"More papers on the credit crunch
Links to some interesting papers that I recently read.
The first comes from a conference on financial markets held at the start of this month at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Last fall, V.V. Chari, Larry Christiano, and Pat Kehoe received a lot of attention (e.g., Tabarrok, Avent, Economist, Kwak, Bonddad, and Thoma [1], [2], [3],) for noting that aggregate lending by banks was in fact increasing during the period in which many analysts were describing it as sharply curtailed. At the Chicago conference, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economists Ethan Cohen-Cole, Burcu Duygan-Bump, Jose Fillat, and Judit Montoriol-Garriga argued that those aggregate numbers conceal some very significant compositional trends, namely, previously existing lines of credit were being drawn on by borrowers and a sharply increased fraction of lending was consumed by securities originally intended for securitization but which banks were forced to hold on their own books.
Another interesting conference was held two weeks later at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, from which I found the paper by Gary Gorton quite interesting. (You can also find it discussed by Falkenblog, Cowen, Kling, and Klein). Gorton views the recent problems as an ongoing banking panic. Here are some excerpts:
A banking panic means that the banking system is insolvent. The banking system cannot honor contractual demands; there are no private agents who can buy the amount of assets necessary to recapitalize the banking system, even if they knew the value of the assets, because of the sheer size of the banking system. When the banking system is insolvent, many markets stop functioning and this leads to very significant effects on the real economy....
The current crisis has its roots in the transformation of the banking system, which involved two important changes. First, derivative securities have grown exponentially in the last twenty-five years, and this has created an enormous demand for collateral, i.e., informationally-insensitive debt. Second, there has been the movement of massive amounts of loans originated by banks into the capital markets in the form of securitization and loan sales. Securitization involves the issuance of bonds ("tranches") that came to be used extensively as collateral in sale and repurchase transactions ("repo"), freeing other categories of assets, mostly treasuries, for use as collateral for derivatives transactions and for use in settlement systems.... [R]epo is a form of banking in that it involves the "deposit" of money on call (as repo is short-term, e.g., mostly over night) backed by collateral. The current panic centered on the repo market, which suffered a run when "depositors" required increasing haircuts, due to concerns about the value and liquidity of the collateral should the counterparty "bank" fail....
Securitized asset classes, e.g., mortgages, credit card receivables, auto loans, may be examples of relatively informationally-insensitive debt, created by the private sector without government insurance....
A "systemic shock" to the financial system is an event that causes such debt to become informationally-sensitive, that is, subject to adverse selection because the shock creates sufficient uncertainty as to make speculation profitable. The details of how that happens are discussed below, but in summary, fear of the resulting lemons market can cause the (inefficient) collapse of trading in debt and a stoppage of new credit being issued.
A classic bank run, you say? Hmm, where have I heard that before? But I think there's more that needs to be said about the regulatory environment that is supposed to prevent this kind of thing.
Gorton's paper might offer some support for those who think that we just got stuck on the bad side of a structure with multiple possible equilibria. An alternative and more pessimistic perspective is developed in a recent note by Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco economists Reuven Glick and Kevin Lansing. Glick and Lansing view the problem as more structural and fundamental, resulting from an unsustainable run-up of household debt. Their analysis was also highlighted by Thoma and Bloomberg.
Technorati Tags: macroeconomics, economics, Federal Reserve, bank panic, credit crunch
"September 01, 2007
Comments on Housing and the Monetary Transmission Mechanism
Here are the comments that I delivered this morning at the Fed Jackson Hole conference.
Governor Mishkin has done a nice job of categorizing the various channels by which the consequences of monetary policy might be transmitted to the economy. I'd like to take a step back and reflect on what are the instruments of monetary policy, the transmission of whose effects we're discussing.
The instrument of monetary policy that we tend to think of first is the time path of short-term interest rates. It's natural to start there, because it's easy to quantify exactly what the Fed is doing.
But another instrument of monetary policy that I think needs to be discussed involves regulation and supervision of the financial system. This is inherently a messier question. It's harder to quantify the effects, and many of the issues I'm going to be raising today may be outside the current regulatory authority of the Federal Reserve itself. Indeed, one way you can view the history of our financial system is that a certain type of problem becomes recognized, we develop regulations to deal with it, and then new parallel institutions evolve, outside that regulatory framework, where the same kind of problem arises in a new setting.
