The ASI's Best of 2016

Sam Bowman, Executive Director

Song: A tie between Floridada by Animal Collective and Monopoly by EasyFun and Noonie Bao.

Album: Dangerous Woman by Ariana Grande, unless Emotion: Side B by Carly Rae Jepsen counts as an album (but overall it was a very poor year for music).

Musician: Grimes (her Art Angels album came out in 2015 but I really got into her this year).

Movie: 10 Cloverfield Lane. Creepy!

TV Show: Stranger Things (it’s on Netflix).

Book: Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop. I thought this was an original, well-sourced and highly informative history of the Church that made its case very persuasively.

Restaurant: Silk Road, Xinjiangese food in the heart of Camberwell.

Article I wrote: I'm a neoliberal. Maybe you are too.

Article others wrote: Scott Alexander’s review/digest of Albion’s Seed. I don’t think I’ve ever learned as much fun or interesting information as in this post.

Political moment: The stock market surging after Donald Trump’s election victory, and Trump’s nomination of Wall Street megabankers to his cabinet. Neoliberalism always wins!

Person: Peter Thiel, for leading the fight against revenge porn online.

 

Ben Southwood, Head of Research

Song: Super Natural - Danny L Harle and Carly Rae Jepson

Album: Tuluum Shimmering - Flower Dance Song (my full best of year list here) 

Movie: Fences (Starring and Directed by Denzel Washington)

Book: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller

Restaurant: Temper or Kiln, both in Soho 

Article I wrote: Sajid Javid will make British cities great again

Article other wrote: Neoliberalism, Social justice and Barbie’s New Hair by Rory Ellwood

Political moment: Madsen's correct prediction of the presidential election—yet another in a seemingly unending streak

Twitter Account: @densifyingHOU

Flora Laven-Morris, Head of Communications

Song: Nothing new, it’s all been underwhelming. Barry and Freda - Victoria Wood. 

Musician: Bruce Springsteen, for playing a 4 hour show and managing not to die this year.

Book: The Shepard’s Life, James Rebanks – like acupuncture for your brain, slow starter but watch out for graphic description of lambing season toward the end. 

Restaurant: I spent my lunch money on the theatre – go see Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour if it ever reruns, (and watch out for Dawn Sievewright) best thing the National’s done in years. 

Article: ‘We’re the only plane in the sky’, on being aboard Air Force 1 during 9/11, it reads more like a book and is about the same length. 

App: Pocket - Kind to aging eyes and very convenient.

Political Moment: It could only be this.

YouTube: Yes Rhythmic Gymnastics is a sport.

Sam Dumitriu, Head of Projects

Song: Landslide by Britta Phillips

Album: Luck or Magic by Britta Phillips

Movie: Nocturnal Animals by Tom Ford

Book: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Restaurant: Chick 'N' Sours

Article I wrote: London Mayor is Punishing the Wrong Kind of Taxi

Article others wrote:  Crony Beliefs by Kevin Simler

Political Moment: Ken Livingstone hides in a toilet

Person: Alan Auerbach. He's single-mindedly pursued Corporate Tax reform for 20+ years and he seems to have got his way with the House tax cut plan. Someone willing to speak to both the left and the right - and able to find common ground.

Amelia Stewart, Gap Year Intern

Song: Place to Be Home (Nick Drake)

Album: 22, A Million (Bon Iver)

Musician: Selena Gomez because, having read her Wikipedia page, I’ve decided she’s a great person

Movie: The new Jason Bourne movie could have been awful but I would have loved it anyway

Book: Written On The Body (Jeanette Winterson) and my favourite poem was No Art (Ben Lerner)

Restaurant: I had some really nice chocolate and banana waffles from Benugo but for some reason I’m drawing a blank on restaurants today

Article: The Absurd Courage of Choosing To Live (Jennifer Michael Hecht)

Political moment: George Galloway retweeting the ASI account (yay!) and how proud my parents were after when I told them…

Person: The Dalai Lama - for his book on happiness and maybe being a CIA agent

TV Show: The Killing on Netflix

Oliver Riley, Gap Year Intern

Song: Beautiful by A.G Cook (credits go to Sam and Ben for introducing to PC music)

Album: Joytime by Marshmello

Book: Progress by Johan Norberg, showed me that it’s not all doom and gloom

Film: 21 Cloverfield Lane (so much thrill)

Restaurant: CAU – I had my first expensive steak here and I will never be able to look at a cow in the same way again

Article: Boris Johnson’s poem to the Spectator about President Erdogan

Political moment: Boris Johnson then becoming Foreign Secretary

Person: Chris Froome

On that £50 billion EU bill for Peter Mandelson's pension

Michel Barnier, the Frenchman negotiating for the EU over Brexit, has told us that Britain will be faced with an exit bill of £50 billion upon leaving the European Union:

Britain will be presented with a £50 billion “exit bill” by the European Union as soon as Theresa May triggers Article 50, the chief negotiator for Brussels is warning.

