Maybe this time was at least a little different?

Earlier this week, Derek Thomson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, began his article "The Graph That Proves Economic Forecasters Are Almost Always Wrong" with some observations that don't really require a graph:

"As the saying goes: 'It's hard to make predictions. Especially about the future.' Thirty years ago, it was obvious to everybody that oil prices would keep going up forever. Twenty years ago, it was obvious that Japan would own the 21st century. Ten years ago, it was obvious that our economic stewards had mastered a kind of thermostatic control over business cycles to prevent great recessions. We were wrong, wrong, and wrong."

In a recent speech, Dennis Lockhart—whom most of you recognize as president here at the Atlanta Fed—offered his own thoughts on why forecasts can go so wrong:

"… you may wonder why forecasters, the Fed included, don't do a better job. To answer this question, let me suggest three reasons why forecasts may be off.

"While it's relatively trivial in my view, the first reason involves missing the timing of economic activity. An example of that was mentioned earlier when I explained that GDP for the third quarter had been revised down while the fourth quarter is expected to compensate.

"A second reason that forecasts miss the mark is, in everyday language, stuff happens.

"To be a little more precise, unforeseen developments are a fact of life. In my view, the energy and commodity shocks early in the year had a significant impact on growth in the first half of 2011. The tsunami-related supply disruptions, though temporary, were an exacerbating factor. In fact, a lot of shocks or disruptions are quite temporary and don't cause one to rethink the narrative about where the economy is likely going.

"Which brings me to the third reason why economic prognostications go off track: we, as forecasters, simply get the bigger story wrong.

"What I mean by getting the bigger story wrong is failing to understand the fundamentals at work in the economy."

"Getting the bigger story wrong" is Simon Potter's theme in the New York Fed's Liberty Street Economics blog post, "The Failure to Forecast the Great Recession":

"Looking through our briefing materials and other sources such as New York Fed staff reports reveals that the Bank's economic research staff, like most other economists, were behind the curve as the financial crisis developed, even though many of our economists made important contributions to the understanding of the crisis. Three main failures in our real-time forecasting stand out:

1.	Misunderstanding of the housing boom …
2.	A lack of analysis of the rapid growth of new forms of mortgage finance …
3.	Insufficient weight given to the powerful adverse feedback loops between the financial system and the real economy …

"However, the biggest failure was the complacency resulting from the apparent ease of maintaining financial and economic stability during the Great Moderation."

Potter does not implicate any of his Federal Reserve brethren, but you can add me to the roll call of those having made each of the mistakes on the list.

Should we have known? A powerful narrative that we should have has taken hold. The boom-bust cycle associated with large bouts of asset appreciation and debt accumulation has a long history in economics, and the theme has been pressed home in its most recent incarnation by the work of Carmen Reinhart and coauthors, including the highly influential book written with Kenneth Rogoff, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

Unfortunately, even seemingly compelling historical evidence is not always so clear cut. An illustration of this, relevant to the failure to forecast the Great Recession, was provided in a paper by Enrique Mendoza and Marco Terrones (from the University of Maryland and the International Monetary Fund, respectively), presented last month at a Central Bank of Chile conference, "Capital Mobility and Monetary Policy." What the paper puts forward is described by Mendoza and Terrones as follows:

"… in Mendoza and Terrones (2008) we proposed a new methodology for measuring and identifying credit booms and showed that it was successful in identifying credit boom events with a clear cyclical pattern in both macro and micro data.

"The method we proposed is a 'thresholds method.' This method works by first splitting real credit per capita in each country into its cyclical and trend components, and then identifying a credit boom as an episode in which credit exceeds its long-run trend by more than a given 'boom' threshold, defined in terms of a tail probability event… The key defining feature of this method is that the thresholds are proportional to each country's standard deviation of credit over the business cycle. Hence, credit booms reflect 'unusually large' cyclical credit expansions."

And here is what they find:

"In this paper, we apply this method to data for 61 countries (21 industrialized countries, ICs, and 40 emerging market economies, EMs), over the 1960-2010 period. We found a total of 70 credit booms, 35 in ICs and 35 in EMs, including 16 credit booms that peaked in the critical period surrounding the recent financial crisis between 2007 and 2010 (again with about half of these recent booms in ICs and EMs each)…

"The results show that credit booms are associated with periods of economic expansion, rising equity and housing prices, real appreciation and widening external deficits in the upswing of the booms, followed by the opposite dynamics in the downswing."

That certainly sounds familiar, and supports the "we should have known" meme. But the full facts are a little trickier. Mendoza and Terrones continue:

"A major deviation in the evidence reported here relative to our previous findings in Mendoza and Terrones (2008) is that adding the data from the recent credit booms and crisis we find that in fact credit booms in ICs and EMs are more similar than different. In contrast, in our earlier work we found differences in the magnitudes of credit booms, the size of the macroeconomic fluctuations associated with credit booms, and the likelihood that they are followed by banking or currency crises.

"… while not all credit booms end in crisis, the peaks of credit booms are often followed by banking crises, currency crises of Sudden Stops, and the frequency with which this happens is about the same for EMs and ICs (20 to 25 percent for banking and currency for banking crisis, 14 percent for Sudden Stops)."

Their notion still supports the case of the "we should have known" camp, but here's the rub (emphasis mine):

"This is a critical change from our previous findings, because lacking substantial evidence from all the recent booms and crises, we had found only 9 percent frequency of banking crises after credit booms for EMs and zero for ICs, and 14 percent frequency of currency crises after credit booms for EMs v. 31 percent for ICs."

