the state capital of Arkansas. It has a growing metropolitan population of just under 900,000, and a median house price of about NZ$300,000 –  little changed, after allowing for inflation, over 40 years.    The US also helps illustrate why it is wrong to (as many do) blame low interest rates:  not only are interest rates the same in both San Francisco and Little Rock, but US longer-term real interest rates are typically a bit lower than those in New Zealand.  The same goes for tax arguments: they have much the same tax code in both the high-priced growing US cities as in (much) more affordable ones.  High real house prices are a policy choice;  not necessarily the desired outcome of central and local government politicians, but the inevitable outcome of the land use restrictions they choose to maintain.

Both central and local government politicians sometimes talk a good game about making housing more affordable, but neither group seems to have grasped that in almost any market aggressive competition among suppliers is what keeps prices low.   People sometimes suggest there isn’t enough competition among, for example, supermarkets or building products suppliers, but if we really want widely-affordable housing again in New Zealand what we need is landowners aggressively competing with each other to get their land brought into development.  And that has to mean an end to local councils deciding where they think development should happen, whether within the existing footprint of a city or on its periphery.    We need a presumptive right for owners to build, perhaps to two or three storeys, on any land (and, of course, councils need to continue to be able to charge for connecting to, for example, water and sewerage networks).   It could be done now.  That it isn’t tells us that councils are the problem not the solution.  Too many –  including in Wellington –  seems to think it is their role to use policy so that in future lots of people are living in townhouses and apartments, even as experience suggests that what most (but not all) New Zealanders want, for most of their lives, is a place with a backyard and garden.  And they seem to fail to understand that simply allowing a bit more urban density, perhaps in response to a build-up of population pressure, hasn’t been a path anywhere else to lowering house prices. Instead, such selective rezoning simply tends to underpin the price of those particular pieces of land. 

Sometimes people suggest that even if this sort of approach would be viable in Hamilton or Palmerston North, it isn’t in rugged Wellington.    But as anyone who has ever flown into or out of Wellington knows there is a huge amount of undeveloped land in greater Wellington.    And if the next best alternative use should be what determines the value of land that could be used for housing, much of the land around greater Wellington simply does not have a very high value in alternative uses (not much of it is prime dairying or horticulture land).  Unimproved land around greater Wellington should really be quite cheap, although the rugged terrain would still add cost to  developing it to the point of being ready to build.

Some worry about, for example, the possibility of increased emissions.  But once we have a well-functioning ETS the physical footprint of cities doesn’t change total emissions, just the carbon price consistent with the emissions cap.  And for those who worry about traffic congestion, congestion charging is a proven tool abroad, which should be adopted in Wellington (and Auckland).

I’m not championing any one style of living.  The mix between densely-packed townhouses and apartments on the one hand, and more traditional suburban homes on the other, shouldn’t be determined by the biases and preferences of politicians and officials but by the preferences of individuals and families, exposed to the true economic costs of those preferences.  Similarly, policymakers should respect the (changing) preferences of groups of existing landowners what development can, or cannot, occur on their land.

The behaviour of councils over many years reveals them as, in practice, the enemies of the sort of widely-affordable housing which the market would readily provide (as it does in much of the US).  If councils won’t free up the land, to facilitate the aggressive competition among land providers that would keep prices low, central government needs to act to take away the blocking power of local councillors.

And this need not be the work of decades.  Of course, it takes time to build more houses, but the biggest single element of the housing policy failure is land prices. Once the land use rules look as though will be freed up a lot, expectations about future land prices will adjust pretty quickly, and prices will start falling.   We could be the boutique capital city with widely-affordable housing.  The only real obstacles are those who hold office in central and (especially) local government.

[1] Michael Reddell was formerly a senior official at the Reserve Bank, and also worked at The Treasury and as New Zealand’s representative on the board of the International Monetary Fund. These days, in additional to being a semi-retired homemaker, he writes about economic policy and related issues at http://www.croakingcassandra.com

On the ANZ affair

Michael Reddell Banking, Reserve Bank

I’m no great fan of David Hisco, perhaps even less of John Key, and hold no particular brief for the ANZ either. I don’t now, and never have, worked for commercial banks.   I’m an ANZ customer, although largely by inertia rather than enthusiastic loyalty –  I was a happy National Bank customer, uneasy about the ANZ takeover, but actually I’ve not had any bad experiences so never went to the effort of changing banks.   But even with all that, and a couple of days on from my initial one-paragraph comment, I’m still at a loss to understand (substantively) why the Hisco expenses issue is exciting so many people and generating so much coverage from so many (ok, yes I’m now adding to it).

As a reminder, the ANZ New Zealand operation is a subsidiary (there is a branch as well, but ignore that) of a large Australian bank that has been operating in New Zealand since 1840.   There aren’t many post-settlement entities that have been operating here continuously for longer than that (Anglican, Catholic, and Methodist churches, and ……?). In that time, ANZ hasn’t failed, hasn’t been bailed out by the Crown, and has provided bank services to New Zealand well enough to, these day, be the largest player in the New Zealand banking market.

As customers, I’d have thought the main two things we’d want from our banks were that (a) they didn’t lose our money (or through some TBTF mechanism get the government to bail them out, and (b) that they provided the transactions and recordkeeping services tolerably well enough.  People can moan about banks all they like, and it can be a hassle to change banks in the shorter-term, but here we are talking about a bank operating in New Zealand for 179 years and counting.   Plenty of banks and quasi-banks have come and gone from the market in that time, as customers (new generations thereof) have preferred one institution over another.    Even the fact that today’s ANZ has grown partly by takeovers (Rural Bank, Postbank, Countrywide, National Bank) doesn’t change that story very much –  the most recent of those takeovers was 15 years ago, and ANZ must have offered the best deal to the vendors (presumably believing they could add most value through the purchases).   People can badly misjudge takeovers but, decades on, ANZ is still here, strongly capitalised and profitable (it isn’t, for example, akin to RBS taking over ABN-AMRO at the end of a frenzied boom).

What else might bother people?  Well, there is always the issue as to whether banks are “excessively” profitable.  I suppose my instinctive bias here is that of an old-fashioned central banker, preferring a profitable bank to the alternative.  But even setting that to one side, I’ve always been rather sceptical of the “excessively profitable” story, partly because the balance sheets of the New Zealand subsidiaries don’t tell the full story: the profits are not just a return on balance sheet equity, but also on the implied support of the parent banks in Australia.  I’ve also tended to emphasise the relatively open regulatory regime we have here, allowing new entrants to set up and take advantage of any (allegedly) excess returns.  But even if there is less to those stories than I have allowed, the merits of such arguments –  which might argue for a more active Commerce Commission involvement –  really shouldn’t be materially affected by the question of a (now-departed) CEO’s expenses, legitimate or otherwise, properly documented and reported internally or not.

I also get that some people are bothered by the level of senior executive salaries.  To be honest, at times I’m inclined to share those concerns (at least a little), perhaps especially around people who are really only second-tier employees in big Australian banking groups.  But what of it?  It is a private business, in a market where customers have alternatives.  If I really don’t like the fact that ANZ remunerates its top managers so well, I could shift my banking to, say, TSB.  They won’t be paying their CEO and top management anything like as much as ANZ is.

And then, of course, there is a scale of this particular issue.  We are told that the amounts involved are mid tens of thousands of dollars, spread over 10 years, so perhaps $5000 a year.   In respect of a person whose total remuneration over that ten years probably averaged $2million a year.  It seems quite appropriate for the ANZ’s group chief executive to want to tidy things up, and to be uneasy about how these expenses may hav been reported internally (details of which the public haven’t been told), but why is it a matter of any public – or legitimate political –  concern.  It is a private company.   Perhaps some people might be puzzled as to quite why ANZ pushed Hisco out over what looks like quite a small matter –  the question has been asked, is there something more to it –  but again, it is a private company, and Hisco is well-equipped to look out for his own interests, including ensuring that he has had good legal advice etc.    Perhaps one might expect the Reserve Bank, as prudential regulator (and that is all), to ask the ANZ a few questions, to ensure that the expenses issue isn’t a cover for more serious problems on Hisco’s watch but assuming it isn’t –  an ANZ would be in serious trouble, including with the ASX, if they were misrepresenting that  – that is about all the legitimate regulatory/political interest I can see.

The story has been used by people on the left, including trade unions, to run a “a bank teller would never get away with it” sort of line. But even if that has some rhetorical force, it shouldn’t.  For better or worse, a bank teller –  one of thousands doing similar jobs, on standard contracts –  would simply not have found themselves in the sort of situation where there was ambiguity about what was acceptable, or what had been subject to an oral agreement.  And had they somehow done so, and been fired, they’d have had recourse to their union and to the protections of employment law.