Michel Barnier has told colleagues that the UK must keep paying “tens of billions” annually into the EU budget until 2020.

The bill would include the UK’s share of outstanding pensions liabilities, loan guarantees and spending on UK-based projects.

Some of this is not sensibly to be included - loan guarantees are payable when loans fail for example, not before. It's also a terribly interesting accounting - this is what the EU already costs us, without the actual running costs of it on an annual basis. The accruals of amounts already owed that is, without the further payments that would be made if we stayed in. 

Which puts that £350 million a week claim in an interesting light, doesn't it? 

However, the general concept seems sound enough. When you give up a lease on a flat you do indeed pay the last bit of the electricity bill, the gas and so on. We might think that we can manage, perhaps even decide upon, Peter Mandelson's pension ourselves (and that is very definitely included in this sum) but let's not allow personal taste to intrude upon such matters.

However, when you do leave such a lease you also get paid out on any improvements you have made to the capital value of the property. And over our decades of membership a number of improvements have been made. There's a substantial landed estate for example, various parliament buildings dotted around, agencies in many major European cities, embassies in most major world capitals. All of these are owned by the EU and have been paid for from the various payments into it by the national governments.

Britain has also been one of the very few such national governments consistently making net payments into the system too. We thus have an argument that a substantial portion of that capital estate is ours and needs to be returned to us.

And it will really be very interesting indeed to find out whether the tail end of the running costs, which is what is being demanded, is larger than the capital value of the estate we've already paid for. For if it is then that's a statement that the EU is simply a drain on us as we pay for it. Only if that capital value is larger than the running costs can we say that the system is a net wealth builder - which might be useful in portraying the EU as worthwhile but it would then mean that we would be net recipients of funds upon leaving.

How should we pay for social care?

Council tax bills may rise to fund care for the elderly, Sky News reports, as the hole to pay for it grows. It’s a very difficult problem to solve: if the state could credibly commit to letting people sink or swim based on whether they’d saved for themselves, there would be a strong incentive for people to save for themselves, but since it’s inconceivable that we’d actually let old people go without care there’s a strong element of moral hazard at play.

Council tax rises wouldn’t be the worst way of raising tax, because they hit landowners who are probably older on average, rather than renters. That might seem counterintuitive, because it’s whoever is actually living in a property that actually hands over the money for council tax, but the economic theory and empirical evidence is pretty clear: when council tax bills rise, rents generally fall in proportion to that, so in actual fact it’s the property owner who pays. I explain why here.

Still, since council tax is a tax on the property value rather than the land value it disincentivises investment in properties (building denser or higher quality units, for example), and it’s also a straightforward expropriation of landowners which is less than ideal.

Median income by age: 2007–08 to 2015–16 (2007–08 = 100) (IFS)

If the state is going to shoulder a large part of the social care burden it makes sense that other benefits to the elderly should be cut to help pay for it. The triple lock, in particular, forces us to divert funds to people who in many respects are quite well off – over-60s have actually seen their incomes rise since 2007, unlike every other age group, as the graph above shows. And with inflation at just over 1 percent, the triple lock requires at least a 1 percent real terms increase, when all other areas of government spending are being cut. It doesn’t make much sense apart from as a vote-buyer, and it’s expensive.

If it’s cost-effective to means test things like free bus passes and the winter fuel allowance, that might be another way to make sure we’re not wasting money on wealthier pensioners, but all means testing that looks at assets (like the size of your pension pot or the value of your home) is a harmful disincentive to saving, which makes us all poorer.

This goes to the root of the problem with paying for social care. The simple approach would be to make it so that those who can pay do, but because pensioners are living off assets what this really means is that means testing will give people a reason not to save or invest their income for their retirement. One often-mentioned ‘solution’ would see pensioners who own their homes or have other savings required to mortgage or sell them to pay for their care, with those who don’t covered by the state. But this gives people a big reason to consume their income instead of investing it before they retire, which is bad overall (investment drives growth) and pretty unfair on the poor sods who aren’t wise enough to game the system this way.

It might be that reducing barriers to saving would reduce this problem – cutting capital taxes and giving people unlimited ISAs so returns to investment are taxed as little as possible.

But I suspect a social care savings account scheme might also be needed, like Singapore’s health savings account policy. If we required people to save for their old age care now, topping up the contributions of people on low incomes, we could make sure that as people get older they have a pot of savings dedicated to their social care. It’s their money – if they don’t need social care and they have money left over when they die, it goes to their children (tax-free, of course). As with Singapore’s health system, we’d probably need an insurance system as well, to cover the costs of those whose needs are exceptionally high – that, or accept that there will always be a pretty large role for government paying for people in their old age. I’m not sure anyone in government has the appetite for reforms of this scale, but I can’t see any other long-term solution to social care funding that would work.