Although the regulatory question is messier to address, I think we'd all agree there have been periods historically where it played a key role in determining the course of events. The most recent experience might be the 1980s, for which you all know the story.1 As a result of a series of bad luck and bad decisions, a significant number of U.S. banks and savings and loans at the time ended up with a position of negative net equity. But that did not prevent them from being able to borrow large sums at favorable rates, thanks to deposit insurance. The decision problem for an entity in that situation has a clear solution-- with the lower part of the distribution truncated, you want to maximize the variance of the investments you fund with that borrowing. That recklessness in lending was a factor aggravating both the boom and the subsequent bust of that episode. Fortunately, through a combination of good luck and good policies, we were able to correct the resulting mess in a way that avoided the more severe problems that some of us were anticipating at the time.
Why do I suggest that there might be something similar going on in the current environment? I'm basically very puzzled by the terms of some of the mortgage loans that we've seen offered over the last few years-- for example, mortgages with no downpayment, negative amortization, no investigation or documentation of the borrowers' ability to repay, and loans to households who had demonstrated problems managing simple credit card debt.
The concern that I think we should be having about the current situation arises from the same economic principles as a classic bank run, and potentially applies to any institution whose assets have a longer maturity than its liabilities. The problem arises when the losses on the institution's assets exceed its net equity. Short-term creditors then all have an incentive to be the first one to get their money out. If the creditors are unsure which institutions are solvent and which are not, the result of their collective actions may be to force some otherwise sound institutions to liquidate their assets at unfavorable terms, causing an otherwise solvent institution to become insolvent.
In the traditional story, the institution we were talking about was a bank, its long term assets were loans, and its short term liabilities were deposits. In the current situation, the institution could be a bank or investment fund, the assets could be mortgage-backed securities or their derivatives, and the short-term credit could be commercial paper. The names and the players may have changed, but the economic principles are exactly the same. How much of a worry this might be depends on the size of specific potential losses for Institution X relative to its net equity, and the volume of short-term loans that could potentially be disrupted as a result.
This is not just a theoretical possibility. My understanding is that this is exactly what happened to Germany's IKB Deutsche Industriebank on August 9 to set off the tumult in global short-term capital markets.2
Governor Mishkin discusses the potential role of real estate prices in the monetary transmission mechanism. I am seeing that not as an issue in its own right, but instead as a symptom and a propagation mechanism of the broader problem. It is a symptom in the sense that, if loans were extended to people who shouldn't have received them, real estate prices would have been bid up higher than they should have been. And it is a propagation mechanism in the sense that, as long as house prices continued to rise, all sins were forgiven. Even a completely fraudulent loan would not go into default when there's sufficient price appreciation, since the perpetrator is better off repaying the loan in order to enjoy the capital gain.
The problem is that, as this process gets undone, both effects operate in reverse. A credit crunch means that some people who should get loans don't receive them, depressing real estate prices, and as prices fall, some loans will become delinquent that otherwise might not. If such fundamentals are indeed contributing factors on the way up and the way down, the magnitude of the resulting decline in real estate prices, and their implications for default rates, could be much bigger than the reassuring numbers Mishkin invites us to remember based on the historical variability of these series. What worries me in particular is, if we see this much in the way of delinquencies and short-term credit concerns in the current economic environment, in which GDP has still been growing and house price declines are quite modest, what can we expect with a full-blown recession and, say, a 20% decline in average real estate values?
Now, the question that all this leads me to ask is why-- why did all this happen? Why were loans offered at such terms? I'm not sure that I have all the answers, but I am sure that this is the right question. And if you reject my answers, I hope it's because you have even better answers, and not because you dismiss the question.
It seems the basic facts highlighted in Green and Wachter's paper yesterday might be a good place to begin. Since 1990, U.S. nominal GDP has increased about 80% (logarithmically). Outstanding mortgage debt grew 50% more than this, raising the debt/GDP ratio from about 0.5 to 0.8. Mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie grew 75% faster than GDP, while mortgages held outright by the two GSEs increased 150% more than GDP. The share of all mortgages held outright by Fannie and Freddie grew from 4.7% in 1990 to 12.9% in 2006, which includes $170 billion in subprime AAA-rated private label securities. The fraction had been as high as 20.5% in 2002.3. It is hard to escape the inference that expansion of the role of the GSEs may have had something to do with the expansion of mortgage debt.
 |
This acquisition of mortgages was enabled by issuance of debt by the GSEs which currently amounts to about $1.5 trillion. Investors were willing to lend this money to Fannie and Freddie at terms more favorable than are available to other private companies, despite the fact that the net equity of the enterprises-- about $70 billion last year-- represents only 5% of their debt and only 1.5% of their combined debt plus mortgage guarantees. If I knew why investors were so willing to lend to the GSEs at such favorable terms, I think we'd have at least part of the answer to the puzzle.