In various articles in the last few days, I’ve seen references to the idea that the banks somehow owe New Zealand for its support (as if to justify public involvement in the Hisco-Key affair).  There have been silly references –  no doubt channelling flawed lines from our bombastic populist Governor –  that somehow the banks were bailed out by the governmment in 2008/09.  They simply weren’t.  There was no risk of any significant bank failing in New Zealand at that time, whether from the funding/liquidity side or from credit losses and insufficient capital.  It is certainly true that there were various Reserve Bank and government direct interventions during that period, but those interventions were not about “saving the banks”, as about limiting the potential damage to the economy that might have arisen otherwise (extremely risk-averse banks – in the middle of a global crisis – would have pulled in lending more aggressively etc).  And cutting the OCR was no “favour” – in downturns, market interest rates tend to fall, and the Reserve Bank’s hand on the OCR is really just meant to mimic that.   I don’t want to take this line too far –  there is some interdependence, and banks operate in a system governed by parameters the political system has set up (eg having our own currency etc) –  but the robustness of the banks in 2008/09 was a credit primarily to them, their owners/managers etc, not to the New Zealand authorities.

We’ve also heard people talking about about the case for a Royal Commission into something around banking, the call we heard last year in the context of the Australian Royal Commission.    And here there is the suggestion –  I saw it in the Herald this morning –  that somehow again the banks owe the Reserve Bank and the authorities, because the latter “went out on a limb”, or “stuck their necks out” to protect the banks.  That is simply rubbish.  Rather, the Governor of the Reserve Bank (and to a lesser extent the FMA) were playing a populist political card when they launched their inquiry last year  – in an area where, as even they acknowledged, they had no statutory powers.  After all the hullabaloo, they found basically nothing (not that surprising, given that different context in which banks operate here and in Australia, especially as regards superannuation), but it hasn’t stopped them using the issue to claim some sort of moral authority over these private banks, operating in markets where customers have choice.

But even if there had been something to the conduct/culture issues, surely those were supposed to be about public facing issues, things directly affecting customers.  Whether some small portion of David Hisco’s large expenses bill was questionable, seems –  to say it again –  like a matter for the Board and management of the ANZ, perhaps even for the staff (confidence in the integrity of your leader) but simply not a matter for government agencies at all.

I guess that among the sound and fury on this issue, there will be a range of interests and motivations.  Some will even be quite genuine and public spirited.  But it is hard not to read the coverage of the last few days and think that at least some people are playing distraction.  Banks are never likely to be that popular, perhaps especially not Australian ones (despite the fact that New Zealand benefits from having its bank part of bigger offsore groups) and they make a convenient scapegoat. Perhaps that is especially so when the old enemy of the left –  John Key –  is chair of the bank’s local board (as I’ve written here before, I happen to think it is unfortunate –  at best –  to have former politicians so quickly on such boards).    It shouldn’t have been a great week for the government –  what with the GJ Thompson affair, meningitis injections, and so on –  and it hasn’t been a great time for the Reserve Bank (all that pushback against their unsupported radical bank capital proposals) , and one is left   –  perhaps unduly cynically – thinking that in some quarters there will have been quite an interest in playing distraction by feeding a beat-up on the ANZ, for what really looks to be a rather small, albeit untidy, mostly internal affair.  For me, if they keep my money safe, do my transactions competently, and don’t rort others on any sort of systematic basis, I’ll be pretty content.

Throughout this note, I have stressed that bank customers have choices and alternatives.  Faced with overly powerful, weakly accountable, government agencies, citizens really don’t.     When Peter Hughes gives gushy speeches about Gabs Makhlouf –  the man he is supposedly investigating –  we are stuck with the clubby system.  When a Supreme Court judge thinks it is just fine to go on holiday with a senior lawyer in a case before the Supreme Court, we have few effective protections.  And when the Governor of the (monopoly) Reserve Bank never gives substantive speeches about things he is actually responsible for, plays fast and loose with the Official Information Act, claims he has no resources to properly oversee the bank capital system (internal models and all) that the Bank itself put in place, all while spending a million dollars on a Maori strategy (for a body with little or no public-facing role), devoting his time and professional energies to personal passions, be it climate change, infrastructure, or whatever, there is also nothing we can do about it.  The amounts involved –  money diverted from core functions (under budgetary pressure) to finance the Goveror’s personal causes and whims –  is probably already at least as much as the Hisco case over 10 years.  But we can’t change central banks, can’t dump our shares in the Reserve Bank.  Perhaps these issues (for some reason) excite fewer people, but when the abuses and slippages are by high government officials, they need to be taken much more seriously, precisely because exit isn’t (for us, citizens) an options.  The small(ish) stuff needs to be sweated.

On which note, I saw a piece on the ANZ affair by Auckland lawyer Catriona MacLennan, I very rarely agree with anything she writes, but her final paragraph did strike a nerve.

I have been on the board of a non-governmental organisation for three years. We are not paid a cent for our work, but I and the other board members would consider we had completely failed in our responsibilities if we let unauthorised expenditure go unchecked for nine years.

The Governor, the Bank’s Head of Financial Stability, and the (outgoing) chair of the Bank’s Board Audit Committee, might like to reflect on questions around unauthorised (operational) expenditure over at least as long a time.

Fit and proper?

Michael Reddell Banking, China, Regulation

Should Jenny Shipley be on the board (actually chairing it) of the local arm of China Construction Bank?   A question primarily, you might have thought, for the owners (CCB in China), perhaps taking account of the views and behaviour of the bank’s customers and investors.  I’d be pretty hesitant about putting my money in a bank (or any other company) that had as the Board chair someone against whom there was the sort of civil judgement that was delivered yesterday by the High Court in the Mainzeal case.  But I’m not, so I don’t really have a strong view on the matter.   And I might be as worried about having a former primary school teacher with no particular expertise in banking, and no reputation for being willing to ask awkward questions and follow through, as chair of the Board of any bank I had money in.

The Reserve Bank doesn’t have the luxury.

And here I’m going to rerun much of an old post on the matter of “fit and proper” rules.

Under Reserve Bank rules (outlined here):

no appointment of any director, chief executive officer, or executive who reports to, or is accountable directly to, the chief executive officer, may be made in respect of the registered bank, and no person may be appointed as chairperson of the board of the bank, unless the Reserve Bank has been supplied with a copy of the curriculum vitae of the proposed appointee and has advised that it has no objection to that appointment.

“Fit and proper” requirements are pretty common internationally.  But citizens should reasonably ask “to what end, and with what evidence that the requirements make a useful difference?”

The Reserve Bank’s prudential regulatory powers have to be used to promote the soundness and efficiency of the financial system (sec 68 of the Act).  The focus of the suitability (“fit and proper”) tests is presumably on the soundness limb of that provision.  Prior Reserve Bank “non-approval” must be expected to reduce the threat to the soundness of the financial system (not just the individual institution, but the system itself).  How might it do that?  The Reserve Bank says it focuses on integrity, skills and experience.

At the (deliberately absurd) extreme, if the Reserve Bank were blessed with the divine quality of omniscience, they could see into the soul of each potential appointee, and discern accurately how those individuals would respond to the sorts of threats, risks, shocks ,and opportunities they would face while serving with a New Zealand registered bank.  No one prone to deceive under stress, to breach internal risk limits, or to take “excessive” risk would get appointed.  That sort of insight would be very helpful.  But it isn’t on offer.

Instead, the Reserve Bank’s document suggests a backward-looking focus – checking out past appointments, past criminal convictions, and the like.  All of which is fine, but all of that information is known (or knowable) to those at registered bank concerned who are making the appointment.  And most of the stuff that is really interesting, and telling, is likely to be about character.  That isn’t knowable in advance, and certainly not by Reserve Bank officials.  What expertise do Bank economists and lawyers –  many very able people – have in second-guessing the judgement of the banks themselves in making such appointments?  And what incentive do they have to get it right?  The model looks like one that favours the appointment of grey colourless accountants and lawyers, who have not yet blotted their copybooks – perhaps never having taken any risk – with a bias against anyone who has learned banking, and what it is to lose shareholders’ money, the hard way.

Banking regulators worry about the risks to depositors and taxpayers if widespread or large banking failures occur.  But the first people to lose money as a result of mistakes, misjudgements, or worse are usually the shareholders in the bank concerned.  They might reasonably be assumed to have more at stake from bad appointments of directors or senior managers than central bank regulatory officials do.  New Zealand has in place pretty demanding bank capital requirements.

No doubt there will be people (and perhaps there already have been) who were employed by failed finance companies coming up for Reserve Bank approval in the next few years.  In some cases, those people will have had no responsibility for the failure, and in others there may have been some culpability.  But business failures happen, and they aren’t always a bad thing (indeed, unlike some systems, our banking regulatory system is explicitly designed not to avoid all failures).  Why is the Reserve Bank better placed than the registered bank concerned to reach a judgement on whether any previous involvement with a failed finance company should disqualify someone from a future senior position in a bank (or other regulated financial institution)?

In a similar vein, I wonder if the Reserve Bank has done a retrospective exercise and asked itself how likely it is that, with the information available at the time, it would have rejected any (or any reasonable number) of those responsible for the 1980s failures of the DFC and the BNZ.  Done in a suitably sceptical way, it would be an interesting exercise

I’m not suggesting there be no rules at all.  Perhaps conviction for an offence involving dishonesty in the previous [10] years should be an automatic basis for disqualification from such senior positions?  It wouldn’t be a perfect test, but it is certain and predictable, and probably better than a “we don’t like the cut of your jib” sort of discretionary judgement exercised by regulatory officials.  It doesn’t hold the false promise of regulators being able to sift out in advance people who might, in the wrong circumstances, later be partly responsible for a bank failure.