Talk about getting the wrong end of the stick here

The Times has a piece from Alice Thomson which manages to get matters entirely the wrong way around:

Surrogacy rules treat babies like objects

No, not really, that's the one thing that the surrogacy rules don't do:

The 30-year-old Surrogacy Arrangements Act, and the system of parental orders under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, is a bizarre anomaly. Even Mary Warnock, the author of the 1984 Warnock Report which formed the basis of the legislation, now says the law is wrong.

The legal parents of a child at birth are the surrogate and her spouse rather than the biological parents. The baby is viewed as an object to be kept or given away rather than as the most important consideration.

Again, no, the very problem is that the baby is not treated as an object. For we can make contracts about objects in a manner that we cannot about human beings. The sale of one human from one to another is also called slavery and we're really pretty sure that we don't in fact like that sort of objectification of a human. This is why we don't, do not and probably cannot, have binding contracts upon surrogate parents.

Simply because if we are to do so then we've got to declare that the child is indeed an object which can be subject to such contracts, an object that we can force someone to deliver up.

We are vocally in favour of organ and gamete donation being sullied by filthy lucre. As we are of paid surrogacy contracts. We're deeply, deeply, unsure whether such surrogacy contracts will ever be thought to be truly, in extremis, binding, rather than a looser laying out of general expectations about what is to happen. 

But we are entirely certain here that this particular problem is that the baby is not an object and thus cannot be subject to contractual, err, terms of delivery.

Postcode auctions, not postcode lotteries

There’s a lot of talk about postcode lotteries, but we don’t have lotteries, we have postcode auctions.

This is because when services or amenities are tied to a location we end up paying for them through higher house prices. This is very clear with schools: many state schools are just as good as fee-paying independent schools, so being able to send your child to one is like having a free ticket to a private education. Parents who can afford it will pay a bit more for a house that’s within the catchment area of one of those good state schools, ultimately driving up the price to be close to the expected value of sending their child to that school. This effect is called 'capitalisation' and, right enough, when we look at the empirical evidence it’s fairly clear that house prices rise, at least to a large extent, to reflect the value of schooling in an area, especially in areas with very good schools.

This seems to hold when we look at Local Authority grants in general. This study looked at grants given to marginal Labour councils during the 2000s by central government – a proxy for money used by the central government to buy off voters in swing constituencies. (Naughty.)

What it found was that, where the supply of housing was constrained, house prices rose almost fully to reflect the value of the grant. That’s a sign that the grants benefit landowners in these places in a fairly direct cash transfer to them, from people elsewhere. As the quality of the area rises, so does the price of their homes.

The same effect exists when we raise or cut property taxes like business rates or council tax in an area – property values and rents fall or rise in proportion to the rise or fall in the tax, meaning that it’s landowners who benefit rather than the renting business or resident. This seems to capitalise into property values very quickly.

Why does this matter? On the one hand, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for people to pay more for things like attractive neighbourhoods. The problem is that, when the money for this is coming from taxpayers from outside these areas, it’s a transfer from them to landowners in those areas. There’s no reason to think that this should be a welfare enhancing transfer, and if it forces renters to move by raising rents then it might well be welfare reducing.

Another problem is equity: most people value good schooling for their kids and living in low crime areas very highly, but can’t afford to pay. If better-than-average state schools are only accessible to parents who can pay through higher house prices, lots of the public expense is benefiting people who can pay, and are.

The final problem is over-entanglement. For example, if quiet and leafy parts of town also happen to be the ones with good schools, you’ll have a situation where some people who really like quiet neighbourhoods but don’t have children are wasting money by having to pay for access to good schools, too, or are being priced out needlessly, and vice-versa for parents who just want the best schools for their children.

There’s no straightforward answer to this, because some of it is unavoidable, and some of it is exactly what we want – house prices should be higher in more desirable areas so they go to people who value them most.

But attaching services to these locations is probably a bad idea because it concentrates them on people who can afford it. A school voucher-like system without catchment areas, and patient choice where people can go anywhere they want to access healthcare if a practice or hospital can admit them, could help to diminish the concentration of good services on people who can pay for it, and might drive up standards overall.

In terms of equity, doing this where possible might make the system more like a lottery (and so more open to poorer people than our auction-like system is now).

Remember that one of the main points of the education and healthcare systems is to cover people who would not be able to afford them otherwise. If lots of this is actually being captured by wealthier people and the taxes used to pay create additional deadweight costs, it might not be a highly efficient system. And it may be a good reason to prefer giving cash transfers to the poor and let people pay for services directly, so that we can better target the people we really want to help.

Put an end to this Brexit bickering

Having voted to leave the European Union in a referendum, Britain is now expected to initiate that process by triggering Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon. This was designed to reduce uncertainty in the event of an EU Member State wanting to leave, by providing for a two-year negotiation period.