In other words, based on this particular evidence, we should have been looking for a run on the dollar, not a banking crisis. What we got, of course, was pretty much the opposite.

No excuses here. Speaking only for myself, I had the story wrong. But the conclusion to that story is a lot clearer now than it was in the middle of the tale.

By Dave Altig, senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

 

The ongoing lender of last resort debate

Two days do not a policy success make, and it is a fool's game to tie the merits of a policy action to a short-term stock market cycle. But at first blush it does certainly appear that Wednesday's announcement of coordinated central bank actions to provide liquidity support to the global financial system had a positive effect. The policy is described in the Board of Governors press release:

"The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank… have agreed to lower the pricing on the existing temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangements by 50 basis points so that the new rate will be the U.S. dollar overnight index swap (OIS) rate plus 50 basis points. This pricing will be applied to all operations conducted from December 5, 2011. The authorization of these swap arrangements has been extended to February 1, 2013."

Or, as explained by The Wall Street Journal:

"Under the program, the Fed lends dollars to other central banks, which in turn make the dollars available to banks under their jurisdiction. The action Wednesday made these emergency Fed loans cheaper, lowering their cost by half a percentage point.

"When the Fed launched the swap lines, it saw them as critical to its efforts to tame the financial storm sweeping the globe. Banks in Europe and elsewhere hold U.S. mortgage securities and other U.S. dollar securities. They get U.S. dollars in short-term lending markets to pay for these holdings. In 2008, when dollar loans became scarce, foreign banks were forced to dump their holdings of U.S. mortgages and other loans, which in turn pushed up the cost of credit for Americans.

"The latest action was at least in part an attempt to head off a repeat of such a spiral."

It is at least interesting that this most recent Fed action occurs as criticism of its past actions to address the financial crisis has once again arisen. The immediate driver is another installment in a series of Bloomberg reports that parse recently released details from Fed lending programs during the period from 2007 to 2009.

I have in the past objected to the somewhat conspiratorial tone in which the Bloomberg folks have chosen to cast the conversation. I certainly do not, however, think it objectionable to have a cool-headed conversation on what we can learn from the Fed's actions during the financial crisis and how it might inform policy going forward. Following on the latest Bloomberg article, Felix Salmon and Brad DeLong have taken up that cause.

It may be useful to start with my institution's official answers to the question: Why did the Federal Reserve lend to banks and other financial institutions during the financial crisis?

"Intense strains in financial markets during the financial crisis severely disrupted the flow of credit to U.S. households and businesses and led to a deep downturn in economic activity and a sharp increase in unemployment. Consistent with its statutory mandate to foster maximum employment and stable prices, the Federal Reserve established lending programs during the crisis to address the strains in financial markets, support the flow of credit to American families and firms, and foster economic recovery."

Neither Salmon nor DeLong argues with this assertion, and even the Bloomberg article includes commentary broadly supporting Fed actions, even if not all details of the implementation. More controversial is this observation from the Fed's frequently asked questions (FAQs):

"The Federal Reserve followed sound risk-management practices under all of its liquidity and credit programs. Credit provided under these programs was fully collateralized to protect the Fed—and ultimately the taxpayer—from loss."

Here is where opinions start to diverge. From DeLong:

"In the fall of 2008, counting the Fed and the Treasury together, a peak of 90% of Morgan Stanley's equity—the capital of the firm genuinely at risk—was U.S. government money. That money was genuinely at risk: had Morgan Stanley's assets taken another dive in value and blown through the private-sector's minimal equity cushion, it would have been taxpayers whose money would have been used to pay off the firm's more senior liabilities. 'Fully collateralized' the loans may have been, but had anything impaired that collateral there was no way on God's Green Earth Morgan Stanley—or any of the other banks—could have come up with the money to make the government whole."

And from Salmon:

"The Fed likes to say that it wasn't taking much if any credit risk here: that all its lending was fully collateralized, etc etc. But it's really hard to look at that red line and have a huge amount of confidence that the Fed was always certain to get its money back. Still, this is what lenders of last resort do. And this is what the ECB is most emphatically not doing."

As Salmon's comment makes clear, he does not view these risks as a repudiation of the appropriateness of what the Fed did during the crisis. And if I read Brad DeLong correctly, his main complaint is not about the programs per se, but on the pricing of the support provided to banks:

"When you contribute equity capital, and when things turn out well, you deserve an equity return. When you don't take equity—when you accept the risks but give the return to somebody else—you aren't acting as a good agent for your principals, the taxpayers.

"Thus I do not understand why officials from the Fed and the Treasury keep telling me that the U.S. couldn't or shouldn't have profited immensely from its TARP and other loans to banks. Somebody owns that equity value right now. It's not the government. But when the chips were down it was the government that bore the risk. That's what a lender of last resort does."

I wish that we could stop commingling TARP and the Fed's liquidity programs. At the very least, the legal authorities for the programs were completely distinct, and the Federal Reserve did not have any direct authority for the implementation of the TARP program. But that is probably beside the point for the current discussion. What is germane is the observation that the TARP funds did come with equity warrants issued to the Treasury. So in that case, there was the equity stake that DeLong urges.

As for the Fed programs, here again is a response taken from Fed FAQs:

"As verified by our independent auditors, the Federal Reserve did not incur any losses in connection with its lending programs. In fact, the Federal Reserve has generated very substantial net income since 2007 that has been remitted to the U.S. Treasury."