Perhaps too there might be a requirement that a summary CV for each director and key officer be shown on the registered bank’s website.  Those summary CVs might be required to list all previous employers or directorships.

But the current fit and proper tests seem to be an additional compliance cost, for no obvious public policy benefit.  It has the feel of something they feel the need to be seen to be doing, to be a “proper supervisor”, and get ticks in the right boxes when the next IMF FSAP comes through, rather than something where there is evidence that the rules have advanced financial system soundness in New Zealand.

Provisions of this sort cost money, both to banks to comply with and to taxpayers to administer the provisions, and impede business flexibility.  Individually, the amounts involved and the degrees of inconvenience, are probably not large, but the old line remains true “take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves”.     There should be a general presumption against regulatory burdens – particularly where they impinge directly on the lives and professional careers of individuals – and an onus on the regulators to show that their provisions are making a material net difference to worthwhile public policy objectives.

2019 here again:

I can’t see that the Reserve Bank will have any choice but to indicate to CCB that they would object to the contined presence of Jenny Shipley on the Board.    The Mainzeal case involved the failure of a substantial institution while Shipley was chair of that Board, and not because of some unforeseeable shocks out of the blue, but because of actions and choices that the Board had control over.  The record suggests, apparently, that Shipley had expressed some unease on the Board.  That’s good, but of little or no value to anyone if it changed nothing, and she then did nothing further.

Of course, there is almost no chance the local CCB is going to collapse –  any problems are much more likely to be group ones, over which the local board will have no control.  But rules are rules, and how could the Bank’s fit and proper regime have any residual credibility if Shipley remains chair of the New Zealand registered, Reserve Bank supervised, bank’s board?  And this isn’t a time for pleasantries.  Whether or not she stands aside voluntarily, or the owners remove her, the Reserve Bank should make clear that her continued presence on the Board (let alone chairing it) would not be acceptable to the Reserve Bank.

One could, of course, argue that no CCB New Zealand problems have become apparent on Shipley’s watch.  I presume that is true, but it is also irrelevant.  Since (see above) the regime has no way of knowing who will turn out to be a dud as a director, it can really only exercise condign discipline after the event.  And I don’t think there is really a case for waiting for any appeals either.  The judgement has been delivered.  Perhaps a higher court will interpret the law differently, but there seems to be less dispute about the facts than about the legal implications, and frankly whether or not the directors are finally held financially liable, if a fit and proper regime is to mean anything it has to mean holding people to a higher standard, as bank directors, than is evident in the record at Mainzeal.

As I say, it shouldn’t be a matter for the Reserve Bank.  There is so much high profile coverage of this case that no one can seriously claim to be unaware, and if Shipley’s presence bothered them, they can bank elsewhere.  If enough people are bothered enough, the self-interest of the owners will resolve the situation.  It shouldn’t be the Reserve Bank’s business,  but it is.    They need to be seen to act pretty quickly.

As for Shipley’s membership of the executive board of the China Council……surely that tawdry taxpayer-funded body that sticks up for Beijing at every turn, has Jian Yang on its advisory board, defends Huawei, and won’t stick up for Anne-Marie Brady is just the place for her?  Then again, if the government doesn’t want the last vestiges of any credibility its propaganda body still has to be in shreds, they should probably remove her too.  But that was probably so anyway after all those pro-Beijing words she gave to the People’s Daily in December.   Effective propaganda can’t be too overt.

Stress tests and bank capital

Michael Reddell bank capital requirements, Banking, Stress tests

Just before Christmas the Reserve Bank released a consultative document on the Governor’s idiosyncratic proposal to increase required bank capital ratios to levels unknown anywhere else in the world.    I will have some fairly extensive commentary on aspects of that (unconvincing) document over the next few weeks, but today I wanted to focus in on stress tests –  something the Reserve Bank would prefer you paid little or no attention to in thinking about the appropriateness of their proposal.

Over the last decade or so, bank stress tests have come to play an important role in assessments of the soundness of banks, and banking systems, in many countries.   Devise a sufficiently demanding shock (or set of shocks) and then require banks to test their individual loan portfolios on those assumptions and see what losses would be thrown up.     Sometimes there has been a sense of the system being gamed – the shocks and associated assumptions deliberately set in such a way that banks the supervisors want to protect don’t emerge too badly.  There were suspicions of such issues in the US in 2009, and in the euro-area stress tests more recently (I heard a nice story about the clever way one set of tests were set up to minimise the adverse results for some Greek banks).    When you are in the middle of a crisis, that sort of thing is always a bit of risk: supervisors and their political masters have rather mixed motivations in those circumstances.

But there haven’t any credible suspicions of this sort of “rigging the game” in the stress tests conducted in New Zealand (and Australia) this decade.  That is no real surprise.  Our banking systems have appeared to be in good shape, and it wasn’t obvious that there was anything the supervisors and regulators would want to hide.  If anything, with both APRA and the RBNZ champing at the bit to interfere more in banks’ choices (especially around housing finance), the incentives ran the other way (if you could show more vulnerability, your case for intervention was stronger).  I was still at the Reserve Bank when the first results came in for the stress tests published in late 2014, and I vividly call a seminar in which various sceptics (me included) pushed and prodded, unconvinced that the results could possibly be as good as they appeared to be.  But, various iterations later, the broad picture of the results stood up to scrutiny.

There have been several stress test results published in the last few years (nota bene, however, that unlike the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank has not published results for individual banks.  The Bank of England approach should be adopted here –  publishing individual bank results should be a key component of disclosure and transparency.)  One of those was a dairy-specific stress test, about which I’m not going to say anything more  here (I had a few sceptical comments here).

The other two stress tests  are more useful in thinking about the overall soundness resilience of the banking system, in the face of severe adverse shocks.

The first set was published in late 2014.   This is how they described the main scenario

In scenario A, a sharp slowdown in economic growth in China triggers a severe double-dip recession. Real GDP declines by around 4 percent, and unemployment peaks at just over 13 percent. House prices decline by 40 percent nationally, with a more marked fall in Auckland. The agricultural sector is also impacted by a combination of a 40 percent fall in land prices and a 33 percent fall in commodity prices. The decline in commodity prices results in Fonterra payouts of just over $5 per kilogram of milk solids (kg/MS) throughout the scenario.

Auckland house prices were assumed to fall by 50 or 55 per cent (as large as the biggest falls seen anywhere).   In a 2015 commentary on these stress tests I pointed out just how demanding this stress test was, especially as regards the increase in the unemployment rate (around 8 percentage points).

My point is simply to highlight that the Reserve Bank’s stress tests were very stringent, using an increase in the unemployment rate larger than any seen in any floating exchange rate country in at least 30 years.  It is right that stress tests are stringent (the point is to test whether the system is robust to pretty extreme shocks)  but these ones certainly were.  And yet not a single one of big banks lost money in a single year.  That might seem a bit optimistic –  it did to me when I first saw the results –  but they are the Reserve Bank’s own numbers.

No bank lost money in a single year, and –  this is the Bank’s own chart –  none of them even had to raise any new capital (none would otherwise have fallen below minimum required capital ratios).

box-a-fig-a3-fsr-nov14

This should have been a bit of a problem for the Reserve Bank, as they published these results –  sold at the time as an indication of a sound and resilient system – just a few months before the then-Governor launched a new wave of LVR controls on housing lending.  I wrote various commentaries on this point back in 2015, and occasionally the Governor and his deputy seemed to squirm a little (one example here), but not ones to let rigorously done stress tests get in a way of a favoured intervention, they went on their merry way.   Ever since then, they’ve been trying to convince us that their interventions further reduced the risks associated with the New Zealand financial system.

In 2017, the results of another set of stress tests were published.     Here was how they described the main scenario in that set of stress tests.

The four largest New Zealand banks have recently completed the 2017 stress testing exercise, which featured two scenarios.1 In the first scenario, a sharp slowdown in New Zealand’s major trading partner economies triggered a downturn in the domestic economy. The scenario featured a 35 percent fall in house prices, a 40 percent fall in commercial and rural property prices, an 11 percent peak in the unemployment rate, and a Fonterra payout averaging $4.90 per kgMS. Banks were required to grow their lending book in line with prescribed assumptions, and also faced funding cost pressures associated with a temporary closure of offshore funding markets and a two notch reduction in their credit rating.

(By then, the unemployment rate was starting from a slightly lower level).

If this test was less demanding regarding the fall in house prices, it not only explicitly assumes huge losses in asset values across the full range of types of collateral banks take in their lending, but also imposed material increasses in funding costs (rather than allowing any such pressures to emerge endogenously), and required banks to keep on growing their lending through a savage recession (in which demand for credit is in any case likely to be very subdued).   If there are one or two areas where this stress test could have been made a bit more demanding, overall the test is likely to materially overstate the potential loan losses in an economic downturn of this sort, because large dairy losses and large housing/commercial losses are highly unlikely to occur at the same time.  In any serious adverse economic shock, both the OCR and the New Zealand exchange rate are likely to fall –  typically a long way.   A fall in the exchange rate acts as a huge buffer to the dairy payout, even if global dairy prices fall a long way in an international recession.   These are details –  perhaps important ones –  but they go to the point that overall the 2017 stress test was a pretty demanding one (which is what one wants –  there is no value in soft tests, especially in good times).