In fact, it will have the opposite effect. In any political negotiations, both sides tend to adopt extreme positions in order to get the other to make concessions. Only just before the clock strikes twelve does agreement break out – if indeed it does. Such a game of chicken hardly encourages investors, as we discovered during the trade unions v government disputes of the 1960s and 1970s. Article 50 is a recipe for two years of uncertainty – or maybe three or four, knowing how these things are often eked out.

And what will we achieve from all this stress? Probably, two-thirds of diddly squat, which is what David Cameron got from his great ‘Renegotiation’ back in the Spring. The reason is that, if the EU concedes anything to us, it will face demands from other nations, both in the EU and outside, for a bit of the same. Give us a special deal, and everyone will want one.

A third problem is that it is not the leaders of the 27 other nations who will lead the discussions, but the eurocrats in Brussels. How else could it be? You cannot have 28 people round a negotiating table and expect agreement. But, as we have seen, the folk in Brussels are the most intransigent negotiators. They are invested in The Project, and the UK has put two fingers up in their face. Again, concede to us and The Project of ever closer union disintegrates, along with their own purpose, jobs and pensions. (Well, not pensions, of course.)

German carmakers and French food and pharma companies and everyone else who benefits from the UK’s £60-£90 billion trade deficit with the EU might be keen to keep tariff-free trading links open with the UK, fully aware that the UK, as the world’s fifth largest economy, would be good to keep sweet. But those who are actually leading the negotiations have a different, more political, agenda.

So two or more years of Article 50 negotiation will be worse than a waste of time. It will simply generate bitterness between the UK and the rest of the EU, and stir up uncertainty among investors on both sides of the English Channel. So what is to be done?

We could, of course, take the off-the-peg EEA solution, the ‘Norway model’. But that still means paying in to the EU budget and a large measure of free movement of workers, which were firmly rejected in the Referendum. And as Prime Minister Theresa May tells us, “Brexit means Brexit”. But her Great Repeal Bill idea of taking all EU law into UK law – where we can amend or scrap it as we like, on or own timetable, makes perfect sense.

Given that Article 50 will take us nowhere, however, the best thing is simply to invoke it and leave. Goodbye to the single market and the customs union, we will be governed by the WTO rules that actually govern our trade with the other 80% of the world. Since the rest of the world is 60% of our trade and rising (and the EU is 40% and falling), what’s the loss? Would our financial services be ruined because of the loss of passporting? Hardly, we were No1 before passporting, and our biggest single services customer is America, where we don’t have passporting. And in any case, we do not have a single market in services. It’s one of our biggest irritations, but it’s never going to change.

And the true meaning of ‘customs union’ is ‘protectionist club’. The average tariff is only 2.4% – so it is no big deal either way. But the EU raises large tariffs against certain products, especially food products, to protect its own farmers. Outside the customs union, we could buy food from the whole world, much cheaper. Our old Commonwealth partners would be delighted to sell it to us. That is good for us, and good for the poorest in many developing countries in particular. Not only the UK, and UK business, would benefit from us simply leaving, and making an offer to all the world to trade with zero tariffs. Some of the world’s poorest would too. But also, we would end all this Brexit bickering and be able to get on with real life.

Why not tax dead people - they are dead, after all?

Supporters of inheritance taxes do love to argue that we really should tax dead people. After all, they are dead so aren't going to squeal about it. Such taxation does therefore at least pass one test, the maximisation of feathers plucked with the least hissing.

However, this idea does meet one major obstacle, which is that the major economic unit among humans is not the individual but the family:

Ageing parents are drawing up legal documents to make clear that they would rather die than allow excessive care home fees to eat into their child’s inheritance.

The rising cost of elderly care is leading the middle-aged to create powers of attorney enshrining their desire to refuse treatment should they become incapacitated, a leading law firm said.

True, that is a piece of puffery from a law firm advertising, through he kind editors at The Times, their ability to write such legal documents. But even puffery has a basis in truth - why bother to advertise what no one is interested in? 

Which brings us to that family thing. Marriage, or at least pair bonding, are essential to the continuation of the species. We don't do that because sex is fun - it's because those for whom sex was fun bonded and thus raised more children through those decades human children need. There are indeed other species which take longer to reach sexual maturity than we do. But none that require such parenting for so long.

All of which has made the family that basic economic unit of us humans. At which point the detestation of inheritance tax makes sense. The aim and purpose of our travails in the vale of tears is the production of grandchildren. Passing on money rather than J. Corbyn getting to spend it on diversity advisers accords with our deeper instincts. Those rationalisations about how taxing dead people harms no one notwithstanding.

There's a larger point to this. We can build abstract arguments for many things just as sandcastles in the air are entirely possible. But we do have to recall, at least occasionally, that we're dealing with Homo Sapiens here. And he and she can be contrary little buggers at times. We must therefore check that our grand abstractions accord with what humans actually do.

