Tag Archives: Liquidity insurance

Central Bank Balance Sheets, LOLR Safety Nets, and Moral Hazard

Niall Ferguson, Martin Kornejew, Paul Schmelzing and Moritz Schularick in CEPR dp 17858:

From the introduction:

… time and again, central banks deployed their power to create liquidity in a bid to insulate economies from disasters. … first began to be linked to geopolitical tail events during the 17th and 18th centuries – occurring with increasing regularity during wars and revolutions –, … the context of central bank liquidity support gradually but consistently shifted towards financial crises: … central banks’ sensitivity to financial crises has risen sharply over the 20th century and increasingly became a systematic response to financial distress after the Great Depression.

… central bank liquidity support systematically cushioned economic effects of financial crises throughout modern history of advanced economies. …

Historically, central bank liquidity support in crises is associated with a rising probability of future episodes of excessive risk-taking by financial intermediaries that end in another financial crisis. If central banks refrained from using their balance sheet to support markets in the last crisis, episodes of renewed excessive risk taking are much rarer.

Mervyn King on Narrow Banking and Liquidity Insurance

In the FT, John Plender reviews Mervyn King’s “The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy.” King diagnoses two problems underlying the crisis. First,

Interest rates today, he says, are too high to permit rapid growth of demand in the short run but too low to be consistent with a proper balance between spending and saving in the long run. The disequilibrium persists, as does a misallocation of capital to unproductive investments.

The second problem relates to the financial system and

the alchemy that runs through the financial system, whereby governments pretend that paper money can be turned into gold on demand and banks pretend that the short-term deposits used to finance long-term investments can be returned whenever depositors want their money back. …

King argues that Bagehot’s famous dictum on central bank crisis management — lend freely on good collateral at penalty rates — is out of date because bank balance sheets today are much larger and have fewer liquid assets than in the 19th century. Central banks are thus condemned in a crisis to take bad collateral in the shape of risky, illiquid assets on which they will lend only a proportion of the value, known as a haircut.

King suggests this lender of last resort role should be replaced by … a pawnbroker for all seasons. In effect, he offers an elegant refinement of the concept of “narrow banking”, which seeks to ensure that all deposits are covered by safe, liquid assets. In his system, banks would decide how much of their asset base to lodge in advance at the central bank to be available for use as collateral. For each asset, the central bank would calculate a haircut to decide how much to lend against it. Together with banks’ cash reserves at the central bank, this collateral would be required to exceed total deposits and short-term borrowings.

This central bankerly pawnbroking would facilitate the supply of liquidity, or emergency money, within a framework that eliminates the incentive for bank runs. It amounts to a form of insurance whereby the central bank can lend in a crisis on terms already agreed and paid for upfront …

The system would displace what King regards as a flawed risk-weighted capital regime ill-suited to addressing radical uncertainty. Today’s liquidity regulation would also become redundant. But banks would still need an equity buffer, with King seeing an equity base of 10 per cent of total assets as “a good start”, against the 3-5 per cent common today.

The current shortfall of fully liquid assets against deposits — the alchemical gap — could be eliminated progressively over 20 years, during which time the expectation would grow that banks would no longer be bailed out. The system would apply to all financial intermediaries …

Update: The Economist‘s reviewer writes:

… Lord King wants banks to buy “liquidity insurance”. In normal times banks would pledge collateral to the central bank, which would agree to lend a certain amount against it, if necessary. Banks would thus know in advance precisely how much help they could get in the event of a meltdown, making them behave responsibly when times were good.

Narrow Banking: History and Merits

George Pennacchi discusses narrow banking in an article in the Annual Review of Financial Economics. He concludes as follows:

During the nineteenth century, US banks were more narrow than they are today, and the narrowest (e.g., those under the Louisiana Banking Act of 1842) appeared resistant to panics. Common modern-banking practices, such as maturity transformation and explicit loan commitments, arose only after the creation of the Federal Reserve and the FDIC.

… There appears to be little or no benefits available from traditional banks that could not be obtained in a carefully designed narrow bank financial system. Most importantly, a narrow-banking system could have huge advantages in containing moral hazard and reducing the overall risk and required regulation of the financial system.

In contrast, the reaction by US regulators to the recent financial crisis was to expand the government’s safety net by raising deposit insurance limits and by giving more financial firms access to insured deposits. Expanding, rather than narrowing, the activities that are funded with insured deposits is justified if one believes that regulation can contain moral hazard when firms have many, complex risk-taking opportunities. Unfortunately, this belief appears dubious if one recognizes that regulators face political and information constraints.

In my view, there is a need for research that considers the optimal design of a financial system when a government regulator is limited in its ability to assess risk. … Research needs to better identify those financial services where government support would produce a net social benefit. Services such as maturity transformation and liquidity insurance may not deserve costly government guarantees. Finally, should further research support the general concept of narrow banking, there are still open questions regarding the specific features of these banks. In particular, how narrow should be these banks’ assets and should their liabilities should be deposits or equity shares (at fixed or floating NAVs) are questions that need better answers.