And again, no bank made losses, and no bank fell below the minimum capital requirements. Here is some of the Bank’s text.

Credit losses: Due to the deteriorating macroeconomic environment in the scenario, cumulative credit losses associated with defaulting loans were around 5.5 percent of gross loans. Losses were spread across most portfolios, with residential mortgages and farm lending together accounting for 50 percent of total losses. Credit losses reduced CET1 ratios by 600 basis points.

RWA growth: The key driver of RWA outcomes were (i) risk weights increasing in line with deterioration in the average credit quality of nondefaulted customers and (ii) the requirement that banks’ lending grows on average by 6 percent over the course of the scenario. RWA growth reduced CET1 ratios by approximately 160 basis points.

Underlying profit: The banking system’s net interest margin declined by approximately 50 basis points per annum in the scenario. Banks only gradually passed on higher funding costs to customers, reflecting a desire to maintain long-term customer relationships and that some customers are on fixed rates. Underlying profits remained sufficient to provide a substantial buffer of earnings that accumulate to around 550 basis points of additional capital for the average bank.

The banking system survived, quite comfortably, the very demanding test thrown at it, based on bank loan books as they stood in early 2017.  As the Bank goes on to note, the results are sensitive to the assumptions used, but the Reserve Bank had no incentive whatever to understate the potential scale of the losses –  after all, these stress test results were released when they already had their capital review project underway.

Of course, we had one more “stress test”; the actual events of 2008/09.   Going into that recession, the Reserve Bank had been becoming increasingly uneasy about bank balance sheets.  There had been several years of rapid growth in housing lending, but there had also been very rapid growth in commercial property and other business lending, and in farm lending, and a sense that not all of this lending had been done with anything like the discipline that might have been prudent.    The 2008/09 recession was pretty severe, and quite a bit of poor-quality lending was revealed (especially in the dairy sector).  And yet, of course, the banking system came through that shock substantially unscathed.   One could argue that the test really wasn’t that demanding, since asset prices didn’t stay down for long, but in a sense that was the point: even with a severe international recession, and lending standards that did seem to have become quite relaxed, we experienced nothing like the sort of asset price or unemployment adjustments that the stress tests assume.   Capital ratios then were lower than they are now –  the latter now regarded by the Bank as totally inadequate.    Really severe adverse events don’t arise out of the blue, they are typically a reflection (as in Ireland or Iceland) of severe misallocations and reckless lending in the years leading up to the reckoning.   This latter point is one that seems lost on the Reserve Bank.

You’d have thought the Reserve Bank couldn’t have it both ways.  Sure, the most recent stress test results are now two years old, but they’ve spent the last few years telling us that they are pretty comfortable with lending standards (especially after imposing their LVR controls).  What used to be a focus of particular concern –  Auckland housing –  has largely gone sideways since then, and overall credit growth has been pretty subdued.  There is no credible story they can tell (and they haven’t even tried) as to how robust balance sheets in 2017 are now such as to make it imperative –  using the coercive power of the state –  for banks to have much higher capital ratios again.

Stress tests do get a (brief) mention in the capital consultation document.  They acknowledge the results

64. Recent stress tests have found that the banking system can maintain significant capital buffers above current minimum requirements during a severe downturn. During the 2017 stress test, the capital ratios of major banks fell to around 125 basis points above minimum requirements, while earlier tests had a trough buffer ratio of around 200 basis points. However, stress test results are sensitive to assumptions on the scale and timing of credit losses, and on the ability of banks to generate underlying profit under stress.

To which one might reasonably respond with “well, sure, but that is the sort of things you are supposed to test”.

But where they get rather desperate is in the next paragraph.

stress test from consultative doc

And here we have come full circle, back to rather strained reliance on the US, Spain, and Ireland in the 2008/09 crisis.

This chart attempts to imply that there is something wrong with the stress test results, rather than drawing the more obvious conclusion that they say something good about the health of the New Zealand and Australian banking systems, and about the macro environments within which those systems are operating.

Take the first panel of experiences, those from the late 1980s and early 1990s.  All five countries had newly liberalised their financial systems.  Neither banks nor borrowers nor supervisors (to the extent that the latter even existed) new much about lending or borrowing in a market economy.  In New Zealand and Australia there was wild corporate exuberance.  And in the three countries where there were systemic banking crises, all that was compounded by fixed exchange rate regimes –  that misallocated resources during the boom phase and then compounded the adjustment difficulties in the bust.

And what of the second panel?   In both Spain and Ireland there was a fixed exchange rate (membership of a common currency, but it amounted to much the same thing for practical purposes), and in the United States there was a deeply government-distorted housing finance market.   None of those cases bear any resemblance whatever to the situation of the New Zealand economy (and banks) in 2019.   We haven’t had the reckless lending, and although a future severe recession will involve losses, there is no reason to think that the 2017 stress test results materially misrepresent the health of the system.  (As the Bank has noted in the past, research suggests that in most serious banking crisis it isn’t residential lending that is the problem, but corporate and property development lending. The Bank has also previously been on record highlighting the importance of the floating exchange rate in providing a buffer in severe shocks, but now they seem to wilfully downplay or ignore that.)

The consultative document is now out for….consultation (although I think few believe the Governor is serious about taking on board other perspectives, and being open to changing his view).    But a story out the other day suggests they aren’t content to wait calmly for submissions to come in, and that the Governor has returned to the fray already in a letter to a single media outlet

Orr was responding to a BusinessDesk story questioning whether the central bank’s proposed new capital requirements for the major banks amount to gold-plating.

(I’ve asked them for a copy of this letter –  clearly already in the public domain –  but even though the Official Information Act requires them to respond as soon as reasonably practicable, I’m still waiting).

And what does the Governor have to say?

Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr says stress tests of banks have inherent limitations, suggesting they shouldn’t be relied on.

“We emphasise in our public articles that stress testing results should not be read at face value,” Orr says in a letter.

“Both the significant modelling uncertainties, and the fact that the banks know how/when the stress situation ends, limits the value of stress tests,” Orr says.

“Further, passing a stress test covering only dairy portfolios is not a meaningful indication of overall capital strength, given it is only approximately 10 percent of banks’ exposures.”

As Newsroom notes, the final point is simply irrelevant –  the Governor attempting to play distraction –  when as the Governor and anyone else interested knows the Bank has done economywide stress tests, across the entire loan books of the banks (see above).

And of course stress tests have inherent limitations.   That is one of the reasons to have as much transparency as possible about the tests so that users can evaluate for themselves just how demanding the Reserve Bank has been.   And while the Governor seems to want to imply that the limitation he highlights could understate the potential loan losses etc, there are alternative perspectives.  For example, knowing at the start of the stress test just how severe and lengthy the eventual shakeout (asset price falls, high and enduring unemployment) will prove to be may lead to more loans being called in earlier, perhaps at larger losses.    One thing we saw in the US in 2007/08 was that banks were able to raise fresh capital early on, at a time when few appreciated just how bad things were going to get.

I don’t, for example, recall anyone suggesting (for example) that the stress test results should result in a reduction in minimum capital ratios (despite the ample margins).  They are one input, but they should be something the Governor engages with a great deal more seriously, particularly when he proposes to go out on a limb and adopt capital requirements out of step with those anywhere else in the world.   And if he wants to run these arguments, it might be better form to do so in the published consultative document, than in knee-jerk responses to individual people casting doubt on his preferred option.  I can think of one or two half-decent counter arguments –  and I’ll come back to them in a later post –  but they aren’t ones the Bank has ever advanced.

Reality is that in thinking about the consultative document, on the one hand we have detailed and specific results from repeated stress tests (and the aftermath of a period of rapid lending growth and loose lending standards not many years ago), using the specifics of banks’ loan books as they stand.   A stake in the ground as it were.   And on the other hand, we have numbers that –  despite pages and pages of the document –  are really just plucked out of the air –  both the proposed requirements themselves, and the economic and financial consequences if those whims eventually form policy.

But more on some of those issues over the next few weeks.

 

 

 

 

The tree god again

Michael Reddell Adrian Orr, Banking, Financial stabilty, Regulation, Uncategorized

Some months ago the Governor of the Reserve Bank inaugurated his audacious bid to have his institution –  seen by most as a official agency created by, and accountable to, Parliament –  seen as some sort of local pagan tree god, with him (I assume) as the high priest in the cult of Tane Mahuta.  We’ve been told, by the Governor, that a people –  New Zealanders –  walked in economic darkness until finally the light dawned with the creation of the Reserve Bank.  It is pretty absurd stuff, not even backed by decent history or analysis, and one might be inclined just to ignore it, but the Governor seems serious.  In particular, he keeps returning to his claim. In fact, he was at it again –  claiming the mantle of Tane Mahuta –  yesterday with another little release that poses more questions than it offers answers (and which presumably means we’ll end the year still with no substantive speech from the Governor on anything he actually has statutory responsibility for).