This observation does not, of course, repudiate Felix Salmon's point that losses may have been incurred, or the DeLong argument that the rates paid for loans from the Fed were not high enough by some metric. Nor should turning a profit be seen as proof that lending policies were sound (just as incurring losses would not be proof that the policies were foolhardy). But doesn't the record at least provide some support for a case that the Fed used reasonable judgment with respect to its lending decisions and acted as prudent steward of taxpayer funds even as it took extraordinary measures to address the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

In fact, the main point raised by Felix Salmon is not that risks were taken, but that those risks were not communicated in a transparent way:

"And it's frankly ridiculous that it's taken this long for this information to be made public. We're now fully ten months past the point at which the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's final report was published; this data would have been extremely useful to them and to all of the rest of us trying to get a grip on what was going on at the height of the crisis. The Fed's argument against publishing the data was that it 'would create a stigma,' and make it less likely that banks would tap similar facilities in future. But I can assure you that at the height of the crisis, the last thing on Morgan Stanley's mind was the worry that its borrowings might be made public three years later. When you need the money, and the Fed is throwing its windows wide open, you don't look that kind of gift horse in the mouth."

One thing I wish to continually stress is that we should be clear about what Bloomberg refers to as "secret loans." One last time from the Fed FAQs:

"All of the Federal Reserve's lending programs were announced prior to implementation and the amounts of support provided were easily tracked in weekly and monthly reports on the Federal Reserve Board's website."

So the missing information was not about the sums of money being lent but the exact details of who was receiving those loans. In most cases, these loans were not targeted to specific institutions, but obtained from open funding facilities such as the Term Auction Facility. And, though you can argue the point, stigma was a real concern, as Chairman Bernanke has testified:

"Many banks, however, were evidently concerned that if they borrowed from the discount window, and that fact somehow became known to market participants, they would be perceived as weak and, consequently, might come under further pressure from creditors. To address this so-called stigma problem, the Federal Reserve created a new discount window program, the Term Auction Facility (TAF). Under the TAF, the Federal Reserve has regularly auctioned large blocks of credit to depository institutions. For various reasons, including the competitive format of the auctions, the TAF has not suffered the stigma of conventional discount window lending and has proved effective for injecting liquidity into the financial system."

Salmon argues that this resolution to the stigma problem would not have been weakened by the current rules that require reporting the lending specifics with a lag. It is a reasonable argument (in what is, as an aside, a balanced and reasoned article by Salmon), and reasonable people can disagree. In any event, lagged reporting of details on the recipients of Fed loans is now the law. As a consequence, if such liquidity programs are needed again we can only hope that Felix Salmon's beliefs turn out to be true.

UPDATE: The Board of Governors has posted a response to recent reports on the Federal Reserve's lending policies.

By Dave Altig, senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

 

"Secret loans" that were not so secret

I confess to be more than a little surprised when yesterday's morning reading turned up the following headline, from Bloomberg's Bob Ivry:

"Fed Gave Banks Crisis Gains on Secretive Loans Low as 0.01%"

The crux of the story found its way to the Wall Street Journal's Real Times Economics blog:

"Credit Suisse Group AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc each borrowed at least $30 billion in 2008 from a Federal Reserve emergency lending program whose details weren't revealed to shareholders, members of Congress or the public. The $80 billion initiative, called single-tranche open-market operations, or ST OMO, made 28-day loans from March through December 2008, a period in which confidence in global credit markets collapsed after the Sept. 15 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Units of 20 banks were required to bid at auctions for the cash. They paid interest rates as low as 0.01 percent that December, when the Fed's main lending facility charged 0.5 percent."

I think a couple of clarifying points are in order. First, these transactions were hardly, in my view, "secretive." On March 7, 2008, the following was posted on the New York Fed's website (with similar information provided by the Board of Governors):

"The Federal Reserve has announced that the Open Market Trading Desk will conduct a series of term repurchase (RP) transactions that are expected to cumulate to $100 billion outstanding. This initiative is intended to address heightened pressures in term funding markets. These transactions will be conducted as 28-day term RP agreements in which primary dealers may elect to deliver as collateral any of the types of securities—Treasury, agency debt, or agency mortgage-backed securities—that are eligible as collateral in its conventional RP operations."

The magic words in the Bloomberg piece are apparently "details weren't revealed." While it is true that specific transactions with specific institutions were not published in real time, the overall results of the auctions (both total purchases and the lowest interest rate paid) were posted each day (as noted in the Bloomberg article), and the list of potential counterparties (the primary dealers) was (and is) available for all to see. I suppose we could have a reasonable debate about how much information is required to support the claim that "details" were made available. But I have a hard time with the notion that publicly announcing the program, offering details on size and prices in each day's transactions, and providing general information about the entities in the game constitutes "secretive."

Another aspect of the Bloomberg piece that I question is the claim that the transactions were "loans" provided under an "emergency lending program." That language is quite imprecise and evokes the thought of the lending programs that relied on the authority granted under "unusual and exigent circumstances" by section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act.

The Bloomberg article does not help in avoiding possible confusion on this point by including this passage:

"Congress overlooked ST OMO when lawmakers required the central bank to publish its emergency lending data last year under the Dodd-Frank law."

But as the New York Fed's public notice made clear at the time, this was not outside of the Fed's standard authorities—and not unprecedented (emphasis added):

"When the Desk arranges its conventional RPs, it accepts propositions from dealers in three collateral 'tranches.' In the first tranche, dealers may pledge only Treasury securities. In the second tranche, dealers have the option to pledge federal agency debt in addition to Treasury securities. In the third tranche, dealers have the option to pledge mortgage-backed securities issued or fully guaranteed by federal agencies in addition to federal agency debt or Treasury securities. With the special 'single-tranche' RPs announced today, dealers have the option to pledge either mortgage-backed securities issued or fully guaranteed by federal agencies, federal agency debt, or Treasury securities. The Desk has arranged single-tranche transactions from time to time in the past."