And I think the obvious answer is that investors were happy to lend to the GSEs because they thought that, despite the absence of explicit government guarantees, in practice the government would never allow them to default. And which part of the government is supposed to ensure this, exactly? The Federal Reserve comes to mind. I'm thinking that there exists a time path for short term interest rates that would guarantee a degree of real estate inflation such that the GSEs would not default. The creditors may have reasoned, "the Fed would never allow aggregate conditions to come to a point where Fannie or Freddie actually default." And the Fed says, "oh yes we would." And the market says, "oh no you wouldn't."
It's a game of chicken. And one thing that's very clear to me is that this is not a game that the Fed wants to play, because the risk-takers are holding the ace card, which is the fact that, truth be told, the Fed does not want to see the GSEs default. None of us do. That would be an event with significant macroeconomic externalities that the Fed is very much committed to avoid.
While I think that preserving the solvency of the GSEs is a legitimate goal for policy, it is equally clear to me that the correct instrument with which to achieve this goal is not the manipulation of short-term interest rates, but instead stronger regulatory supervision of the type sought by OFHEO Director James Lockhart, specifically, controlling the rate of growth of the GSEs' assets and liabilities, and making sure the net equity is sufficient to ensure that it's the owners, and not the rest of us, who are absorbing any risks. So here's my key recommendation-- any insitution that is deemed to be "too big to fail" should be subject to capital controls that assure an adequate net equity cushion.
While I think the answer to our question may begin here, it certainly doesn't end, as indeed, thanks to Lockhart, the growth of mortgages held outright by the GSEs in 2006 was held in balance, and we simply saw privately-issued mortgage-backed securities jump in to take their place, with their share of U.S. mortgages spiking from 8.6% in 2003 to 17.4% in 2005. One might argue that the buyers of these private securities may have made a similar calculation, insofar as the same aggregate conditions that keep Fannie and Freddie afloat would perhaps also be enough to keep their noses above water. Or perhaps Professor Shiller is right, that psychologically each investor deluded himself into thinking it must be OK because he saw everybody else doing the same thing. Or maybe they were more rationally thinking, "the Fed wouldn't let us all go down, would it?" And the Fed says, "oh yes we would." And once again, regulation, not selecting an optimal value for the fed funds target, has to be the way you want to play that game.
If these bad loans were all a big miscalculation, perhaps that is something the Fed might consider addressing as a regulatory problem as well. The flow of accurate information is absolutely vital for properly functioning capital markets. I have found myself frustrated, in looking through the annual reports of some of the corporations and funds involved in this phenomena, at just how difficult it is to get a clear picture of exactly where the exposures are. I think the accounting profession has let us down here, which you might describe as a kind of networking equilibrium problem. But if the Federal Reserve were to develop and insist on certain standards of accounting transparency for its member institutions, that might help to be a stimulus to get much more useful public documentation for everybody.
It also might be useful to revisit whether Fed regulations themselves may be contributing to this misinformation. Frame and Scott (2007) report that U.S. depository institutions face a 4% capital-to-assets requirement for mortgages held outright but only a 1.6% requirement for AA-rated mortgage-backed securities, which seems to me to reflect the (in my opinion mistaken) assumption that cross-sectional heterogeneity is currently the principal source of risk for mortgage repayment. Perhaps it's also awkward for the Fed to declare that agency debt is riskier than Treasury debt and yet treat the two as equivalent for so many purposes.