Readers might recall that there was a damning report on the Reserve Bank as financial regulator, drawing on survey results of regulated institutions, released in April by the New Zealand Initiative.    This chart summed it up quite well

partridge 1

It has, presumably, been a priority for the Governor to improve the situation.   After all, even the Bank’s Board –  always reluctant to ever suggest any weaknesses at the Bank, even though their sole role is monitoring and accountability –  was moved to comment on this report, and the issues it raises, in their Annual Report this year.

And thus the Governor begins

In a step toward achieving the best “regulator-regulated” relationships possible, the Reserve Bank (Te Pūtea Matua) has established a Relationship Charter for working effectively with banks. The Charter will also be discussed with insurers and non-bank deposit takers in the near future.

One might question just how “best” is to be defined here –  after all, the public interest is not the same as that of either the Reserve Bank or of the banks, and there have been many examples globally of all too-comfortable relationships between regulators and the regulated.

But it was the next paragraph that started to get interesting.

Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr said the Relationship Charter commits the Bank and the financial sector to a mutual understanding of appropriate conduct and culture. “This is underpinned by the principle ‘te hunga tiaki’, the combined stewardship of an efficient system for the benefit of all,” Mr Orr said.

I’m not sure that understanding is necesssarily advanced when an institution operating in English introduces little-known phrases from another language to their press releases.  Here is how Te Ara explains “te hunga tiaki”

Te hunga tiaki

The Te Arawa tribes use the term ‘te hunga tiaki’ instead of kaitiaki, explains Huhana Mihinui.

The prefix ‘hunga’ is more common than ‘kai’ amongst Te Arawa, hence te hunga tiaki rather than kaitiaki. The essence of hunga is a group with common purpose. Hunga may also link with the sense of communal responsibilities. The same meaning is not conveyed with ‘kai’ … te hunga tiaki likewise invokes ideas of obligations to offer hospitality, but also to manage and protect, with the implicit recognition of the group’s mana whenua [customary authority over a traditional territory] role in this respect. 1

Which sounds pretty problematic frankly.  Banks and the Reserve Bank do not have a common purpose or a common set of responsibilities.  The Reserve Bank has legal responsibilities to the people of New Zealand, and the banks have legal responsibilities to their shareholders.  The two won’t always be inconsistent, but at times they will and there is little gained (and some things risked) from trying to pretend otherwise.  In both cases –  but particularly in that of the Reserve Bank –  there are limits on the ability of the principals (citizens and shareholders) to ensure that the boards and/or managers are actually operating according to those responsibilities.   Shareholders can sell.  Citizens are stuck with the Governor.

The statement goes on

“Writing it was the easy part. Operating consistently with the conduct principles is the challenge. We will regularly mutually review behaviours with the industry. Appropriate conduct is critical to the trust and wellbeing of New Zealand’s financial system, and the Reserve Bank – the ‘Tane Mahuta’ of the financial garden,” Mr Orr said. 

It is the tree god again –  a tree god that has some considerable way to go in improving its own conduct, be it around attempting to silence critics or whatever.

But this is also where I started to get puzzled.   In both those last two paragraphs from the statement, there is a suggestion that this document is some sort of agreed position between the banks and the Reserve Bank.   It is there in the charter document itself –  a one pager, complete with cartoonish tree god characters.

RBNZ-Relationships-Charter

(What I didn’t see was, for example, “we will avoid abusing our office and putting pressure on regulated bank CEOs to silence their economists when those economists write things we don’t like”.)

The word “mutual” is there twice, clearly suggesting that the banks have signed on to this.

But, if so, isn’t it a little strange that there are no quotes from any bankers, or the Bankers’ Association, in the press release, just the Governor’s own spin?   And when I checked the Bankers’ Association website, there was no statement from them. In fact, I checked the websites of all the big four banks and there was not a comment or statement from any of them.   Frankly, it doesn’t seem very “mutual”.   It looks a lot like gubernatorial spin.

And, to be frank, I don’t really see any good reason why there should be such mutual commitments.   Regulated entities don’t owe anything to the regulators.  They may often be intimidated by them, (privately) derisive of them, or even respect them.  But the regulated entities are just private bodies trying to go about their business in a competitive market.  By contrast, the Reserve Bank  –  the Governor personally –  carries a great deal of power over those entities, and they have few formal remedies against the abuse of that power.   What might reasonably be expected is unilateral commitments by the Governor as to how his organisations will operate in its dealings with regulated entities, standards (ideally measurable ones) that they and we can use to hold the regulator to account.      But that is different from what purports to be on offer in yesterday’s statement.

Of the brief specifics in the list of commitments, I don’t have too much to say.  There is a big element of “motherhood and apple pie” to them, and a few notable elements missing.  There is nothing about analytical rigour, nothing about transparency, nothing about remembering that the Bank’s responsibility is primarily to the New Zealand public, nothing about maintaining appropriate distance between the regulator and the regulated.  But I guess those would have been inconsistent with the fallacious claims about all being in it together and working for common goals.

It is at about this point that the Bank’s press release changes tone quite noticeably (not quite sure what happened to “one organisation, one message, one tone”).   Deputy Governor Geoff Bascand takes over and claims

Deputy Governor Geoff Bascand said the Reserve Bank’s recent announcement of a consultation with banks about the appropriate level of bank capital highlights the usefulness of the Relationship Charter.

And even in that one sentence he captures some of the mindset risks.  As I read the announcement the other day, it was a public consultation about the appropriate level of bank capital, and yet the Deputy Governor presents it as a “consultation with banks”.  If the Bank is going to run with this “Relationship Charter” notion, perhaps they could consider one for their relationship with the only people who give them legitimacy, Parliament and the public (having said that, perhaps I should be careful what I wish for).

And then weirdly –  in a press release supposed to highlight a new era of comity, open-mindedness etc –  the Deputy Governor launches into an argumentative spiel about the proposed new capital requirements.

“There is a natural conflict of interest. Banks will want to hold lower levels of capital to maximise returns for their shareholders. However, customers and society wear the full economic and social cost of a bank failure. We represent society’s interests and will naturally insist on higher capital holdings than any one individual shareholder,” Mr Bascand said.

Strange use of the phrase “conflict of interest”, which usually relates to a person or an organisation having two competing loyalties (perhaps personal and institutional), but even if one sets that point to one side for now, the rest is all rather one-dimensional and not terribly compelling.  He seems unaware, for example, that banks often hold capital well above regulatory minima –  creditors and rating agencies have perspectives too –  or that in most industries firms happily determine their own levels of capital, and somehow society manages (and prospers).  And, of course, there is not an iota of recognition of the way in which bureaucrats all too often serve bureaucratic interests (rather than societal ones), of the distinction between loan losses and bank failures, or of how the interventions of official and ministers often create the problems in the first place.

And then there is the final paragraph

“Following our Relationship Charter, we long signalled the purpose of our work and shared our analysis and consultation timetable. We have also committed significant time to engage with banks and provide a sensible transition period to make any changes we decide on. The Charter means what we are looking to achieve can be discussed professionally, while we continue to build appropriate working relationships. Outcomes will be superior and better understood and owned by society,” Mr Bascand said.

Of course, for example, whether the proposed transition period is “sensible” is itself a matter for consultation (one would hope –  and not just with banks).  Given the high probability of a recession in the next five years –  and the limited firepower here and abroad to deal with a severe recession –  some might reasonably wonder at just how wise it would be to compel big increases in capital ratios over that five year period, at a time when the Bank’s own analysis repeatedly suggests the banks are sound with current capital levels.   Credit availability might well be more than usually constrained.

One might go on to note that the level of disclosure in the consultative document is seriously inadequate for such a substantial intervention –  one that would take New Zealand further away from the international mainstream not closer to it.   As I noted in a post a few days ago, back in 2012 the Bank published a fuller cost-benefit analysis of the sorts of capital requirements that were then in place.  There is nothing similar in the consultative document issued last week, not even (I gather) any engagement with the previous cost-benefit analysis.  Given the amounts of money involved, that is simply unacceptable.  I’ve lodged an Official Information Act request for the (any) modelling and analysis they’ve done, but I (and others) shouldn’t have needed to; it should have been released as a matter of course.  In fact, even better they should have published a series of technical background papers over the year, held discussions with a range of interested parties (not just banks) before coming to the decisions they chose to formally consult on.      That is what good regulatory process might have looked like.

And then there is that bold final claim

Outcomes will be superior and better understood and owned by society

I’m all for effective and professional relationships between the Reserve Bank and the banks it regulates.  Perhaps that may even lead to better policy outcomes, but there is no guaranteee of that (after all, at the end of it all the law allows the Governor to make policy pretty much on a personal whim –  which is a lot like what the proposed higher capital ratios feel like).  But quite how a better relationship between the Reserve Bank and the banks will make outcomes “better understood and owned by society” is a complete mystery to me.   There are plenty of examples of regulators and the regulated ganging up against the public interest, and others of the regulators ramming through changes that might –  or might not –  be in society’s interest.  There is simply no easy mapping from a better relationship between the Bank and the banks, and good outcomes for society, let alone ones that –  whatever it means –  are “owned by society”.   Good outcomes rely heavily on very good and searching analysis.  And nothing in the Charter commits the Bank to that.

When one reads the argumentative second half of the press release it is little wonder the banks themselves wanted nothing to do with the statement.   I guess there isn’t much chance of the banks and the Reserve Bank getting too close to each other in the coming months as they (and the bank parents and APRA no doubt too) fight over the billions of additional capital Adrian Orr thinks they should have.

Meanwhile, the Governor can play at tree gods.  But it would be much better for everyone, including most notably citizens, if he were to engage openly and (in particular) more substantively on the issues he has legal responsibility for.   Cartoons and glib statements don’t build confidence where it counts.

 

 

 

Bank capital proposals: a few initial comments

Michael Reddell bank capital requirements, Banking, Financial stabilty

I wasn’t planning to write today about the Reserve Bank’s proposed new bank capital requirements, announced yesterday.  I’ll save a substantive treatment of their consultative document until (after I’ve read it and in) the New Year.   But I found myself quoted in an article on the proposals in today’s Dominion-Post, in a way that doesn’t really reflect my views.  Perhaps that is what happens when a journalist rings while you are out Christmas shopping and didn’t even know the document had been released. But I repeatedly pointed out to him that, despite some scepticism upfront, I’d have to look at documents in full and (for example) critically review any cost-benefit analysis the Bank was providing before reaching a firm view.

The gist of the proposal was captured in this quote from Deputy Governor Geoff Bascand

“We are proposing to almost double the required amount of high quality capital that banks will have to hold,” Bascand said.

Or in this chart I found on a quick skim through the document.

capital requirements

These are very big changes the Governor is proposing.   As I understand it, and as reflected in my comments in the article, they would leave capital requirements (capital as a share of risk-weighted assets) in New Zealand higher than almost anywhere else in the advanced world.

These were the other comments I was reported as making

The magnitude of the new capital required by banks surprised former Reserve Bank head of financial markets, Michael Reddell, who now blogs on the central bank.

A policy move of this scale would have an impact on the value of New Zealand banks, though ASB, BNZ, Westpac and ANZ are all owned by Australian companies listed on the ASX sharemarket.

“If these were domestically listed companies, you would see the impact immediately,” Reddell said.

That would be through a fall in the price of their shares.

Many KiwiSaver funds own shares in the Australian banks.

I think the journalist got a bit the wrong end of the stick re the first comments –  perhaps what happens discussing such things, sight unseen, in a carpark.  In many respects the magnitude of the increase isn’t that surprising given that the Governor had already indicated –  a week or so before –  his desire to have banks able to resist sufficiently large shocks that, on specific assumptions, systemic crises would occur no more than once in 200 years.  That is much more demanding than what previous capital requirements have been based on –  the same ones the Reserve Bank produced a cost-benefit analysis in support of only five or so years ago, and which have had them ever since declaring at every FSR  how robust the New Zealand banking system is.

As for the second half of the comments, they were a hypothetical in response to the journalist’s question about whether higher bank capital requirements would be felt in wealth losses by (for example) people with Kiwisaver accounts who might hold bank shares.  He was uneasy about the line the Bank used that the increased capital requirements were equivalent to 70 per cent of estimated/forecast bank profits over the five year transitional period (of itself, this isn’t an additional cost or loss of wealth).  My point was that if the New Zealand banks (subsidiaries of the Australian banks or Kiwibank) were listed companies, such an effect would be visible directly, because (rightly or wrongly) markets tend to treat higher equity capital requirements as an additional cost on the business, and thus we could have expected the share price of the New Zealand companies to fall, at least initially.    As it is, I’d have thought it would be near-impossible to see any material impact on the share price of the parents (or thus on the value of any shares held in Kiwisaver accounts).

My bottom-line view remains the one I expressed here a couple of weeks ago

Time will tell how persuasive their case is, but given the robustness of the banking system in the face of previous demanding stress tests, the marginal benefits (in terms of crisis probability reduction) for an additional dollar of required capital must now be pretty small.

And, thus, I’m looking forward to critically reviewing their analysis, including in the light of that previous cost-benefit analysis.   Is it really worth compelling banks to hold much more capital than the market seems to require (even from institutions small enough no one thinks a government will bail them out)?

In thinking through this issue, there are some other relevant considerations to bear in mind.  The first is to reflect on just how unsatisfactory it is that decisions of this magnitude are left to a single unelected individual who, in this particular case, does not even have any particular specialist expertise in the subject.  And his most senior manager responsible for financial stability only took up his job a year ago, having previously had no professional background in banking, financial stability or financial regulation.   The legislation is crying out for an overhaul –  big policy decisions like these really should be made by those we can hold to account (elected politicians).    And note that banks have no substantive appeal rights in these matters, even though the Governor is, in effect, prosecutor, judge and jury, and (in effect) accountable to no one much.

The other is to note that there is likely to be very considerable pushback from Australia on these proposals –  both the parent banks of the subsidiaries operating here and, quite probably, from the Australian regulator (APRA) itself.   The proposed new capital requirements here are far higher than those required in Australia (and for the banking groups as a whole).  APRA has adopted a standard that Australian banks should be capitalised so that the system is “unquestionably strong”, but their Tier 1 capital requirement is apparently “only” 10.5 per cent.       Of course, subsidiaries operating in New Zealand are New Zealand registered and regulated banks, and our authorities should be expected to regulate primarily in the interests of New Zealand.   We won’t look after Australia, and they are unlikely to look after us, in a crisis (and coping with crises are really what bank capital is about).  But you have to wonder why we should be inclined to place such confidence in our Reserve Bank’s analysis, relative to that of APRA –  an organisation with (especially now) much greater institutional depth and expertise.  Given the legislated trans-Tasman banking commitments, and the common interests of the two sets of authorities in the health of the banking groups, one can’t help thinking that it would have been more reassuring to have seen the two regulators (and the two governments for that matter – limiting fiscal risks in the event of bank failure) reach a rather more in-common view on the appropriate capitalisation of banks in Australasia.

But perhaps the Governor really is leading the way, supported by compelling analysis.  More on that (superficially unlikely) possibility in the New Year.   In the meantime, for anyone interested, there is a non-technical summary of their proposal (although not of any supporting analysis) here.

I didn’t move to Australia; my bank came to me

Michael Reddell Banking, NZ politics

I was in town for a meeting earlier in the week, and walking along Lambton Quay I noticed this gigantic advertisement adorning the wall of an office building.

TSB photo.jpeg

I’ve always quite admired TSB, as the little bank that could. When I paid more attention to these things, they seemed to have innovative products, good technology, and had to stand on their own feet.  Oh, and there was the feisty CEO who once told visiting central bankers worrying about pandemic risks and bank preparedness that in New Plymouth they had bigger risks to worry about, turning around as he spoke and pointing out the window at Mt Egmont, which will erupt again.

I guess they have always played the “local bank” line in their marketing to some extent, but it was the brazenness of that billboard that astonished me.  Both the message and, even more so, the location.   This is central Wellington, and if there is any sort of “ground zero” for commitment to an open outward-oriented economy surely it must be here.  Much as I dislike the word, New Zealand’s “globalists” disproportionately live and work here.  Within a radius of a couple of hundred metres from this billboard you capture Treasury, MBIE, the Reserve Bank, MFAT, the Ministry for Primary Industry, and the Productivity Commission.  Why, the “right-wing” business think-tank the New Zealand Initiative is just over the road –  Eric Crampton and Oliver Hartwich must just be grateful the billboard faces away from their offices and they don’t have to see this crass effort every time they look out the window.

Perhaps Gabs Makhlouf, Brook Barrington, Adrian Orr et al don’t get out for a lunchtime walk, but their minions do and they must be the target audience for this billboard – Lambton Quay is always at its busiest at lunchtime.

And firms spend money on marketing presumably because they believe it will work –  “work” in this context presumably being drawing in new customers (unless it is just designed to court more Shane Jones Provincial Growth Fund goodies for Taranaki –  TSB being owned by a community trust.)  Are Wellingtonians really going to be swayed by this sort of crude nationalism and economic illiteracy.  It scares me a bit if so.

I didn’t move to Korea and yet the screen I’m typing to was made by a Korean company, and the profits from its design and manufacture presumably accrued to the owners of Samsung.   I didn’t move to the United States, and yet the platform this blog uses is (I think) American, and the profits from what I pay for using it accrue to the owners of that company.   One could go on –  the car, the printer, the TV, the bottle of French wine, or those Californian oranges in the fruit bowl.  The jersey I’m wearing is American and the books on the shelves next to me are from all over the Anglo world –  there will (producers hope) have been profits associated with each of them.  And although there probably isn’t much profit involved, my morning newspaper is produced by an Australian-owned company.  And yet, like 400000+ others I live in Wellington.

It is trade, and it is a good thing –  usually mutually beneficial, and if there are occasional exceptions to that presumption, you wouldn’t expect them to be successfully highlighted down Lambton Quay (even if too many public servants are all too keen on the possibilities of clever government interventions in our lives).   I didn’t move to Australia, and yet the shareholders of ANZ invested some of their savings to provide banking services to New Zealanders like me.  That was good of them –  in fact the earliest progenitors of ANZ were setting banking services here in 1840 (10 years earlier than the founding of what became TSB) when there wasn’t much organised here at all.   The profits from those transactions accrue to the shareholders (many but not all of whom are in Australia), because they provide the risk capital that underpins the business.  And while the TSB talks of the profits “moving to” Australia, in fact successful businesses –  that find willing purchasers of their services –  typically reinvest many of the profits in the business, right here in New Zealand.    Banking is a big business –  some might think too big and views will differ on that, but that isn’t the line TSB is running –  so it takes lots of capital.  That will, often or even typically, mean generating quite large profits –  the returns on that capital.

(Although it is a bit of a distraction, one could note that of the five New Zealand owned banks, four are directly capital-constrained by their ownership structures –  Kiwibank being government-owned, TSB owned by a community trust, and SBS  and Coop being a (modestly-sized) mutuals –  and only one of the NZ-owned banks manages a credit rating better than BBB. Not one of those institutions could even begin to displace the major players, and the risks facing New Zealand would increase if they were to try.)

TSB’s billboard proclaims to sophisticated (as they like to think) Wellingtonians that TSB is “proudly supporting New Zealand”.  This sort of crass attempt to play some sort of crude nationalist card supports no one other than themselves –  and perhaps the Shane Jones-isation of New Zealand politics.  It diminishes, and reflects poorly on, those who commission the advert, who surely know better.  They should stop trying to gull New Zealanders with some weird autarkic vision that, if followed through on, would be bad for a big country, and totally crazy for a small one.

I once worked for someone who told me his maxim was that from choice he would always use an overseas provider if he could (as I recall this was in the Ansett vs Air NZ days) to keep the pressure on the New Zealand providers to work harder and produce excellent products and services.  I never went fully along with him, but having seen that distasteful TSB advert on Tuesday, it actually gave some small pleasure to be in an ANZ branch yesterday and to receive friendly, helpful, accommodating service on the small matter I wanted dealt with. I’d say I’d be happy to have seen the resulting profits accruing to Australian shareholders, but they were so helpful they even waived the small fee on the matter in question –  lifetime customer value and all that I suppose.

As for TSB, they really should do better.  I hope Wellingtonians passing that big advert look on with disdain, grateful instead for the opportunities that foreign trade and investment –  in both directions –  created, and continues to create, for New Zealanders.    Or would we welcome British consumers being regaled with billboards proclaiming “you didn’t move to New Zealand, so why should the profits on that leg of lamb?”.

Local listing for banks: a case for one in particular

Michael Reddell Banking, Uncategorized

There was a very strange article in the Herald yesterday from one Duncan Bridgeman claiming that it was, in the words of the hard copy headline “Time to force Aussie banks to list in NZ”.

What wasn’t at all clear was why.

Bank profit announcements seemed to be the prompt for the column

Australian banks reaping huge profits from their New Zealand customers is a perennial scab that gets ripped off every time financial results come in.

I’m not persuaded the banks earn excessive profits here, but I know some other serious people take the opposite view.  But even if they are right, surely that is a competition policy issue –  the case for one of the new market studies perhaps, and any resulting recommendations.  There is nothing in the article explaining how forcing the Australian banks to sell down part of their New Zealand operations would affect, for the better, competition in the New Zealand banking services market.

The other prompt appear to be industry developments in Australia

Meanwhile, Australia’s big banks are starting to move away from vertical integration, partly because of conflicts of interest but also because their financial services model is unlikely to sustain the same profits over the longer term.

Suncorp, ANZ, CBA and NAB have all divested their life insurance operations. The latter two have also announced plans to spin off their wealth management operations. Westpac remains wedded to these areas of business but is expected to follow suit at some point.

And just last week financial services firm AMP, also heavily damaged by the banking royal commission, announced the sale of its wealth protection unit to US firm Resolution Life for A$3.3 billion and divulged plans to offload its New Zealand wealth management and advice businesses through a public offer and NZX listing next year.

But not one of those divestments has anything to do with core banking operations, unlike the approach Bridgeman appears to be proposing for the New Zealand bank subsidiaries.

A not unimportant word that one –   subsidiaries.  Presumably Bridgeman is fully aware, even though his article doesn’t mention, that all four Australian banks do the bulk of their New Zealand business not through branches, but through legally separate New Zealand subsidiary companies, with their own boards of directors (and statutory duties). (New Zealand compels them to do so, at least in respect of the retail business).

But when I read this paragraph I had to wonder if he really did appreciate that.

But if ever there was a time to raise the prospect of some form of domestic ownership and oversight of the banks, it is now.

The problem is it will never happen unless the Aussie banks are forced to by our politicians and regulators. After all, the last thing the banks want right now is another regulator to answer to.

Yet, why should it be accepted that four of this country’s five most profitable companies are effectively regulated in Australia?

The New Zealand subsidiaries are fully subject to New Zealand law: competition law, prudential regulation, financial conduct law, health and safety law.  The lot.  (Even the branches are subject to much New Zealand law, but leave them aside for now.)   The Reserve Bank of New Zealand sets minimum capital standards. minimum liquidity standards, disclosure requirements and so on.

Of course, since the New Zealand subsidiaries are part of much larger Australian-based banking groups, APRA’s regulations and requirements for the group can also be binding  –  not on the New Zealand business itself, but on the group as a whole.   APRA can, in effect, hold the local subsidiaries to higher requirements than those set by our Reserve Bank  (in just the same way that shareholders might voluntarily choose –  perhaps under rating agency pressure – higher standards than a regulator might impose), but it can’t undercut New Zealand standards for New Zealand operations.  Daft as they may be, New Zealand LVR restrictions are binding on banks operating in New Zealand.

Bridgeman goes on

Theoretically an Aussie bank could offload 25 per cent of the institution’s New Zealand assets and list the shares here separately. That would bring tax advantages to New Zealand investors who can’t use Australian franking credits, even though they are dual listed.

I presume he means selling off 25 per cent of the shares in the New Zealand subsidiary (rather than 25 per cent of the assets).  It would, no doubt, have tax advantages for New Zealand investors (and thus, in principle, the shares might command a higher price), and yet the banks haven’t regarded it as worth their while (value-maximising) to do so.    Bridgeman doesn’t look at question of why (presumably something about best capturing value for shareholders by holding all of the operations in both countries, and being able to  –  subject to legal restrictions and duties –  manage them together).

And he also doesn’t note that if, say, ANZ sold down 25 per cent of the shares in its New Zealand operation, the subsidiary will still be regarded by APRA as part of the wider banking group, and prudential standards will still apply to the group as a whole.  As they should –  after all, with a 75 per cent stake there would be a high expectation (from market, regulators and governments) of parental support in the event that something went wrong in New Zealand.

There is a suggestion that the article is a bit an advertorial for NZX

If a quarter of these assets were listed that would bring about $12.5b of capital to the local stock exchange – a badly needed injection at a time when the main market is shrinking.

But even then it isn’t clear what is meant.  It isn’t as if there is a new $12.5 billion (I haven’t checked his numbers) of local savings conjured up.   Buying one lot of shares would, presumably, mean selling some other assets.  In a country with quite low levels of foreign investment, the initial effect of any such floats would be to reduce that level further.  (Of course, in practice quite a few of the shares in any newly floated New Zealand subsidiaries would be picked up by foreign investment funds, leaving the alleged benefits of any compulsory selldowns even more elusive.)

Bridgeman ends with a rallying cry

And right now the Aussie banks are distracted with a battle on their home turf.

It’s the perfect time for some Coalition politicians to show some backbone and make a case for a change in this direction.

It might have appealed to Winston Peters once upon a time, but even if it weren’t a daft policy to start with, Bridgeman may have noticed that business confidence is at rather a low ebb right now.  Arbitrarily interfering in the private property rights of owners of private businesses – even if largely Australian ones –  wouldn’t be likely to do much to instill confidence in the soundness of policymaking.

As it is, they could start closer to home.  If governments really did want to focus on getting some more bank representation on the domestic stock exchange –  and it is not obvious why they would –  perhaps they could look at the New Zealand banks first.  After all, only one of them (Heartland) is sharemarket listed.  And the biggest of those New Zealand owned banks –  Kiwibank – is actually owned by the government itself.    In fact,  by three separate goverment agencies (NZ Post, ACC, and NZSF), none bringing obvious expertise to the business of retail banking, none themselves facing any effective market disciplines.  I’d be all in favour of a well-managed float of Kiwibank  (although once floated it might not last long as an independent entity).  There are good reasons (they’ve been there for years) for the government to consider seriously that option.  But there are no good reasons to force well-functioning locally regulated foreign-owned banks to sell down part of their operations in New Zealand.

 

Voting on monetary reform

Michael Reddell Banking, Monetary policy, Switzerland

This coming Sunday, voters in Switzerland get to vote on the future monetary system.  I don’t share the New Zealand Initiative’s enthusiasm for Switzerland –  the only OECD country since 1970 to have had slower productivity growth even than New Zealand –  but I do like the element of direct democracy in their system: binding referenda on matters initiated by citizens.  No doubt it produces some silly results at times, but that’s part of democracy –  not ideal, just better than the alternatives.    And it isn’t as if our own system is immune to silly policies, unaccountable institutions etc.

I’d forgotten that the Vollgeld referendum was coming up until I saw yesterday that the eminent Financial Times economics columnist Martin Wolf was expressing the hope that the Swiss vote for change this Sunday.  It isn’t clear that he really favours the general adoption of the specific system called for in the Swiss referendum but, in his words,

Finance needs change.  For that, it needs experiments.

Dread word that: experiments.  I remember the efforts we went to one year to get all uses of the word out of the OECD’s review of the New Zealand, in the midst of the reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s.   For better or worse, one can’t do randomised control trials in macroeconomics and monetary policy: “experiments”, if tried at all, have to be done on entire nations.

What are the Swiss being asked to vote on next week?  The Vollgeld (“full money”) initiative is described by its proponents here, and described/analysed by a couple of independent Swiss economists here.

The key element of the proposal is this

The 100% reserves requirement means that all sight deposits in Swiss Francs (CHF) in Switzerland would have to be entirely kept as reserves in the Swiss National Bank. This implies that commercial banks would not be able anymore to use a fraction of these deposits to finance their lending activities, as they currently do. Swiss money would then entirely become “sovereign money”, controlled by the Swiss National Bank.

Proponents of the Vollgeld approach put a great deal of emphasis on something they label as “money”.   As they note, the issuance of notes and coins is controlled by the state –  even if in practice, supply simply respond to demand –  and argue that the same should apply to other transactions balances (eg a traditional cheque account).    Some seem to argue from a principled position that money creation is a natural business of the state, and thus direct control over the quantity of transactions balances created is simply a logical corollary.   Of course, in New Zealand it was almost 80 years after the establishment of responsible government before the state here issued any payments media (coincidentally, but not inconsistently, we were the highest income country in the world through much of that period).  Personally, I’d continue to mount an argument for removing the current state monopoly on the issue of bank notes.

Others focus on more pragmatic arguments around monetary and financial stability.  If all demand deposits are fully backed by deposits at the central bank – or, at the limit, if all demand deposits were directly claims on the central bank – and were held on a separate balance sheet, there would be no more bank runs on demand deposits.

Ideas of this sort aren’t new.  Proponents often hark back to the so-called Chicago Plan proposed by some prominent US economists in the 1930s, and at one stage in his career as orthodox a figure as Milton Friedman favoured 100 per cent reserve requirements for demand deposits.

But if the broad ideas aren’t new then, as the independent Swiss economists observe, runs on demand deposits also aren’t the main issue in real-world financial fragility.  They put that down to the existence of deposit insurance –  although Vollgeld advocates argue that under their system deposit insurance could be got rid of – but whatever the explanation

…the main source of fragility of modern banks is …..rather the wholesale short term debt issued by banks and held by professional investors, including other banks. These investors, who are not insured, may suddenly stop lending to a bank (this is called a wholesale run) if they suspect that the bank may have solvency problems. This wholesale short term debt is an important source of funding for the banks in the current system, but it is also a source of fragility, as the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 has shown. The 100% reserves requirement would not apply to short term debt.

Wholesale funding markets seizing up was an issue even for Australasian banks in 2008/09.

Vollgeld advocates (at least those looking at the issue in detail) are aware of these other sort of “runs”, or market refusals to rollover funding at maturity, but don’t have a detailed response.

To tackle it, paragraph 2 of article 99a of the VGI mentions that the SNB would have the power to set a minimum duration for the debt issued by commercial banks. The VGI does not give much detail on this question, but it is clear that a new liquidity regulation would have to be introduced as a complement to the 100% reserve requirement. Indeed, financial stability can only be guaranteed in the Vollgeld system if the banks are strictly limited in their ability to issue wholesale short term debt as they do today.

I’ve long argued that the issue goes beyond even that.  One could have all –  or almost all – lending done by closed-end mutual funds (ie no early redemption at all, you just sell your claim on the open market) –  something like the model favoured by prominent US economist Larry Kotlikoff – and there would still be financial crises, they would just take a different form.   The nature of a market economy is that people get optimistic, and then over-optimistic, about particular industries, or the economy more generally.  And then opinion changes –  actual outcomes don’t quite meet expectations or whatever – and the flow of new investment, the flow of finance dries up.  The dot-com boom, and subsequent bust, were good examples of that.  So, in their way, were the Australasian post-deregulation booms and subsequent busts in the 1980s (they involved some bank failures late in the post-bust adjustment, but those failures were incidental).

And nothing in the Vollgeld proposals (or in similar Sovereign Money proposals in other countries, including New Zealand) deals with that.  Nor does it really deal with the fact that many countries –  including New Zealand and Australia and Canada –  have gone for a very long time without bank failures (except in that brief post-deregulation transition period), and yet not been immune to recessions, periods of ill-judged investments, or prolonged booms or prolonged periods of underperformance.

Some advocates of reform put a great deal of emphasis on the alleged problem that lending simultaneously creates deposits, at a systemwide level.  This is a feature not a bug.  Lending transfers claims on resources from one person to another, and both sides of that need to be recorded –  if I borrow to buy a house, the counterpart to that is that the seller of the house collects the proceeds of the sale.    These people tend to confuse the position of an individual bank –  for whom secure access to funding is absolutely critical – from the macroeconomics of the system as a whole.   No (later troubled) New Zealand finance company –  none of whom banked with the Reserve Bank – conjured its deposits out of nowhere: they first persuaded depositors and debenture holders to back their business model, and finance all manner of (often quite bad) projects.   The finance companies didn’t fail because they had on-demand deposits (mostly they didn’t) but because they made really bad loans, and were part of the associated misallocation of real resources.  Nothing in the Vollgeld initiative (or similar Sovereign Money proposals) seems to address that.

So why does someone as eminent as Martin Wolf encourage Swiss voters to vote for the Vollgeld initiative on Sunday?     Mostly, it seems from reading his article, because he grossly exaggerates the real economic cost of financial crises, conflating the headline events (runs on banks, wholesale or otherwise, bailouts etc) with the correction for the misallocation of real resources that occurrred during the boom years and (in the case of 2008/09) treating all the slowdown in productivity growth as a consequence of “the financial crisis” when signs of it were already apparent before the crises. (I dealt with some of these issues in this post some time ago. )   Changing the rules around transactions balances just wouldn’t make that much difference.  And although Martin Wolf and the Vollgeld advocates talk bravely of how such reforms might allow governments to more readily walk away from failing banks (ie the bits not offering transactions balances) at best that is aspirational.   AIG and the federal agencies weren’t offering transactions balances –  and were bailed –  and even in New Zealand one of the key motivations for the OBR model isn’t about transactions balances, but about maintaining the credit process (all the information on firms that enables banks to continue to provide working capital finance with confidence).

Over the years, I’ve spent lots of time looking at various monetary reform proposals.  When I was a young economist, Social Credit was still represented in the New Zealand Parliament, and their acolytes regularly wrote to the Governor and the Minister of Finance.  Their ideas genuinely were wrongheaded and dangerous.  In my experience, though, most such proposed reforms aren’t, and they often capture important elements of truth.  But the proponents typically oversell the likely gains from what they are proposing.  I don’t think the Vollgeld initiative model would be particularly damaging or costly –  although there are a lot of details not spelled out, and the transition could be very unsettling (especially in a world of zero or negative interest rates) – but it just wouldn’t offer the gains the proponents claim.  Monetary matters are rarely quite that important and in a market economy, human nature will have its head, and sometimes things will turn out badly.  More often, of course, real financial crises reflect wrongheaded policy interventions that skewed choices and incentives and made the bad outcomes more likely (I’d include both the US crisis of 2008/09, and the Irish crisis in that category –  and probably the Australasian and Nordic crises of the late 80s and early 90s).

In truth, calls for reform (from people like Wolf) and public support for ideas like the Vollgeld one (apparently perhaps 35 per cent of people may vote for it), probably stem more from some ill-defined sense that something is wrong (with economic and political outcomes).  Banks and monetary systems are a convenient target –  just like the idea here that somehow fixing monetary policy might make a material difference to our economic underperformance – but probably the wrong one.

Readers sometimes suggest that the Reserve Bank is reluctant to ever fully engage with alternative models. I’m not sure what they’ve been doing more recently, but when I was at the Bank I spent quite a bit of time over the years unpicking various proposals and trying to understand their strengths and weaknesses.  It wasn’t always very systematic, and often depended on the interests of individuals, but I’d be surprised if the Bank is that much different now.  We even used to send people along to debate some of those proposing alternative models.  A speech I did along those lines is here.   I’m not sure I’d stand by absolutely everything in it today, but we were an institution willing to engage.