Finally, identifying the one auction where the Fed "paid interest rates as low as 0.01 percent" is misleading. To begin with, the 0.01 percent refers to the so called "stop-out" rate, which is the lowest rate paid by bidders in any particular auction. The operations in question were multi-price auctions, so the lowest rate cannot be assumed to be the average rate paid on the repo transactions. In any event, the program was terminated after two auctions when the stop-out rate hit the very low levels the Bloomberg article referred to.

More generally, the auction rates in these ST OMOs tracked short-term funding rates over the course of the program's existence:

(enlarge)

The interest rates associated with all operations obviously fell as the provision of market liquidity became more aggressive after the failure of Lehman Brothers. You are free to object to that response, but singling out ST OMO as secretive or special in anyway isn't, in my opinion, justified.

Update: Felix Salmon weighs in.

By Dave Altig
senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

How has the financial system changed? (And what to do about it)

The subject of this post's title was, in essence, the centerpiece of the most recent edition of the Atlanta Fed's annual Financial Markets Conference, convened this year in Stone Mountain, Ga. (just outside Atlanta). In terms of formal papers, the conference was bookended by work that came to very similar conclusions but from very different angles. From the vantage point of recent developments in micro banking structure, Arnoud Boot offered this diagnosis:

"A fundamental feature of more recent financial innovations is their focus on augmenting marketability. Marketability has led to a strong growth of transaction-oriented banking (trading and financial market activities). This is at least in part facilitated by the scalability of this activity (contrary to relationship banking activities). It is argued that the more intertwined nature of banks and financial markets induces opportunistic decision making and herding behavior. In doing so, it has exposed banks to the boom and bust nature of financial markets and has augmented instability."

Taking the very long view, Moritz Schularick presented (from a paper co-authored with Alan Taylor) pretty compelling evidence that the ongoing shift from relationship banking to transactions-based banking has fundamentally altered the nature of financial developments on real activity in modern economies:

"We first document and discuss our newly assembled dataset on money and credit, aligned with various macroeconomic indicators, covering 14 developed countries and the years from 1870 to 2008. This new dataset allows us to establish a number of important stylized facts about what we shall refer to as the 'two eras of finance capitalism.' The first financial era runs from 1870 to 1939. In this era, money and credit were volatile but over the long run they maintained a roughly stable relationship to each other, and to the size of the economy measured by GDP. The only exception to this rule was the Great Depression period: in the 1930s money and credit aggregates collapsed. In this first era, the one studied by Friedman and Schwartz, the 'money view' of the world looks entirely plausible. However, the second financial era, starting in 1945, looks very different. With the banking sector progressively more leveraged in the second financial era, particularly towards the end, the divergence between credit supply and money supply offers prima facie support for the credit view as against a pure money view; we have entered an age of unprecedented financial risk and leverage, a new global stylized fact that is not fully appreciated."

If there was agreement on increasing threats to financial stability, what to do about it (unsurprisingly) was somewhat more controversial. On the microprudential front, several conference participants—Viral Acharya, for example—looked to greater capital buffers as a key to greater financial stability. Others—George Kaufman commenting on Boot's paper, for instance—were more inclined to rely on market solutions. Boot, for his part, was highly skeptical of the self-correcting market forces and, while sympathetic to greater reliance on bank capital, believes much more is required:

"What we have also argued is that market discipline might be rather ineffective. We described this as a paradox. When particular strategies have momentum in financial markets, the market as a whole may underestimate the risks that these entail. How then can we expect market discipline to work? It appears to us that market discipline might not be present when banks follow financial market inspired strategies. Things are even worse because these strategies will lead to a high correlation in actual exposures between financial institutions because all see the same opportunities and hence herding occurs. Systemic risk would then be considerable and not checked by market discipline."

Earlier in the paper, Boot puts forward:

"We believe that heavy handed intervention in the structure of the banking industry—building on the Volcker Rule—might ultimately be an inevitable part of the restructuring of the industry. It could address complexity but also help in containing market forces that might run orthogonal to what prudential concerns would dictate (as the insights on market discipline in section 6 suggest). For now, the structural interventions in the banking industry are rather tentative. Other measures such as higher capital and liquidity requirements are clearly needed. But these primarily focus on individual institutions while a more system-orientation is crucial to identify externalities and interlinkages (Goodhart, 2009; and Calomiris, 2009). Anti-cyclical capital surcharges and other measures and surcharges depending on the degree of interconnectedness are needed as well to add some further comfort. We tend to subscribe to John Kay's (2009) notion of redundancy: having comfort in the stability of the financial sector dictates building redundancy into the regulatory and supervisory structures of banking."

With respect to "system-oriented" signals, Schularick was clear where he and his co-author think their research leads:

"These new results from long-run data, if they pass scrutiny, inform the current controversy over macroeconomic policy practices in developed countries. Specifically, the pre-2008 consensus argued that monetary policy should follow a 'rule' based only on output gaps and inflation, but a few dissenters thought that credit aggregates deserved to be watched carefully and incorporated into monetary policy. The influence of the credit view has certainly advanced after the 2008–09 crash, just as respect has waned for the glib assertion that central banks could ignore potential financial bubbles and easily clean up after they burst."

Credit and bank capital—along with sound fiscal policy and a little good luck—do appear to have been key to how well different economies fared during the recent financial crisis. At least that is the conclusion reached in a study by Stephen Cecchetti and his co-authors from the Bank of International Settlements:

"The macroeconomic performance of individual countries varied markedly during the 2007–09 global financial crisis.… Better-performing economies featured a better-capitalised banking sector, a current account surplus, high foreign exchange reserves and low private sector credit-to-GDP. In other words, sound policy decisions and institutions reduced their vulnerability to the financial crisis. But these economies also featured a low level of financial openness and less exposure to US creditors, suggesting that good luck played a part."

As we seek to shore up our financial timber to avoid a repeat of recent history, it is appropriate to remember that, while it is good to be lucky, fortune is probably not arbitrary in choosing where it will shine.

By Dave Altig
senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

Regulatory reform via resolution: Maybe not sufficient, certainly necessary

This macroblog post is the first of several that will feature the Atlanta Fed's 2010 Financial Markets Conference. Please return for additional information.

On Tuesday and Wednesday the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta hosted its annual Financial Markets Conference, titled this year Up From the Ashes: The Financial System After the Crisis. Much of the first day was devoted to conversations about rating agencies and their role in the economy, for better and worse. The second day was absorbed by the issues of too-big-to-fail, macroprudential regulation, and regulatory reform.

One theme that ran throughout the second day's conversations related to the two aspects of regulatory reform highlighted by Chairman Bernanke in his recent congressional testimony on lessons from the failure of Lehman Brothers:

"The Lehman failure provides at least two important lessons. First, we must eliminate the gaps in our financial regulatory framework that allow large, complex, interconnected firms like Lehman to operate without robust consolidated supervision… Second, to avoid having to choose in the future between bailing out a failing, systemically critical firm or allowing its disorderly bankruptcy, we need a new resolution regime, analogous to that already established for failing banks."

Though those two aspects of reform are in no way mutually exclusive, there is, I think, a tendency to lean to one or the other as the first most important contributor to avoiding a repeat of our recent travails. To put it in slightly different terms, there are those that would place greatest emphasis on reducing the probability of systemically important failures and those that would put greatest emphasis on containing the damage when a systemically important failure occurs.

I offered my views last month at the Third Transatlantic Economic Dialogue, hosted by Johns Hopkins University's Center for Transatlantic Relations.

"…the best chance for durable reform is to start with the assumption that failure will happen and construct a strategy for dealing with it when it does…

"In a world with the capacity for rapid innovation, rule-writers have a tendency to perpetually fight the last war…

"I am not arguing that … the 'Volcker rule,' derivative exchanges, trading restrictions, or any of the specific regulatory reform proposals in play are necessarily bad ideas. I am arguing that we should assume that, no matter what proposed safeguards are put in place, failure of some systemically important institution will ultimately occur—somewhere, somehow. And that means priority has to be given to the development of resolution procedures for institutions that are otherwise too big to fail."

At our conference this week, University of Florida professor Mark Flannery expressed concerns that, placed in an international context, a truly robust resolution process for failed institutions may be tough to construct:

"In principle, a non-bankruptcy reorganization channel for SIFIs [systemically important financial institutions] makes a lot of sense. But the complexity of SIFIs' organizational structures introduces some serious problems. Not only do SIFIs operate with a bewildering array of subsidiaries… but they generally operate in many countries. Without very close coordination of resolution decisions across jurisdictions, a U.S. government reorganization would likely set off a scramble for assets of the sort that bankruptcy is meant to avoid. Rapid asset sales could generate downward price spirals… with systemically detrimental effects. Second, supervisors would have to assure that SIFIs maintain the proper sort and quantity of haircut-able liabilities outstanding. Once a firm has been identified as systemically important, this may be a relatively straightforward requirement to impose, but there remains the danger that 'shadow' institutions will become systemically important, before they are properly regulated. (This is not a danger unique to the question of resolution.)

"I conclude that the international coordination required to make prompt resolution feasible for SIFIs is a long way off, if it can be achieved at all."

Not an encouraging note, and the point is very well taken. Flannery concludes that we would be better served by focusing on changes that lie on the "avoiding failure" end of the reform spectrum: standardized derivative contracts, tying supervisory oversight to objective market-based metrics on the health of SIFIs, limitations on risky activities, and higher capital standards.

As I noted above, I am certainly not hostile to these ideas, and the answer to the question "should reform strategies be rules-based or resolution-based?" is surely "all of the above." But even if it will take a long time to develop better resolution procedures to address the types of problems that emerged in the past several years, I strongly argue that development of such procedures are necessary for the long-term, and work on these procedures should begin. And here, I have a relatively modest proposal, returning to my remarks:

"…there is a pretty obvious way to vet proposals that are offered. We have a couple of real-world case studies—Bear Stearns, Lehman, AIG. One test for any proposed resolution process would be to illustrate how that plan would have been implemented in each of those cases. This set of experiments can't be started too soon, and I think should move it to the top of our reform priorities."

Whether it be the specific provisions of reform bills winding their way through Congress or the "living will" idea championed this week by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, I think we would do well to let the stress testing of those proposals begin.

By Dave Altig, senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

Return of the swap lines

As the European Union jumped into crisis resolution mode with both feet and the European Central Bank (ECB) responded to the "exceptional circumstances" with measures to address severe tensions in financial markets, the Federal Reserve has made its own contribution to global economic stability by announcing the reestablishment of temporary U.S. dollar swap facilities with the ECB, Bank of Canada, Bank of England, Swiss National Bank, and (later) the Bank of Japan.

Swap lines are not new tools for central banks. In fact, we covered the basics of swap arrangements in September 2008, explaining the rationale at that time for the facilities thus:

"An underlying aspect of a currency swap is that banks (and businesses) around the world have assets and liabilities not only in their home currency, but also in dollars. Thus, banks in England need funding in U.S. dollars as well as in pounds.

"However, banks recently have been reluctant to lend to one another. Some observers believe this reluctance relates to uncertainty about the assets that other banks have on their balance sheets or because a bank might be uncertain about its own short-term cash needs. Whatever the cause, this reluctance in the interbank market has pushed up the premium for short-term U.S. dollar funding and has been evident in a sharp escalation in LIBOR rates.

"The currency swap lines were designed to inject liquidity, which can help bring rates down."

Yesterday's online edition of The Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog makes note of a more recent, and very nice, primer from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, co-authored by Michael Fleming and Nicholas Klagge. The Fleming-Klagge article describes a Libor-based measure of stress that was particularly acute in nondollar countries during the worst of the crisis that began in 2007.

"Because foreign banks secure much of their dollar funding through interbank loans, they can expect to face greater funding pressures during times of market stress. One way to measure such pressures involves examining the individual borrowing rates of the sixteen banks that make up the Libor survey 'panel.' The difference between the average borrowing rate of the panel's thirteen non-U.S. banks and the average borrowing rate of its three U.S. banks provides a rough proxy for the increased difficulty foreign banks face in trying to borrow dollars."

Did the currency swaps help bring this spread down? Here's a little informal evidence:

enlarge

That's not proof, but it is not too hard to see why the New York Fed article would conclude with this answer to the WSJ's answer to the question "Did it Work?":

"Early evidence suggests that the swap lines were successful in smoothing disruptions in overseas dollar funding markets. Swap line announcements and operations were associated with improved conditions in these markets: Although measures of dollar funding pressures remained high throughout the crisis period, they tended to moderate following large increases in dollars lent under the swap line program. Moreover, the sharp decline in swap line usage as the crisis ebbed suggests that the pricing of funds offered through swap lines gave institutions an incentive to return to private sources of funding as market conditions improved."

You can find more information about the Federal Reserve's previous swap facilities here.

By Dave Altig, senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

Consumer credit: More than meets the eye

A lot has been made (here, for a recent example) of the idea that banks have shown a surprising amount of reluctance to extend credit and to start making loans again. Indeed, the Fed's consumer credit report, which shows the aggregate amount of credit extended to individuals (excluding loans secured by real estate), has been on a steady downward trend since the fall of 2008.

Importantly, that report also provides a breakdown that shows how much credit the different types of institutions hold on their books. Commercial banks, which are the single largest category, accounted for about a third of the total stock in consumer credit in 2009. The two other largest categories—finance companies and securitized assets—accounted for a combined 45 percent. While commercial banks have been the biggest source of credit, they have not been the biggest direct source of the decline.

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The chart above highlights a somewhat divergent pattern among the big three credit holders. This pattern mainly indicates that credit from finance companies and securitized assets has been on a relatively steady decline since the fall of 2008 while credit from commercial banks has shown more of a leveling off. These details highlight a potential misconception that commercial banks are the primary driver behind the recent reduction in credit going to consumers (however, lending surveys certainly indicate that standards for credit have tightened).

To put a scale on these declines, the aggregate measure of consumer credit has declined by a total of 5.7 percent since its peak in December 2008 through February 2010. Over this same time period, credit from finance companies and securitizations declined by 16.2 percent and 12.4 percent, respectively, while commercial bank credit declined by 5.5 percent. Admittedly, securitization and off-balance sheet financing are a big part of banks' activity as they facilitate consumers' access to credit. The decline in securitized assets might not be that surprising given that the market started to freeze in 2007 and deteriorated further in 2008 as many investors fled the market. Including banks' securitized assets that are off the balance sheet would show a steeper decline in banks' holdings of consumer credit.

A significant factor in evaluating consumer credit is the pace of charge-offs, which can overstate the decline in underlying loan activity (charge-offs are loans that are not expected to be paid back and are removed from the books). Some (here and here) have made the point that the declines in credit card debt, for example, reflect increasing rates of charge-offs rather than consumers paying down their balances.

How much are charge-offs affecting the consumer credit data? Unfortunately, the Fed's consumer credit statistics don't include charge-offs. However, we can look at a different dataset that includes quarterly data on charge-offs for commercial banks to get an approximation. We can think of the change in consumer loan balances roughly as new loans minus loans repaid minus net loans charged off:

Change in Consumer Loans = [New Loans – Loan Repayments] – Net Charge-Offs

Adding net charge-offs to the change in consumer loans should give a cleaner estimate of underlying loan activity:

 

If the adjusted series is negative, loan repayments should be greater than new loans extended, which would lend support to the idea that loans are declining because consumers are paying down their debt balances. If the adjusted series is positive, new loans extended should be greater than loan repayments and adds support to the hypothesis that part of the decline in the as-reported loans data is from banks removing the debt from their books because of doubtful collection. Both the as-reported and adjusted consumer loan series are plotted here:

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Notably, year-over-year growth in consumer loans adjusted for charge-offs has remained positive, which contrasts the negative growth in the as-reported series. That is, the net growth in new loans and loan repayments shows a positive (albeit slowing) growth rate once charge-offs are factored in. Over 2009, this estimate of charge-offs totaled about $27 billion while banks' average consumer loan balances declined by about $25 billion. Thus, a significant portion of the recent decline in consumer loan balances is the result of charge-offs.

Nevertheless, in an expanding economy, little or no credit growth implies a declining share of consumption financed through credit. Adjusting consumer loans for charge-offs suggests that the degree of consumer deleveraging across nonmortgage debt is somewhat less substantial than indicated by the headline numbers.

All in all, the consumer credit picture is a bit more complicated than it appears on the surface. A more detailed look suggests that banks haven't cut their consumer loan portfolios as drastically as sometimes assumed. The large run-up in charge-offs has also masked the underlying dynamics for loan creation and repayment. Factoring in charge-offs provides some evidence that a nontrivial part of consumer deleveraging is coming through charge-offs.

By Michael Hammill, economic policy analysis specialist in the Atlanta Fed's research department

Breaking up big banks: As usual, benefits come with a side of costs

Probably the least controversial proposition among an otherwise very controversial set of propositions on which financial reform proposals are based is that institutions deemed "too big to fail" (TBTF) are a real problem. As Fed Chairman Bernanke declared not too long ago:

As the crisis has shown, one of the greatest threats to the diversity and efficiency of our financial system is the pernicious problem of financial institutions that are deemed "too big to fail."

The next question, of course, is how to deal with that threat. At this point the debate gets contentious. One popular suggestion for dealing with the TBTF problem is to just make sure that no bank is "too big." Two scholars leading that charge are Simon Johnson and
James Kwak (who are among other things the proprietors at The Baseline Scenario blog). They make their case in the New York Times' Economix feature:

Since last fall, many leading central bankers including Mervyn King, Paul Volcker, Richard Fisher and Thomas Hoenig have come out in favor of either breaking up large banks or constraining their activities in ways that reduce taxpayers' exposure to potential failures. Senators Bernard Sanders and Ted Kaufman have also called for cutting large banks down to a size where they no longer pose a systemic threat to the financial system and the economy.

…We think that increased capital requirements are an important and valuable step toward ensuring a safer financial system. We just don't think they are enough. Nor are they the central issue…

We think the better solution is the "dumber" one: avoid having banks that are too big (or too complex) to fail in the first place.

Paul Krugman has noted one big potential problem with this line of attack:

As I argued in my last column, while the problem of "too big to fail" has gotten most of the attention—and while big banks deserve all the opprobrium they're getting—the core problem with our financial system isn't the size of the largest financial institutions. It is, instead, the fact that the current system doesn't limit risky behavior by "shadow banks," institutions—like Lehman Brothers—that carry out banking functions, that are perfectly capable of creating a banking crisis, but, because they issue debt rather than taking deposits, face minimal oversight.

In addition to that observation—which is the basis of calls for a systemic regulator that spans the financial system, and not just specific classes of financial institutions—there is another, very basic, economic question: Why are banks big?

To that question, there seems to be an answer: We have big banks because there are efficiencies associated with getting bigger—economies of scale. David Wheelock and Paul Wilson, of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Clemson University, respectively, sum up what they and other economists know about economies of scale in banking:

…our findings are consistent with other recent studies that find evidence of significant scale economies for large bank holding companies, as well as with the view that industry consolidation has been driven, at least in part, by scale economies. Further, our results have implications for policies intended to limit the size of banks to ensure competitive markets, to reduce the number of banks deemed "too-big-to-fail," or for other purposes. Although there may be benefits to imposing limits on the size of banks, our research points out potential costs of such intervention.

Writing at the National Review Online, the Cato Institute's Arnold Kling acknowledges the efficiency angle, and then dismisses it:

There's a long debate to be had about the maximum size to which a bank should be allowed to grow, and about how to go about breaking up banks that become too large. But I want to focus instead on the general objections to large banks.

The question can be examined from three perspectives. First, how much economic efficiency would be sacrificed by limiting the size of financial institutions? Second, how would such a policy affect systemic risk? Third, what would be the political economy of limiting banks' size?

It is the political economy that most concerns me…

If we had a free market in banking, very large banks would constitute evidence that there are commensurate economies of scale in the industry. But the reality is that our present large financial institutions probably owe their scale more to government policy than to economic advantages associated with their vast size.

I added the emphasis to the "probably" qualifier.

The Wheelock-Wilson evidence does not disprove the Kling assertion, as the estimates of scale economies are obtained using banks' cost structures, which certainly are impacted by the nature of government policy. But if economies of scale are in some way intrinsic to at least some aspects of banking—and not just political economy artifacts—the costs of placing restrictions on bank size could introduce risks that go beyond reducing the efficiency of the targeted financial institutions. If some banks are large for good economic reasons, the forces that move them to become big would likely emerge with force in the shadow banking system, exacerbating the very problem noted by Krugman.

I think it bears noting that the argument for something like constraining the size of particular banks implicitly assumes that it is not possible, for reasons that are either technical or political, to actually let failing large institutions fail. Maybe it is so, as Robert Reich asserts in a Huffington Post item today. And maybe it is in fact the case that big is not beautiful when it comes to financial institutions. But in evaluating the benefits of busting up the big guys, we shouldn't lose sight of the possibility that this is also a strategy that could carry very real costs.

By Dave Altig, senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

In the beginning, there was a lender of last resort

Steven Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, asks and answers the question "should the Fed stay out of the bank supervision business?"

"As the Senate begins to focus on how to fix financial regulation, one of the remaining unresolved issues is what role the Federal Reserve should have in supervising banks.

"The correct answer? None at all."

One of the centerpieces of the Pearlstein argument is this:

"The reality is that the Fed's primary focus is and will always be on monetary policy. Bank supervision will continue, as it has been, as a secondary activity that not only receives less attention from the top but will be sacrificed at those rare but crucial moments when the two missions might conflict. Indeed, by arguing that the Fed needs the insights gleaned from bank supervision to be more effective in making monetary policy, the Fed essentially acknowledges this hierarchy in its priorities. Bank supervision is important enough that it ought to be somebody else's top priority."

If you might allow me a moment of personal indulgence, there was a time when I had some sympathy with the sentiment that the "Fed's primary focus is and always will be on monetary policy." I, of course, knew the story of the creation of the Fed, motivated by the need to provide an elastic currency to avoid disruptive fluctuations in prices and a lender of last resort to stop liquidity stress from becoming a full-blown financial crisis. But that was a story from the past. The modern world began in 1935 with the statutory creation of the Federal Open Market Committee, which would eventually evolve, with its central bank brethren in the rest of the world, into the institution described by Pearlstein as being primarily focused on monetary policy.

I felt that way until Sept. 11, 2001. On an average day in the week ending Sept. 5 of that year, the Federal Reserve extended $21 million in discount loans to banks, a reasonably representative volume. On Sept. 12, discount loans amounted to over $45 billion. As a result, the U.S. financial system did not collapse.

The horrible circumstances of 9/11 have been thankfully unique, but there is a case to be made for the proposition that the most important role of the central bank in the recent financial crisis was not in the realm of traditional monetary policy but in the exercise of variations on the lender-of-last-resort function. In fact, in times of acute financial stress, this role must always be so. Witness this remark by Alan Greenspan on Oct. 20, 1987:

"… in a crisis environment, I suspect we shouldn't really focus on longer-term policy questions until we get beyond this immediate period of chaos."

Which brings us to the question of the Fed's role in bank supervision. More precisely, it brings us to comments from Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart, who delivered remarks on Wednesday to the New York Association for Business Economics:

"… the Fed must play a central role in a defense structure designed to prevent or manage future crises. My key argument is the indivisibility of monetary authority, the lender-of-last-resort role, and a substantial direct role in bank supervision. Only the Fed can act as lender of last resort because only the monetary authority can print money in an emergency. To make sound decisions, the lender of last resort needs intimate hard and qualitative knowledge of individual financial institutions, their connectedness to counterparties, and the capacity of management.

"There is sentiment in Washington that would separate these tightly linked functions that are so critical in responding to a financial crisis. Removing the central bank from a supervision role designed to provide totally current, firsthand knowledge and information will weaken defenses against recurrence of financial instability. Flawed defenses could be calamitous in a future we cannot see."

If this advice goes unheeded, I fear we might discover its wisdom in the worst possible circumstances.

By Dave Altig, senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

Should the Fed stay in regulation?

One of the central issues in the postcrisis effort to reform our regulatory infrastructure is who should do the regulating. The answer to some in Congress is none of the above:

"… under consideration is a consolidated bank regulator, one aide [to Alabama Senator Richard Shelby] said. The idea is supported by [Connecticut Senator Christopher] Dodd, who proposed eliminating the Office of Thrift Supervision and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and moving their powers, along with the bank-supervision powers of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., to the new agency.

"Negotiators are still deciding how to monitor firms for systemic risk, including how to define and measure it, what authorities to give a regulator and which agency is best suited to get the power, a Shelby aide said."

As reported in The New York Times:

"The Senate and the Obama administration are nearing agreement on forming a council of regulators, led by the Treasury secretary, to identify systemic risk to the nation's financial system, officials said Wednesday…"

Though the idea of a council to provide regulatory and supervisory oversight is still contentious (the Times article offers multiple opinions from Federal Reserve officials) the formation of a council is not necessarily the same thing as removing the central bank from boots-on-the-ground, or operational, supervisory responsibility. In other words, there is still the question of how to monitor systemic risk and which agency is best suited to get the power.

Earlier this week I made note of a new International Monetary Fund (IMF) paper by Olivier Blanchard, Giovanni Dell'Aricca, and Paulo Mauro, taking some issue with the proposal that central banks consider raising their long-run inflation objectives. Though that part of the paper seemed to attract almost all of the attention in the media and blogosphere, the discussion in the IMF article expanded well beyond that inflation target issue. Included among the many proposals of Blanchard et al. was this, on systemic risk regulation and the role of the central bank:

"If one accepts the notion that, together, monetary policy and regulation provide a large set of cyclical tools, this raises the issue of how coordination is achieved between the monetary and the regulatory authorities, or whether the central bank should be in charge of both.

"The increasing trend toward separation of the two may well have to be reversed. Central banks are an obvious candidate as macroprudential regulators. They are ideally positioned to monitor macroeconomic developments, and in several countries they already regulate the banks. 'Communication' debacles during the crisis (for example on the occasion of the bailout of Northern Rock) point to the problems involved in coordinating the actions of two separate agencies. And the potential implications of monetary policy decisions for leverage and risk taking also favor the centralization of macroprudential responsibilities within the central bank."

Consistent with the even-handedness of the Blanchard et al. paper, the authors did not come to this conclusion without noting the legitimate issues of those who would separate regulatory authority from the central bank:

"Against this solution, two arguments were given in the past against giving such power to the central bank. The first was that the central bank would take a 'softer' stance against inflation, since interest rate hikes may have a detrimental effect on bank balance sheets. The second was that the central bank would have a more complex mandate, and thus be less easily accountable. Both arguments have merit and, at a minimum, imply a need for further transparency if the central bank is given responsibility for regulation."

But, they conclude:

"The alternative, that is, separate monetary and regulatory authorities, seems worse."

I wonder, then: Would a regulatory council of which the Federal Reserve is a member, combined with operational supervisory responsibilities housed within the central bank, be a tolerably good response to Blanchard's and his colleagues' admonitions?

By Dave Altig, senior vice president and director of research at the Atlanta Fed