Sure, it would be great if everyone would work flat out to create the perfect society, sharing everything equally as they did so. We've also tried that and it didn't work - because humans. So too with inheritance tax. There are all sorts of logical reasons why it's a stunningly good idea. But that people would seemingly rather pop their c logs rather than not be able to pass on inheritances would seem to indicate that this is one of those times when logic and humans don't mix well. Or perhaps that the wrong logic about humans is being deployed.

Bank of England stress tests inadvertently reveal the weakness of the UK banking system

For the first posting in this two-part series on the 2016 UK stress tests, see here.

The Bank of England’s latest stress test results are important for the following reason: in acknowledging the financial weakness of RBS, the Bank of England is implicitly acknowledging that its own past policies have failed. After all, had those policies worked, then RBS should have returned to financial health long before now. [1]

The results of the stress tests properly interpreted also show that RBS is not the only bank in trouble. The Bank of England flagged up ‘issues’ with Barclays and Standard Chartered too, but the truth is that all the banks are financially weak. The elephant in the room is that the Bank of England’s policies towards the UK banking system have failed to restore it to financial health despite the vast public subsidies involved and despite Bank of England protestations to the contrary.

Read on here:

To start with, we can dismiss the Bank of England’s headline results based on the ratio of Common Equity Tier 1 capital to Risk-Weighted Assets (RWAs). A substantial body of research – including work by its own chief economist Andy Haldane has discredited the RWA measure. Consider:

·      Average RWA fell in the years running up to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), suggesting that the banking system was getting safer when in fact risks were actually building up (see, e.g., Haldane, 2013).

·      Using latest data for the big four UK banks – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS – the ratio of average RWA to Total Assets was 30.6%. However, many assets assigned zero or low risk weights are quite risky.

Thus, the RWA measure hides many (and maybe most) of the risks in the banking system. It did so before the GFC and is doing so still.

The only ratio that matters is the ratio of a bank’s core capital to an appropriate measure of its total amount at risk. The ratio used by the Bank in its stress tests is the Tier 1 Leverage Ratio, Tier 1 capital divided by an amount-at-risk measure known as the Leverage Exposure.

Unfortunately, Tier 1 capital is not a good measure of core capital because it includes items known as Additional Tier 1 (AT1), some of which (such as Deferred Tax Assets) are of no use as a capital resource to a bank in a solvency crisis. AT1 capital also includes items such as Co-Co bonds, whose usefulness in a crisis is also controversial. There is therefore a good argument that a prudent assessment of UK banks’ financial health should focus on CET1 and not include questionable AT1 items, i.e., we should use the CET1 Leverage Ratio instead of the Tier 1 Leverage Ratio. [2]

When we replace Tier 1 with CET1 as the numerator in the Leverage Ratio, then the average post-stress Leverage Ratio for the big 4 UK banks – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS – falls from 3.9 percent to 3.6 percent. [3]

This figure of 3.6 percent can be compared to both regulatory standards and expert opinion:

·      Under the Basel III capital rules, the absolute minimum required leverage ratio is 3 percent. However, the best practice in this field is represented by the Federal Reserve: under rules coming through in the United States, the subsidiaries of the 8 big U.S. G-SIBs (Globally Systemically Important Banks) are soon to be required to maintain leverage ratios of at least 6 percent, i.e., twice that specified in Basel III.

·      Many experts recommend that the minimum required leverage ratio should be at least 15 percent, i.e., five times the Basel III minimum requirement. [4]

There is also a second elephant in the room whose presence has been emphasised by Anat Admati and Sir John Vickers: the price-to-book (PTB) ratio.

For a healthy bank, the PTB ratio would be comfortably above one indicating that the bank had a positive franchise value.

A PTB ratio below one indicates a bank that is sickly: for example, with a PTB ratio of 50%, then the bank has managed to convert £2 of capital provided by shareholders into just £1 of market value.

Yet the PTB ratios of major UK banks are all below 1 and in most cases, well below 1. For the big 4 banks the latest PTB ratios are 79 percent for Barclays, 71 percent for HSBC, 72 percent for Lloyds and 43 percent for RBS.

Such low PTB ratios contradict any narrative that the banking system has been fixed.

They also indicate that the market is signalling major problems that the book values are overlooking and we should take account of these signals.

When we do so, we get the following results for the post-stress market-value CET1 Leverage Ratios:

Market-Value CET1 Leverage Ratios Post BoE Stress

The post-stress market-value CET1 Leverage Ratios vary from 1.08 percent for RBS to 2.93 percent for HSBC and the average is 2.2 percent. All the big four banks fail the test. [5]

The natural inference is that the whole UK banking system is under water. [6]

An obvious follow-on is that the Bank of England narrative – “Banking system fixed because of our wise policies and you can see its resilience from the stress tests” to paraphrase Governor Carney from last year’s stress test press conference – is demonstrably falsified by the results of the BoE’s own stress tests.