Of course I grant the traditional argument that regulation necessarily involves some loss of efficiency. But to that my answer is, it's worth a bit of inefficiency if it enables us to avoid a full-fledged financial crisis. I'd also point out that, if our problems do indeed materially worsen, the political calls for regulation will become impossible to resist, and much of the cures recommended by the politicians would create dreadful new problems of their own-- that too is part of the historical pattern we've seen repeated many times. For this reason, I think it would be wise for the Federal Reserve to be clear on exactly what changes in regulatory authority could help prevent a replay of these developments, and preposition itself as an advocate to get these implemented now. Such steps will also be necessary, I think, to restore confidence in the system, if the situation indeed worsens from here.
Now, I should also emphasize that understanding how we got into this situation is a different question from how we get out. Tighter capital controls by themselves right now would surely make the matter worse, and allowing an expansion of the GSE liabilities may be as good a short-term fix as anybody has. But I do not think we should do so without seeing clearly the nature of the underlying problem, and certainly cannot think that by itself expansion of GSE liabilities represents any kind of long-run solution.
Finally, in closing, suppose that I'm wrong about all of this. Suppose that the developments I've been talking about-- the appearence of loan originators in every strip mall, anxious to lend to anyone, and other parties just as anxious to buy those loans up-- suppose that it is all a response to the traditional monetary instrument, the manipulation of the short-term interest rate. After all, a 1% short-term rate, 6% 30-year mortgage rate, and 13% house price appreciation, such as we saw in 2004, is plenty of incentive to borrow and repay. I used to believe that this was sufficient to account for all that we were seeing, and many of you perhaps still think that way. But if it were the case that all these institutional changes are just a response to interest rates, it means that the lags in the monetary transmission process are substantially longer than many of us had supposed. If people were still buying houses in 2006 as a result of institutions that sprung up from the conditions in 2004,it means that, if we thought in 2004 that overstimulation could easily be corrected by bringing rates back up, then we would have been wrong. And likewise, suppose you believe that the pain we're seeing now, and may continue to see for a matter of years, until the new loan originators all go out of business, and recent buyers are forced out of their homes, is simply a response to a monetary tightening that ended a year ago. If so, then if we think today that, if things get really bad, we can always fix things by rapidly bringing interest rates back down-- well, then, once again, we'd be wrong.
Footnotes
1. See for example Kane (1989) and Keeley (1990). Return to text
2. Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2007, p. A1. Return to text
3. Sources: Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, Enterprise Share of Residential Mortgage Debt Outstanding: 1990 - 2007Q1, and Lockhart (2007). Return to text
References
Frame, W. Scott, and Lawrence J. White. 2007. "Charter Value, Risk-Taking Incentives, and Emerging Competition for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, 39, pp. 83-103.
Green, Richard K., and Susan M. Wachter. 2007. "The Housing Finance Revolution."
Kane, Edward J. 1989. The S&L Insurance Mess: How Did It Happen? (Washington: Urban Institute Press).
Keeley, Michael C. 1990. "Deposit INsurance, Risk, and Market Power in Banking," American Economic Review, 80, pp. 1183-1200.
Lockhart, James A. III. 2007. Housing, Subprime, and GSE Reform: Where Are We Headed?
Shiller, Robert J. 2007. "Recent Trends in House Prices and Home Ownership."
"September 06, 2007
Borrowing short and lending long
Here I elaborate on the description of the nature of current problems in financial markets that I offered at the Fed's Jackson Hole conference last week.
A traditional bank is in the business of taking the funds it receives from its depositors and investing them in projects with higher rates of interest. If that was all that is involved, however, the system would be highly unstable, because it's always possible that the bank could lose money on its long-term investments if interest rates rise or worsening economic conditions lead some of its borrowers to default. In such a situation, if the customers all decide they want their money back, there wouldn't be enough to pay them all.
The way this problem is solved is to have the capital that the bank lends come not just from its depositors but also in part from the owners of the bank. These owners should have invested some of their own money to start the bank and reinvested some of the profits of the bank to allow it to grow. The capital that comes from the owners rather than depositors is known as the bank's net equity. The idea is that if the bank takes a loss on its investments, that loss comes out of net equity, and there's still money to pay off all the people who deposited money in the bank.
And what if the losses are bigger than the net equity? Then we're back to the unstable equilibrium, in which each depositor has an incentive to be the first one to get his or her money back, the situation for a classic bank run. Depositors may not be sure which banks have adequate net equity and which don't, so some will be trying to get their money out of banks that are really in good shape. As a result of the bank run, however, those previously solvent institutions will have to sell off their long-term assets, perhaps at a significant loss if they have to be unloaded at fire-sale prices in a panicked market. The result of this may be that the bank panics themselves create new insolvencies, and the problem cascades into a worsening situation.
