CCAR

Central Banks' New Frontier: Interventions in Securities Markets

In his 2016 book The End of Alchemy, our friend and former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King provided a template for financial reform aimed at reducing the frequency and severity of crises. At the time, we were very cautious for two reasons. First, we believed that adoption of King’s framework would vastly increase the influence of central banks on private financial markets, something that could ultimately lead to a misallocation of resources in the economy and to a diminution of the independence of monetary policy that is necessary for securing price stability. Second, we doubted that most central banks had the technical capacity to implement the proposal.

Well, the landscape has changed significantly. During the pandemic, central banks intervened massively in private securities markets and there now appears to be no turning back. In a number of jurisdictions, monetary policymakers broadened the scale and scope of their lending and intervened directly in financial markets, going significantly beyond even their extraordinary actions during the 2007-09 financial crisis. As a result, we likely will be paying the costs that we feared could accompany the implementation of King’s proposal, so we might as well reap the benefits.

In this post, we discuss central banks’ pandemic interventions and the type of infrastructure needed to support them. We then review King’s proposal, highlighting how adopting his approach would make the financial system safer, while radically simplifying the role of regulators and supervisors ….

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Bank Capital and Stress Tests: The Foundation of a Thriving Economy

We submitted this statement to the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit of the Committee on Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives for its hearing on July 17, 2018.

We appreciate the opportunity to submit the following statement on the occasion of the hearing entitled “Examining Capital Regimes for Financial Institutions.” We welcome the Subcommittee’s further examination of the existing regulatory approach for prudentially regulated financial institutions.

We are academic experts in financial regulation with extensive knowledge of the financial industry. Our experience includes working with private sector financial institutions, government agencies and international organizations. In our view, a strong and resilient financial system is an essential foundation of a thriving economy. The welfare of every modern society depends on it. The bedrock of this foundation is that banks’ capital buffers are sufficient to withstand significant stress without recourse to public funds. Furthermore, it is our considered view that the benefits of raising U.S. capital requirements from their current modest levels clearly outweigh the costs.

To explain this conclusion, we start with a definition of bank capital, including a discussion of its importance as a mechanism for self-insurance. We then turn to capital regulation and a discussion of stress testing….

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Tougher capital regulation pays off

Banks continue to lobby for weaker financial regulation: capital requirements are excessive, liquidity requirements are overly restrictive, and stress tests are too burdensome. Yes, in the aftermath of the 2007-09 financial crisis, we needed reforms, they say, but Basel III and Dodd-Frank have gone too far.

Unfortunately, these complaints are finding sympathetic ears in a variety of places. U.S. authorities are considering changes that would water down existing standards. In Europe, news is not promising either. These developments are not only discouraging, but they are self-defeating. Higher capital clearly improves resilience. And, at current levels of capitalization, it does not limit banks’ ability to support economic activity.

As it turns out, on this particular subject, there may be less of a discrepancy between private and social interests than is commonly believed. The reason is that investors reward banks in jurisdictions where regulators and supervisors promote social welfare through tougher capital standards....

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Ensuring Stress Tests Remain Effective

Last month, the Federal Reserve Board published proposed refinements to its annual Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) exercise—the supervisory stress test that evaluates the capital adequacy of the largest U.S. banks (34 in the 2017 test). In our view, the Federal Reserve has an effective framework for carrying out these all-important stress tests. Having started in 2011, the Fed is now embarking on only the seventh CCAR exercise. That means that everyone is still learning how to best structure and execute the tests. The December proposals are clearly in this spirit.

With this same goal in mind, we make the following proposals for enhancing the stress tests and preserving their effectiveness:

---  Change the scenarios more aggressively and unexpectedly, continuing to disclose them only after banks’ exposures are fixed.
---  Introduce an experimental scenario (that will not be used in “grading” the bank’s relative performance or capital plans) to assess the implications of events outside of historical experience and to probe for weaknesses in the system.
---  As a way to evaluate banks’ internal models, require publication of loss rates or risk-weighted assets for the same hypothetical portfolios for which the Fed is disclosing its estimates.
---  Stick with the annual CCAR cycle....

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Basel's Refined Capital Requirements

After nearly a decade of negotiations, last month, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision completed the Basel III post-crisis reforms to capital regulation. The final standards include refinements to: credit risk measurement and the computation of risk-weighted assets; the calculation of off-balance-sheet exposures and of the requirements to address operational risk; and the leverage ratio requirement for global systemically important banks (G-SIBs).

In this post, we focus on revisions to the way in which banks compute risk-weighted assets. To foreshadow our conclusion: the new approach adds unnecessarily to regulatory complexity. If the concern is that current risk-based requirements result in insufficient capital, it would be better simply to raise the requirements.

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Banks and interest rates: be careful what you wish for

Many people seem to think that – as a new BIS working paper concludes – banks benefit when monetary policy tightens and interest rates rise (especially from a low level). Do they? In some instances, perhaps, but as a general principle, surely not.

A casual glance at recent U.S. stock market behavior seems to support the idea that higher interest rates would be good for banks now. When the Federal Open Market Committee decided not to hike interest rates on September 17, the S&P500 dropped by 1.85% over two days, while the KBW index of bank stocks fell by 4.85%. A week later, when Fed Chair Yellen speaking about inflation dynamics expressed her continued expectations for a rate hike this year, the S&P500 edged lower, but the bank index rose by nearly 2%...

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