References

Admati, A. et alia (2010) “Healthy banking system is the goal, not profitable banks.” Financial Times 10 November. 

Bank of England (2016) “Stress testing the UK banking system: 2016 results.” Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/news/2016/stresstesting.aspx

Haldane, A. G. (2013) “Constraining discretion in bank regulation.”  Speech by Andrew Haldane iven at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Conference on ‘Maintaining Financial Stability: Holding a Tiger by the Tail(s)’, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, 9 April. Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/2013/657.aspx

End Notes

* Kevin Dowd (kevin.dowd@outlook.com) is professor of finance and economics at Durham University. He thanks Tim Bush, James Ferguson, Joel Hills, Martin Hutchinson, Gordon Kerr, Sir John Vickers and Basil Zafiriou for helpful inputs. The usual caveat applies.

[1] Steve Baker MP, Tim Bush (from PIRC), Gordon Kerr (from Cobden Partners) and I have been trying to tell them for over five years that RBS was an unfixable zombie that needed to be put through bankruptcy.  The response? A deafening silence.

[2] In its Stress Test report, the Bank of England set out a variety of alternative sets of results: (a) outcomes before assumed management actions or AT1 conversion, (b) outcomes after assumed management actions but before AT1 conversion, and (c) outcomes after assumed management actions and after AT1 conversion. I prefer the latter for reasons suggested in the text.

[3] If we had assumed case (b) in the above footnote, the difference would only have been slight: the average post-stress CET1 Leverage Ratio for the big four banks would have been 3.7 percent instead of 3.6 percent.

[4] For example, a famous letter drafted by Professor Admati and co-signed by 19 other distinguished economists suggested a minimum leverage ratio (although it did not use that term) of at least 15 percent and some signatories wanted the minimum to be much higher than that. See A. Admati et alia, 2010. Former BB&T chairman John Allison has also supported this position.

[5] We can also say that the post-stress leverage ratios reported here are over-estimates because they are based on Leverage Exposure numbers that fail to incorporate many derivatives exposures. Gordon Kerr, an expert in this area, assures me that the true exposures are at least twice those reflected in the Leverage Exposure numbers used here. Were we to take account of these additional exposures, we would obtain post-stress Leverage Ratios of less than half those reported here.

[6] Note too that the results in the chart are based on the lower of the Bank’s two pass standards, i.e., its so-called hurdle rate or 3 percent. It’s new, higher, pass standard, the ‘systemic reference point’ is in general higher: 3.4 percent for Barclays and HSBC, 3.2% for RBS and (unfortunately) ‘n.a.’ for Lloyds (but even so, presumably not less than 3 percent). Had I used these latter pass standards, the picture would have been worse than suggested by the chart.

Some people still aren't getting these finer distinctions of private property

It's quite obvious that out there in that political world there are people who don't get even the basics of this idea of private property. Those who insist that shareholders cannot pay their managers what they wish for example, or that someone else must be prevented from utilising their own land in their own manner because, you know, the view or something.

But there are also those who miss some of the finer distinctions in this area:

Taxpayers saved the Royal Bank of Scotland. Now it’s time we owned it

Gareth Thomas

That's interesting, not sure we agree, but it is interesting. Maybe the taxpayers should buy out the remaining private shareholders of this dog's dinner. And when put that way we definitely disagree with it. That isn't what is being suggested:

Together as taxpayers we saved the Royal Bank of Scotland – now we should each be allowed to own it. It should become a people’s bank, which every tax-paying British citizen would have the right to become a part-owner of.

Every taxpaying Briton is a part owner right now. For the government, which we fund with out taxes, owns some ungodly percentage of the shares in RBS.

More than £45bn of taxpayer funds have been injected into the Royal Bank of Scotland. This was the right thing to do, but neither keeping it as a state bank nor a fully privatised bank offer the same advantages as turning it into a mutual.

We can have private stock companies, public and even state. RBS is an odd little blend of those last two at present. A mutual is something different, it is owned by (usually at least, in the case of banks or building societies) the depositors. Who gain a slightly better rate of interest on their savings from the absence of that outside capital which would like to get paid a dividend or two.

So the demand here is that all of us taxpayers, who currently own however much it is of the bank, should make a free gift to the future depositors with RBS of £45 billion? Or at least whatever the current diminished value of that investment is?

You know, we really do think that's a deal we can reject. It might even be a good idea that RBS becomes a mutual - again, not that we think so ourselves. But we really are very certain indeed that if that is to happen it should happen with other peoples' money, not ours, us long suffering taxpayers.

We the heck should all of us gift such a thing to some subset of us?

Bank of England fails its stress test again

On November 30th, the Bank of England released the results of its third publicly disclosed set of stress tests of the financial resilience of the UK banking system.  

The good news is that the news is good: our banking system is in good shape, but the bad news is that the good news is not credible.

In this post, I would like to put the stress test results through my own favourite stress test – a reality check.

By this most basic of tests the Bank scores an ‘F’.

Read on:

The spin is that the banking system passes with flying colours even though one of the seven banks involved failed (RBS) and two others (Barclays and Standard Chartered) were deemed as problematic.

Let’s pass over the slight glaring contradiction at the heart of that narrative and quote Governor Carney:

The resilience of the system during the past year in part reflects the consistent build-up of capital resources by banks since the global financial crisis. … the UK banking system is well placed to provide credit to households and businesses during periods of severe stress.

That conclusion is corroborated by the 2016 stress test [which is] broad, coherent and severe …  (Governor’s opening remarks, p. 3)

Every one of these claims is questionable, but let’s focus on the severity of the Bank’s ‘doomsday’ scenario.  

The scenario consists of a bunch of adverse events, including world and UK recessions (annual global GDP growth troughs at -1.9% and UK GDP falls by 4.3%), major falls (over 30% and over 40%) in the prices of houses and commercial real estate, unemployment rising by 4.5 percentage points and sundry other stuff. However, the key phrase is this: “overall, the UK stress is roughly equivalent to that experienced during the financial crisis, albeit with a shallower fall in domestic output” (Bank of England, 2016 stress test results report, p. 6).

Take-home message: the stress scenario was not quite as stressful as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).

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Now consider how this adverse scenario impacts the banks. To quote Carney, the adverse stress scenario led to “system-wide losses of £44 billion over the first two years of the stress – five times those incurred by the same banks over the two years at the height of the financial crisis.” (Governor’s remarks, p. 2)

This statement misled some commentators into thinking that the stress scenario was five times more severe than the GFC, but it isn’t.

Carney’ statement implies that the system-wide losses over the two height years of the crisis were less than £44 billion/5 = £8.8 billion.

This claim is misleading, however. In fact, the banks spread out their reported losses over the period since, because they were afraid of the adverse public reaction if they had disclosed them promptly. Consequently, the appropriate comparison is not with reported losses over these two years only but with cumulative losses post-2007. As James Ferguson of The MacroStrategy Group points out, the cumulative loan losses for the big 4 banks alone were nearly £200 billion and nearly double that if we include balance sheet reserves, securities losses, restructurings/goodwill write-downs and legal redress (Ferguson, 2016, p. 2). [1]

The £44 billion losses generated by the Bank’s stress model are not five times the losses incurred at the height of the crisis but 44¸ 450 or about a tenth of the gross losses banks experienced since 2007.

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But how can a supposedly severe stress scenario lead to the moderate losses projected by the Bank’s stress model?

The most plausible answer is that the Bank’s model is wrong. The Bank model’s estimated losses merely indicate that the feedback link between the scenario and the simulated losses in the Bank’s model must (greatly) under-estimate the losses involved.

This point in and of itself is enough to discredit the entire exercise.

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In the Q&A at the press conference, Carney makes a related claim:

the capital hit in this stress would have wiped out all of the capital that these same banks had prior to the crisis. So this is a big, big hit to capital. (Financial Stability Report Q&A, p. 19)

This claim is wrong. For the big four banks alone, their 2006 Annual Reports report that their capital going into 2007 was about £150 billion. The projected £44 billion loss from the Bank’s stress test model is barely 30% of this number, and would be even lower if we included the capital of the other banks in the exercise.

A loss of $44 billion is a fairly small hit anyway. With about £2.1 trillion in assets, a loss of $44 billion is equivalent to a loss rate of about 2 percent. Yet since the GFC, the accumulated loss rate so far has been about 10 percent, i.e., five times bigger rather than five times smaller than that simulated by the Bank.

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Carney’s responses in the Q&A also alluded to another important issue that deserves more attention: the problem of the incurred loss accounting model by which losses are not recognised until they have occurred – implying that expected losses are not reported – and the inadequacy of the supposed solution to this problem, IFRS 9, which recognises expected losses so long as they are expected within 12 months. As he said in response to a question:

Now there is another issue which is not adjusted for in the stress tests which is coming which is IFRS 9, which not yet finalised and could have some impact. But I think you know the banks, the analyst community, ourselves, we all have equal line of sight to that and its timing. (Press conference Q&A, p. 18)

So Carney acknowledges that the Bank’s stress tests are based on accounting rules that ignore expected losses and some people might regard this omission as a bit of a worry.

But even when it is implemented, IFRS 9 won’t fix the hidden expected losses problem: it will merely encourage banks to adopt practices that make sure that losses are pushed out into the future so they are expected to occur more than 12 months hence. As the UK’s leading financial accountant Tim Bush wrote me: IFRS 9 “is going to be a disaster.”

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There is one last issue that surfaced in the discussion last week: the setting of the Countercylical Capital Buffer (CCyB). Back in July, the FPC reduced the CCyB on banks’ UK exposures from 0.5% to 0%. To quote Carney again:

The FPC was concerned that banks could respond to these developments by hoarding capital and restricting lending. The reduction of the CCyB rate was intended to reinforce the FPC’s expectation that all elements of capital and liquidity buffers are able to be drawn on to support the real economy.

That position has not changed. In light of the continued uncertainty around the UK economic outlook and the resilience demonstrated in the 2016 stress test, the FPC agreed to maintain the CCyB rate at 0% and that it expects, absent any material change in the outlook, to maintain this rate until at least June 2017. (Governor’s opening remarks, pp. 4-5)

I don’t understand this passage. What does it mean to say that the FPC expects “that all elements of capital and liquidity buffers are able to be drawn on to support the real economy” and how is this relevant to the decisions first to reduce the CCyB to zero and then to keep it there?

And what is the point of relying on “continued uncertainty” to justify any CCyB decision, given that uncertainty, like the poor, will always be with us?

There is a deeper problem: the FPC seems to have it the wrong way round. The purpose of the CCyB is to counter the financial cycle: as aggregate credit builds, markets boom and risks build up; then the boom breaks, markets fall and the risks are realised and subsequently fall. [2] The CCyB should rise in the first phase to help slow the euphoria, and then fall in the second phase to ameliorate the distress. Over the last few years markets have been booming, so we are presumably still in Phase 1. If so, then the FPC should be to increase rates instead of to reduce them. The FPC’s ‘countercyclical’ policy is therefore procyclical: it is aggravating the problems it is meant to ameliorate!

On the other hand, it may be that the FPC’s and Carney’s thinking is that we are actually in Phase 2, the down phase of the cycle, in which case reducing the CCyB would make sense – if one accepts that assessment and buys into countercyclical financial policy in the first place, which I don’t. However, that is not the message that clearly comes across from their statements.

At the very least, the Bank should always base its decisions on CCyB settings on a clear statement about which phase of the cycle they think we are in: Phase 1 implying that the decision to be considered is to raise the buffer or Phase 2 implying the opposite. However, I suspect they don’t do that because they don’t know themselves or because they don’t wish to expose their views on the matter to criticism. Hence the Bank waffle around the issue. If this latter conjecture is correct, they would be better off abandoning CCyB policy altogether.

One gets the distinct impression that all that they see is uncertainty, so they think “uncertainty is bad so we should ease” and cut the buffer. However, if that is what they do, they are not even attempting to follow countercyclical policy: all they have is a policy bias towards ease, which is the same bias that we see with unconventional policy for most of the past decade.

But this might just be me. All I can say is that I don’t understand their CCyB policy and I suspect they don’t either.

There are further problems with the stress test results too, but I will come to those in my next posting.

References

Bank for International Settlements (2016) “Countercyclical capital buffer.” July 20. Available at https://www.bis.org/bcbs/ccyb/.

Bank of England, Financial Stability Report Press Conference Q&A, 30 November 2016. Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/fsr/2016/conf301116.pdf.

Bank of England, “Opening remarks by the Governor.” Financial Stability Report Press Conference, 30 November 2016. Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/fsr/2016/fsrspnote301116.pdf.

Bank of England (2016) “Stress testing the UK banking system: 2016 results.” Bank of England 30 November 2016. Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/financialstability/Documents/fpc/results301116.pdf.

Ferguson, J. (2016) “UK bank ‘stress’ test.” The Macrostrategy Partnership, 2 December 2016.

Local Authority Pension Fund Forum (2011) UK and Irish Banks Capital Losses – Post Mortem. London: LAPFF.

Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards (2013) ‘An accident waiting to happen’: The failure of HBOS. London: Stationery Office.

End Notes

* Kevin Dowd (kevin.dowd@outlook.com) is professor of finance and economics at Durham University. I thank Tim Bush, James Ferguson, Martin Hutchinson and Basil Zafiriou for helpful comments.

[1] Let me also cite some other numbers give an idea of the true scale of losses. (i) Tim Bush in his LAPFF Post-Mortem report (LAPFF, 2011) cited bank losses over the 2007-2010 of over £89.4 billion. (ii) The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards (2013) reported that the losses for HBOS alone were £46.5 billion. (iii) The Asset Protection Scheme has estimated the losses to RBS at almost £60 billion.

[2] Consider this quote from a recent BIS statement (BIS, 2016): “The countercyclical capital buffer aims to ensure that banking sector capital requirements take account of the macro-financial environment in which banks operate. Its primary objective is to use a buffer of capital to achieve the broader macroprudential goal of protecting the banking sector from periods of excess aggregate credit growth that have often been associated with the build-up of system-wide risk. Due to its countercyclical nature, the countercyclical capital buffer regime may also help to lean against the build-up phase of the credit cycle in the first place. In downturns, the regime should help to reduce the risk that the supply of credit will be constrained by regulatory capital requirements that could undermine the performance of the real economy and result in additional credit losses in the banking system.”