Historical experience teaches us that this is a highly undesirable scenario, and can create significant economic hardship for people who are completely innocent bystanders. For this reason, we have developed institutions to regulate the banking system, one key goal of which is to ensure that banks always retain sufficient net equity to be able to weather such storms.
What has happened over the last decade is that a variety of new institutions have evolved that play a similar role to that of traditional banks, but that are outside the existing regulatory structure. Rather than acquire funds from depositors, these new financial intermediaries may get their funds by issuing commercial paper. And instead of lending directly, these institutions may be buying assets such as mortgage-backed securities, which pay the holder a certain subset of the receipts on a larger collection of mortgages that are held by the issuer. Although the names and the players have changed, it is still the same old business of financial intermediation, namely, borrowing short and lending long.
There are a variety of new players involved. The principals could be hedge funds or foreign or domestic investment banks. Others could be conduits or structured investment vehicles, artificial entities created by banks, perhaps on behalf of clients. The conduit issues commercial paper and uses the proceeds to purchase other securities. The conduit generates some profits for the bank but is technically not owned by the bank itself and therefore is off of the bank's regular balance sheet.
This system has seen an explosion in recent years, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that conduits have issued nearly $1.5 trillion in commercial paper. Their thirst for investment assets may have been a big factor driving the recklessness in mortgage lending standards, as a result of which much of the assets backing that commercial paper have experienced significant losses.
Without an adequate cushion of net equity for these new financial intermediaries, and with tremendous uncertainty about the quality of the assets they are holding, the result is that those who formerly bought the commercial paper are now very reluctant to renew those loans, a phenomenon that PIMCO's Paul McCulley described at the Fed Jackson Hole conference as a "run on the shadow banking system." I heard others at the conference claim that there might be as much as $1.3 trillion in commercial paper that will be up for renewal in the next few weeks, with great nervousness about what this will entail.
In some cases, these intermediaries have lines of credit with conventional investment banks on which they will be drawing heavily, which will cause these off-balance-sheet entities to quickly become on-balance-sheet problems. Their losses may severely erode the net equity of the institution extending the line of credit. How big a mess will this be? I don't think anybody really knows for sure.
In my remarks at Jackson Hole, I basically suggested that we should be thinking about both the causes and potential solutions to the current problem not just in terms of choosing an "optimal" level for the fed funds target interest rate, but also in terms of seeking regulatory and supervisory reforms, the ultimate goal of which would be to ensure that any financial institution whose failure would exert significant negative externalities on the rest of us should be subject to net equity requirements, so that most of the money the players in this game are risking is their own.
I also recommended that we need reforms to make the whole system more transparent. I think the accounting profession has let us down, in that it is very difficult to look at the annual reports of some of the institutions involved and determine what exactly the exposures are. In theory, competitive market pressures are supposed to result in incentives for private auditors to ensure accurate and informative reports. But I think there is a networking equilibrium issue here in which it is very hard for one auditor to try to change the rules if nobody else does, even if getting everybody to change at once would unambiguously improve social welfare. I recommended that the Federal Reserve could itself be a catalyst for such a change by revisiting the reporting requirements on its member institutions.
Technorati Tags: macroeconomics, housing, Federal Reserve, bank run, economics, bank conduits, shadow banking system
Me:
Previewing your Comment
"The concern that I think we should be having about the current situation arises from the same economic principles as a classic bank run, and potentially applies to any institution whose assets have a longer maturity than its liabilities. The problem arises when the losses on the institution's assets exceed its net equity. Short-term creditors then all have an incentive to be the first one to get their money out. If the creditors are unsure which institutions are solvent and which are not, the result of their collective actions may be to force some otherwise sound institutions to liquidate their assets at unfavorable terms, causing an otherwise solvent institution to become insolvent." I call this a Calling Run, and agree with you. But my notion of this came from Irving Fisher's classic paper "The Debt-Deflation Theory Of Great Depressions", and Debt-Deflation is what frightened me, not a contained run on some kinds of investments. Was this your worry as well? In other words, the fear was a run that spread outside of its purview. Posted by Don the libertarian Democrat
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment