Macroeconomic Resilience

In this post, I apply the framework outlined previously to some empirical patterns in the financial markets and the broader economy. The objective is not to posit crony capitalism as the sole explanation of the below patterns, but merely to argue that the below patterns are consistent with an increasingly crony capitalist economy.

The Paradox of Low Volatility and High Correlation

As many commentators have pointed out [1,2,3], the spike in volatility experienced during the depths of the financial crisis has largely reversed itself but correlation within equities and between various risky asset classes has kept on moving higher. The combination of high volatility and high correlation is associated with the process of collapse and typical of the Minsky moment when the system undergoes a rapid delevering. However the combination of high correlation and low volatility post the Minsky moment is unusual. In the absence of bailouts or protectionism, the economy should undergo a process of creative destruction and intense exploratory activity which by its diffuse nature results in low correlation. The combination of high correlation and low volatility instead signifies stasis and the absence of sufficient exploration in the economy, alongwith the presence of significant slack at firm level (micro-resilience).

As I mentioned in a previous post, financing constraints faced by small businesses hinder new firm entry across industries. Expanding lending to new firms is an act of exploration and incumbent banks are almost certainly content with exploiting their known and low-risk sources of income instead.

The Paradox of High Corporate Profitability, Rising Productivity and High Unemployment and The Paradox of High Cash Balances and High Debt Issuance

Although corporate profitability is not at an all-time high, it has recovered at an unusually rapid pace compared to the nonexistent recovery in employment and wages. The recovery in corporate profits has been driven by a rise in worker productivity and increased efficiency but the lag between an output recovery and an employment recovery seems to have increased dramatically. So far, this increased profitability has led not to increased business investment but to increased cash holdings by corporates. Big corporates with easy access to debt markets have even chosen to tap the debt markets simply for the purpose of increasing cash holdings.

Again, incumbent corporates are eager to squeeze efficiencies out of their current operations including downsizing the labour force but instead of channeling the savings from this increased efficiency into exploratory investment, they choose to increase holdings of liquid assets. In an environment where incumbents are under limited threat of being superceded by exploratory new entrants, holding cash is an extremely effective way to retain optionality (a strategy that is much less effective if the pace of exploratory innovation is high as an extended period of standing on the sidelines of exploratory activity can degrade the ability of the incumbent to rejoin the fray). Old jobs are being destroyed by the optimising activities of incumbents but the exploration required to create new jobs does not take place.

This discussion of profitability and unemployment echoes many of the common concerns of the far left. This is not a coincidence – one of the most damaging effects of Olsonian cronyism is its malformation of the economy from a positive-sum game into an increasingly zero-sum game. The dynamics of a predominantly crony capitalist economy are closer to a Marxian class struggle than they are to a competitive free-market economy. However, where I differ significantly from the left is in the proposed cure for the disease. For example, incumbent investment can be triggered by an increase in leverage by another sector – given the indebted state of the consumer, the government is the most likely candidate. But such a policy does nothing to tackle the reduced evolvability of the economy or the dominance of the incumbent special interest groups. Moreover, increased taxation and transfers of wealth to other organised groups such as labour only aggravate the ossification of the economic system into an increasingly zero-sum game. A sustainable solution must restore the positive-sum dynamics that are the essence of Schumpeterian capitalism. Such a solution involves reducing the power of the incumbent corporates and transferring wealth from incumbent corporates towards households not by taxation or protectionism but by restoring the invisible foot of new firm entry.

STABILITY AS THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF CRONY CAPITALISM

The core insight of the Minsky-Holling resilience framework is that stability and stabilisation breed fragility and loss of system resilience . TBTF protection and the moral hazard problem is best seen as a subset of the broader policy of stabilisation, of which policies such as the Greenspan Put are much more pervasive and dangerous.

By itself, stabilisation is not sufficient to cause cronyism and rent seeking. Once a system has undergone a period of stabilisation, the system manager is always tempted to prolong the stabilisation for fear of the short-term disruption or even collapse. However, not all crisis-mitigation strategies involve bailouts and transfers of wealth to the incumbent corporates. As Mancur Olson pointed out, society can confine its “distributional transfers to poor and unfortunate individuals” rather than bailing out incumbent firms and still hope to achieve the same results.

To fully explain the rise of crony capitalism, we need to combine the Minsky-Holling framework with Mancur Olson’s insight that extended periods of stability trigger a progressive increase in the power of special interests and rent-seeking activity. Olson also noted the self-preserving nature of this phenomenon.  Once rent-seeking has achieved sufficient scale, “distributional coalitions have the incentive and..the power to prevent changes that would deprive them of their enlarged share of the social output”.

SYSTEMIC IMPACT OF CRONY CAPITALISM

Crony capitalism results in a homogenous, tightly coupled and fragile macroeconomy. The key question is: Via which channels does this systemic malformation occur? As I have touched upon in some earlier posts [1,2], the systemic implications of crony capitalism arise from its negative impact on new firm entry. In the context of the exploration vs exploitation framework, absence of new firm entry tilts the system towards over-exploitation¹ .

Exploration vs Exploitation: The Importance of New Firm Entry in Sustaining Exploration

In a seminal article, James March distinguished between “the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties. Exploration includes things captured by terms such as search, variation, risk taking, experimentation, play, flexibility, discovery, innovation. Exploitation includes such things as refinement, choice, production, efficiency, selection, implementation, execution.” True innovation is an act of exploration under conditions of irreducible uncertainty whereas exploitation is an act of optimisation under a known distribution.

The assertion that dominant incumbent firms find it hard to sustain exploratory innovation is not a controversial one. I do not intend to reiterate the popular arguments in the management literature, many of which I explored in a previous post. Moreover, the argument presented here is more subtle: I do not claim that incumbents cannot explore effectively but simply that they can explore effectively only when pushed to do so by a constant stream of new entrants. This is of course the “invisible foot” argument of Joseph Berliner and Burton Klein for which the exploration-exploitation framework provides an intuitive and rigorous rationale.

Let us assume a scenario where the entry of new firms has slowed to a trickle, the sector is dominated by a few dominant incumbents and the S-curve of growth is about to enter its maturity/decline phase. To trigger off a new S-curve of growth, the incumbents need to explore. However, almost by definition, the odds that any given act of exploration will be successful is small. Moreover, the positive payoff from any exploratory search almost certainly lies far in the future. For an improbable shot at moving from a position of comfort to one of dominance in the distant future, an incumbent firm needs to divert resources from optimising and efficiency-increasing initiatives that will deliver predictable profits in the near future. Of course if a significant proportion of its competitors adopt an exploratory strategy, even an incumbent firm will be forced to follow suit for fear of loss of market share. But this critical mass of exploratory incumbents never comes about. In essence, the state where almost all incumbents are content to focus their energies on exploitation is a Nash equilibrium.

On the other hand, the incentives of any new entrant are almost entirely skewed in favour of exploratory strategies. Even an improbable shot at glory is enough to outweigh the minor consequences of failure² . It cannot be emphasised enough that this argument does not depend upon the irrationality of the entrant. The same incremental payoff that represents a minor improvement for the incumbent is a life-changing event for the entrepreneur. When there exists a critical mass of exploratory new entrants, the dominant incumbents are compelled to follow suit and the Nash equilibrium of the industry shifts towards the appropriate mix of exploitation and exploration.

The Crony Capitalist Boom-Bust Cycle: A Tradeoff between System Resilience and Full Employment

Due to insufficient exploratory innovation, a crony capitalist economy is not diverse enough. But this does not imply that the system is fragile either at firm/micro level or at the level of the macroeconomy. In the absence of any risk of being displaced by new entrants, incumbent firms can simply maintain significant financial slack³. If incumbents do maintain significant financial slack, sustainable full employment is impossible almost by definition.  However, full employment can be achieved temporarily in two ways: Either incumbent corporates can gradually give up their financial slack and lever up as the period of stability extends as Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) would predict, or the household or government sector can lever up to compensate for the slack held by the corporate sector.

Most developed economies went down the route of increased household and corporate leverage with the process aided and abetted by monetary and regulatory policy. But it is instructive that developing economies such as India faced exactly the same problem in their “crony socialist” days. In keeping with its ideological leanings pre-1990, India tackled the unemployment problem via increased government spending. Whatever the chosen solution, full employment is unsustainable in the long run unless the core problem of cronyism is tackled. The current over-leveraged state of the consumer in the developed world can be papered over by increased government spending but in the face of increased cronyism, it only kicks the can further down the road. Restoring corporate animal spirits depends upon corporate slack being utilised in exploratory investment, which as discussed above is inconsistent with a cronyist economy.

Micro-Fragility as the Key to a Resilient Macroeconomy and Sustainable Full Employment

At the appropriate mix of exploration and exploitation, individual incumbent and new entrant firms are both incredibly vulnerable. Most exploratory investments are destined to fail as are most firms, sooner or later. Yet due to the diversity of firm-level strategies, the macroeconomy of vulnerable firms is incredibly resilient. At the same time, the transfer of wealth from incumbent corporates to the household sector via reduced corporate slack and increased investment means that sustainable full employment can be achieved without undue leverage. The only question is whether we can break out of the Olsonian special interest trap without having to suffer a systemic collapse in the process.

1. It cannot be emphasized enough that absence of new firm entry is simply the channel through which crony capitalism malforms the macroeconomy. Therefore, attempts to artificially boost new firm entry are likely to fail unless they tackle the ultimate cause of the problem which is stabilisation [↩]
2. It is critical that the personal consequences of firm failure are minor for the entrepreneur – this is not the case for cultural and legal reasons in many countries around the world but is largely still true in the United States. [↩]
3. It could be argued that incumbents could follow this strategy even when new entrants threaten them. This strategy however has its limits – an extended period of standing on the sidelines of exploratory activity can degrade the ability of the incumbent to rejoin the fray. As Brian Loasby remarked : “For many years, Arnold Weinberg chose to build up GEC’s reserves against an uncertain technological future in the form of cash rather than by investing in the creation of technological capabilities of unknown value. This policy, one might suggest, appears much more attractive in a financial environment where technology can often be bought by buying companies than in one where the market for corporate control is more tightly constrained; but it must be remembered that some, perhaps substantial, technological capability is likely to be needed in order to judge what companies are worth acquiring, and to make effective use of the acquisitions. As so often, substitutes are also in part complements.” [↩]

William Dudley recounts the conventional story on how society benefits from maturity transformation here: “The need for maturity transformation arises from the fact that the preferred habitat of borrowers tends toward longer-term maturities used to finance long-lived assets such as a house or a manufacturing plant, compared with the preferred habitat of investors, who generally have a preference to be able to access their funds quickly. Financial intermediaries act to span these preferences, earning profits by engaging in maturity transformation—borrowing shorter-term in order to finance longer-term lending.” The debate on maturity transformation then focuses on comparing these benefits of maturity transformation with its role in creating fragility and moral hazard  in the financial system. This post explores a different tack and argues that even the purported benefits of maturity transformation are overstated – structural changes in the economy have drastically reduced and even possibly eliminated the need for society to promote and subsidise maturity transformation.

Ceteris paribus, most borrowers prefer to match the maturity of their liabilities to the maturity of their assets. For example, a corporate borrowing to fund a nuclear plant will seek to borrow long-term funds whose repayment schedule closely matches the expected cashflows from its project. It is important to realise that longer is not always better from the borrower’s perspective. A corporate that needs to fund its working capital will borrow on a short-term basis,  and many borrowers (such as homeowners) are willing to pay a premium to retain prepayment options. So if we sum up the demand from all borrowers in an economy, we face a term structure of loan demand rather than a simplistic need to borrow long-term funds. This term structure of loan demand primarily depends on the nature of investment opportunities available at any given point of time. For example, if the economy is undergoing a major upgradation in key infrastructure as in the case in many emerging markets, loan demand will be skewed towards longer-term funds.

Now what about investors’ preference for shorter term maturities? Again, it’s too naive and simplistic to state that all investors simply prefer shorter maturity investments – in particular, it ignores the increasing assets under management of pension funds and life insurers who strongly prefer longer-tenor investments that match their natural long-tenor liabilities. The growing role of pension funds in the long-end is of course a relatively recent phenomenon driven by many factors such as increased longevity and the phase-out of defined benefit and pay-as-you-go pension schemes, the result of which is to divert an increasing portion of investor funds into long-tenor investments. Indeed, pension funds and life insurers are the dominant player in the long-end of the interest rate curve in Europe even though Europe is behind the curve in the transition away from a defined-benefit, pay-as-you-go pension model – a situation that will be exacerbated by the adoption of Solvency 2. In the United Kingdom, pension demand in the long-end meant that the interest rate curve was perennially inverted until the financial crisis hit and short rates plummeted.

The obvious objection to the above story is as follows: even if there is significant investor demand for long-tenor investments, won’t removing bank demand for them still lead to a catastrophic increase in long-end interest rates? The answer is No – as I explained in a previous post, the most significant proportion of the difference between long-end and short-end rates comes from the interest rate differential which most banks hedge out to a large degree (ironically with pension funds and insurers). The part that is usually left unhedged is the credit risk and the liquidity risk. Removing maturity-transformers from the long-end will only lead to a small rise in rates to the extent of the quantum of this unhedged credit risk – what’s more, some of this lost demand may be made up for by pension funds who choose to allocate a higher proportion of their assets towards fixed income investments in response to the rise in rates. But more fundamentally, even if rates do rise at the long-end it is not at all clear that this reduces the welfare of society in any manner. Suppose financial intermediaries are forced to move away from the long-end to the short-end – the resultant reduction of rates at the short-end may even be beneficial if the natural distribution of investment opportunities is more skewed towards the short-end.

It’s worth reiterating that my preferred solution is not to ban or to artificially limit maturity transformation. As Rajiv Sethi points out, all firms can engage in maturity transformation and many do so after explicitly considering the risks involved in it – not surprising given that even on an interest rate hedged basis, short-tenor loans usually cost less than long-tenor loans due to the usually upward-sloping credit spread curve. The question is whether we need to protect maturity transforming banks against the liquidity risk inherent in their actions in order to prevent bank runs – Ideally not but in a second best world where the past weight of protected maturity-transforming actions by banks have made the system too fragile to remove this protection all at once, it is worth putting in place an explicit limitation on the practice of maturity transformation in the future.

In the HBR, Amar Bhide notes that models have replaced discretion in many areas of finance, particularly in banks’ mortgage lending decisions: “Over the past several decades, centralized, mechanistic finance elbowed aside the traditional model….Mortgages are granted or denied (and new mortgage products like option ARMs are designed) using complex models that are conjured up by a small number of faraway rocket scientists and take little heed of the specific facts on the ground.” For the most part, the description of the damage done by “robotic finance” is accurate but the article ignores why this mechanisation came about. It is easy to assume that the dominance of models over discretion may have been a grand error by the banking industry. But in reality, the “excessive” dependence on models was an entirely rational and logical evolution of the banking industry given the incentives and the environment that bankers faced.

An over-reliance on models over discretion cripples the adaptive capabilities of the firm: “No contract can anticipate all contingencies. But securitized financing makes ongoing adaptations infeasible; because of the great difficulty of renegotiating terms, borrowers and lenders must adhere to the deal that was struck at the outset. Securitized mortgages are more likely than mortgages retained by banks to be foreclosed if borrowers fall behind on their payments, as recent research shows.” But why would firms choose such rigid and inflexible solutions? There are many answers to this question but all of them depend on the obvious fact that adaptable solutions entail a higher cost than rigid solutions. It is far less expensive to analyse the creditworthiness of mortgages with standardised models than with people on the ground.

This increased efficiency comes at the cost of catastrophic losses in a crisis but long periods of stability inevitably select for efficient and rigid solutions rather than adaptable and flexible solutions. This may be a consequence of moral hazard or principal-agent problems as I have analysed many times on this blog but it does not depend on either. A preference for rigid routines may be an entirely rational response to a long period of stability under uncertainty – both from an individual’s perspective and an organisation’s perspective. Probably the best exposition of this problem was given by Brian Loasby in his book “Equilibrium and Evolution” (pages 56-7): “Success has its opportunity costs. People who know how to solve their problems can get to work at once, without considering whether some other method might be more effective; they thereby become increasingly efficient, but also increasingly likely to encounter problems which are totally unexpected and which are not amenable to their efficient routines…The patterns which people impose on phenomena have necessarily a limited range of application, and the very success with which they exploit that range tends to make them increasingly careless about its limits. This danger is likely to be exacerbated by formal information systems, which are typically designed to cope with past problems, and which therefore may be worse than useless in signalling new problems. If any warning messages do arrive, they are likely to be ignored, or force-fitted into familiar categories; and if a crisis breaks, the information needed to deal with it may be impossible to obtain.”

Now it is obvious why banks stuck with such rigid models during the “Great Moderation” but it is less obvious why banks don’t discard them voluntarily post the “Minsky Moment”. The answer lies in the difficulty that organisations and other social systems face in making dramatic systemic U-turns even when the logic for doing so is clear, thus the importance of mitigating the TBTF problem and enabling entry of new firms. As I have asserted before: “A crony capitalist economic system that protects the incumbent firms hampers the ability of the system to innovate and adapt to novelty. It is obvious how the implicit subsidy granted to our largest financial institutions via the Too-Big-To-Fail doctrine represents a transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the financial sector. It is also obvious how the subsidy encourages a levered, homogenous and therefore fragile financial sector that is susceptible to collapse. What is less obvious is the paralysis that it induces in the financial sector and by extension the macroeconomy long after the bailouts and the Minsky moment have passed.”

Amongst economic commentators, Raghuram Rajan has stood out recently for his consistent calls to raise interest rates from “ultra-low to the merely low”. Predictably, this suggestion has been met with outright condemnation by many economists, both of Keynesian and monetarist persuasion. Rajan’s case against ultra-low rates utilises many arguments but this post will focus on just one of these arguments that is straight out of the “resilience” playbook. In 2008, Raghu Rajan and Doug Diamond co-authored a paper, the conclusion of which Rajan summarises in his FT article: “the pattern of Fed policy over time builds expectations. The market now thinks that whenever the financial sector’s actions result in unemployment, the Fed will respond with ultra-low rates and easy liquidity. So even as the Fed has maintained credibility as an inflation fighter, it has lost credibility in fighting financial adventurism. This cannot augur well for the future.”

Much like he accused the Austrians, Paul Krugman accuses Rajan of being a “liquidationist”. This is not a coincidence – Rajan and Diamond’s thesis is quite explicit about its connections to Austrian Business Cycle Theory: “a central bank that promises to cut interest rates conditional on stress, or that is biased towards low interest rates favouring entrepreneurs, will induce banks to promise higher payouts or take more illiquid projects. This in turn can make the illiquidity crisis more severe and require a greater degree of intervention, a view reminiscent of the Austrian theory of cycles.” But as the summary hints, Rajan and Diamond’s thesis is fundamentally different from ABCT. The conventional Austrian story identifies excessive credit inflation and interest rates below the “natural” rate of interest as the driver of the boom/bust cycle but Rajan and Diamond’s thesis identifies the anticipation by economic agents of low rates and “liquidity” facilities every time there is an economic downturn as the driver of systemic fragility. The adaptation of banks and other market players to this regime makes the eventual bust all the more likely. As Rajan and Diamond note: “If the authorities are expected to reduce interest rates when liquidity is at a premium, banks will take on more short-term leverage or illiquid loans, thus bringing about the very states where intervention is needed.”

Rajan and Diamond’s thesis is limited to the impact of such policies on banks but as I noted in a previous post, market players also adapt to this implicit commitment from the central bank to follow easy money policies at the first hint of economic trouble. This thesis is essentially a story of the Greenspan-Bernanke era and the damage that the Greenspan Put has caused. It also explains the dramatically diminishing returns inherent in the Greenspan Put strategy as the stabilising policies of the central bank become entrenched in the expectations of market players and crucially banks – in each subsequent cycle, the central bank has to do more and more (lower rates, larger liquidity facilities) to achieve less and less.

This post is the first in a series that takes an ecological and dynamic approach to analysing market/macroeconomic regimes and transitions between these regimes.

Normal, Pre-Crisis and Crisis Regimes

In a post on market crises, Rick Bookstaber identified three regimes that any model of the market must represent (normal, pre-crisis and crisis) and analysed the statistical properties (volatility,correlation etc) of each of these regimes. The framework below however characterises each regime by the varying combinations of positive and negative feedback processes and the variations and regime shifts are determined by the adaptive and evolutionary processes operating within the system.

1. Normal regimes are resilient regimes. They are characterised by a balanced and diverse mix of positive and negative feedback processes. For every momentum trader who bets on the continuation of a trend, there is a contrarian who bets the other way.

2. Pre-crisis regimes are characterised by an increasing dominance of positive feedback processes. An unusually high degree of stability or a persistent trend progressively weeds out negative feedback processes from the system thus leaving it vulnerable to collapse even as a result of disturbances that it could easily absorb in its previously resilient normal state. Such regimes can arise from bubbles but this is not necessary. Pre-crisis only implies that a regime change into the crisis regime is increasingly likely – in ecological terms, the pre-crisis regime is fragile and has suffered a significant loss of resilience.

3. Crisis regimes are essentially transitional  - the disturbance has occurred and the positive feedback processes that dominated the previous regime have now reversed direction. However, the final destination of this transition is uncertain – if the system is left alone, it will undergo a discontinuous transition to a normal regime. However, if sufficient external stabilisation pressures are exerted upon the system, it may revert to the pre-crisis regime or even stay in the crisis regime for a longer period. It’s worth noting that I define a normal regime only by its resilience and not by its desirability – even a state of civilizational collapse can be incredibly resilient.

“Critical Transitions” from the Pre-Crisis to the Crisis Regime

In fragile systems even a minor disturbance can trigger a discontinuous move to an alternative regime – Marten Scheffer refers to such moves as “critical transitions”. Figures a,b,c and d below represent a continuum of ways in which the system can react to changing external conditions (ref Scheffer et al) . Although I will frequently refer to “equilibria” and “states” in the discussion below, these are better described as “attractors” and “regimes” given the dynamic nature of the system – the static terminology is merely a simplification.

In Figure a, the system state reacts smoothly to perturbations – for example, a large external change will trigger a large move in the state of the system. The dotted arrows denote the direction in which the system moves when it is not on the curve i.e. in equilibrium.  Any move away from equilibrium triggers forces that bring it back to the curve. In Figure b, the transition is non-linear and a small perturbation can trigger a regime shift – however a reversal of conditions of an equally small magnitude can reverse the regime shift. Clearly, such a system does not satisfactorily explain our current economic predicament where monetary and fiscal intervention far in excess of the initial sub-prime shock have failed to bring the system back to its previous state.

Figure c however may be a more accurate description of the current state of the economy and the market – for a certain range of conditions, there exist two alternative stable states separated by an unstable equilibrium (marked by the dotted line). As the dotted arrows indicate, movement away from the unstable equilibrium can carry the system to either of the two alternative stable states. Figure d illustrates how a small perturbation past the point F2 triggers a “catastrophic” transition from the upper branch to the lower branch – moreover, unless conditions are reversed all the way back to the point F1, the system will not revert back to the upper branch stable state. The system therefore exhibits “hysteresis” – i.e. the path matters. The forward and backward switches occur at different points F2 and F1 respectively, which implies that reversing such transitions is not easy. A comprehensive discussion of the conditions that will determine the extent of hysteresis is beyond the scope of this post – however it is worth mentioning that cognitive and organisational rigidity in the absence of sufficient diversity is a sufficient condition for hysteresis in the macro-system.

Before I apply the above framework to some events in the market, it is worth clarifying how the states in Figure d correspond to those chosen by Rick Bookstaber. The “normal” regime refers to the parts of the upper and lower branch stable states that are far from the points F1 and F2 i.e. the system is resilient to a change in external conditions. As I mentioned earlier, normal does not equate to desirable – the lower branch could be a state of collapse. If we designate the upper branch as a desirable normal state and the lower branch as an undesirable one, then the zone close to point F2 on the upper branch is the pre-crisis regime. The crisis regime is the short catastrophic transition from F2 to the lower branch if the system is left alone. If forces external to the system are applied to prevent a transition to the lower branch, then the system could either revert back to the upper branch or even stay in the crisis regime on the dotted line unstable equilibrium for a longer period.

The Magnetar Trade revisited

In an earlier post, I analysed how the infamous Magnetar Trade could be explained with a framework that incorporates catastrophic transitions between alternative stable states. As I noted: “The Magnetar trade would pay off in two scenarios – if there were no defaults in any of their CDOs, or if there were so many defaults that the tranches that they were short also defaulted alongwith the equity tranche. The trade would likely lose money if there were limited defaults in all the CDOs and the senior tranches did not default. Essentially, the trade was attractive if one believed that this intermediate scenario was improbable…Intermediate scenarios are unlikely when the system is characterised by multiple stable states and catastrophic transitions between these states. In adaptive systems such as ecosystems or macroeconomies, such transitions are most likely when the system is fragile and in a state of low resilience. The system tends to be dominated by positive feedback processes that amplify the impact of small perturbations, with no negative feedback processes present that can arrest this snowballing effect.”

In the language of critical transitions, Magnetar calculated that the real estate and MBS markets were in a fragile pre-crisis state and no intervention would prevent the rapid critical transition from F2 to the lower branch.

“Schizophrenic” Markets and the Long Crisis

Recently, many commentators have noted the apparently schizophrenic nature of the markets, turning from risk-on to risk-off at the drop of a hat. For example, John Kemp argues that the markets are “trapped between euphoria and despair” and notes the U-shaped distribution of Bank of England’s inflation forecasts (table 5.13). Although at first glance this sort of behaviour seems irrational, it may not be – As PIMCO’s Richard Clarida notes: “we are in a world in which average outcomes – for growth, inflation, corporate and sovereign defaults, and the investment returns driven by these outcomes – will matter less and less for investors and policymakers. This is because we are in a New Normal world in which the distribution of outcomes is flatter and the tails are fatter. As such, the mean of the distribution becomes an observation that is very rarely realized”

Richard Clarida’s New Normal is analogous to the crisis regime (the dotted line unstable equilibrium in Figures c and d). Any movement in either direction is self-fulfilling and leads to either a much stronger economy or a much weaker economy. So why is the current crisis regime such a long one? As I mentioned earlier, external stabilisation (in this case monetary and fiscal policy) can keep the system from collapsing down to the lower branch normal regime – the “schizophrenia” only indicates that the market may make a decisive break to a stable state sooner rather than later.

A popular line of argument blames the lack of bank lending despite the Fed’s extended ZIRP policy on the impaired capital position of the banking sector. For example, one of the central tenets of MMT is the thesis that “banks are capital constrained, not reserve constrained”. Understandably, commentators extrapolate from the importance of bank capital to argue that banks must be somehow recapitalised if the lending channel is to function properly as Michael Pettis does here.

The capital constraint that is an obvious empirical reality for individual banks’ does not imply that bank bailouts are the only way to prevent a collapse of the monetary transmission channel. Although individual banks are capital constrained, the argument that an impairment in capital will induce the bank to turn away profitable lending opportunities assumes that the bank is unable to attract a fresh injection of capital. Again, this is not far from the truth: As I have explained many times on this blog, banks are motivated to minimise capital and given the “liquidity” support extended to them by the central bank during the crisis, they are incentivised to turn away offers for recapitalisation and instead slowly recapitalise by borrowing from the central bank and lending out to low-risk ventures such as T-Bonds or AAA Bonds. This of course means that they are able to avoid injecting new capital unless forced to do so by their regulator. Potential investors know of this incentive structure facing the bank and are wary of offering new equity. Moreover, injecting new capital into existing banks can be a riskier proposition than capitalising a new bank due to the opacity of bank balance sheets.

So the bank capital “limitation” that faces individual banks is real, in no small part due to the incestuous nature of their relationship with the central bank. But does this imply that the banking sector as a whole is capital constrained? The financial intermediation channel as a whole is capital constrained only if there is no entry of new firms into the banking sector despite the presence of profitable lending opportunities. Again this is empirically true but I would argue that changing this empirical reality is critical if we want to achieve a resilient financial system. The opacity of bank balance sheets means that even in the most perfectly competitive of markets, it is unlikely that old banks will find willing new investors when dramatic financial crises hit. However, investors most certainly can and should start up new unimpaired financial intermediary firms if the opportunity is profitable enough.

The onerous regulations and the time required to set up a new bank clearly discourage new entry – see for example the experience of potential new banks in the UK here. But even if we accelerate the regulatory approval process, the fundamental driver that discourages the entry of startup new banks is the Too-Big-To-Fail(TBTF) subsidy extended to the large incumbent banks that ensures that startup banks are forced to operate with significantly higher funding costs than the TBTF banks. This may be the most damaging aspect of TBTF – not only does it discriminate against existing small banks, it discourages new entry into the sector thus crippling the monetary transmission mechanism via the bank capital constraint.

In a previous post, I quoted Richard Fisher’s views on how bailouts cause business cycles and financial crises: “The system has become slanted not only toward bigness but also high risk…..if the central bank and regulators view any losses to big bank creditors as systemically disruptive, big bank debt will effectively reign on high in the capital structure. Big banks would love leverage even more, making regulatory attempts to mandate lower leverage in boom times all the more difficult…..It is not difficult to see where this dynamic leads—to more pronounced financial cycles and repeated crises.”

Fisher utilises the “incentives” argument but the same argument could also be made via the language of natural selection and Hannan and Freeman did exactly that in their seminal paper that launched the field of “Organizational Ecology”. Hannan and Freeman wrote the below in the context of the bailout of Lockheed in 1971 but it is as relevant today as it has ever been: “we must consider what one anonymous reader, caught up in the spirit of our paper, called the anti-eugenic actions of the state in saving firms such as Lockheed from failure. This is a dramatic instance of the way in which large dominant organizations can create linkages with other large and powerful ones so as to reduce selection pressures. If such moves are effective, they alter the pattern of selection. In our view, the selection pressure is bumped up to a higher level. So instead of individual organizations failing, entire networks fail. The general consequence of a large number of linkages of this sort is an increase in the instability of the entire system and therefore we should see boom and bust cycles of organizational outcomes.”

Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed delivered a speech last week( h/t Zerohedge) on the topic of financial reform, which delivered some of the most brutally honest analysis of the problem at hand that I’ve seen from anyone at the Fed. It also made a few points that I felt deserved further analysis and elaboration.

The Dynamics of the TBTF Problem

In Fisher’s words: “Big banks that took on high risks and generated unsustainable losses received a public benefit: TBTF support. As a result, more conservative banks were denied the market share that would have been theirs if mismanaged big banks had been allowed to go out of business. In essence, conservative banks faced publicly backed competition…..It is my view that, by propping up deeply troubled big banks, authorities have eroded market discipline in the financial system.

The system has become slanted not only toward bigness but also high risk…..if the central bank and regulators view any losses to big bank creditors as systemically disruptive, big bank debt will effectively reign on high in the capital structure. Big banks would love leverage even more, making regulatory attempts to mandate lower leverage in boom times all the more difficult…..

It is not difficult to see where this dynamic leads—to more pronounced financial cycles and repeated crises.”

Fisher correctly notes that TBTF support damages system resilience not only by encouraging higher leverage amongst large banks, but by disadvantaging conservative banks that would otherwise have gained market share during the crisis. As I have noted many times on this blog, the dynamic, evolutionary view of moral hazard focuses not only on the protection provided to destabilising positive feedback forces, but on how stabilising negative feedback forces that might have flourished in the absence of the stabilising actions are selected against and progressively weeded out of the system.

Regulatory Discretion and the Time Consistency Problem

Fisher: “Language that includes a desire to minimize moral hazard—and directs the FDIC as receiver to consider “the potential for serious adverse effects”—provides wiggle room to perpetuate TBTF.” Fisher notes that it’s difficult to credibly commit ex-ante not to bail out TBTF creditors – as long as the regulator retains any amount of discretion with the purpose of maintaining systemic stability, they will be tempted to use it.

On the Ineffectiveness of Regulation Alone

Fisher: “While it is certainly true that ineffective regulation of systemically important institutions—like big commercial banking companies—contributed to the crisis, I find it highly unlikely that such institutions can be effectively regulated, even after reform…Simple regulatory changes in most cases represent a too-late attempt to catch up with the tricks of the regulated—the trickiest of whom tend to be large. In the U.S. financial system, what passed as “innovation” was in large part circumvention, as financial engineers invented ways to get around the rules of the road. There is little evidence that new regulations, involving capital and liquidity rules, could ever contain the circumvention instinct.”

This is a sentiment I don’t often hear expressed by a regulator – As I have opined before on this blog, regulations alone just don’t work. The history of banking is one of repeated circumvention of regulations by banks, a process that has only accelerated with the increased completeness of markets. The question is not whether deregulation accelerated the process of banks’ maximising the moral hazard subsidy – it almost certainly did and this was understood even by the Fed as early as 1983. As John Kareken noted, “Deregulation Is the Cart, Not the Horse”. The question is whether re-regulation has any chance of succeeding without fixing the incentives guiding the actors in the system – it does not.

Bailouts Come in Many Shapes and Sizes

Fisher: “Even if an effective resolution regime can be written down, chances are it might not be used. There are myriad ways for regulators to forbear. Accounting forbearance, for example, could artificially boost regulatory capital levels at troubled big banks. Special liquidity facilities could provide funding relief. In this and similar manners, crisis-related events that might trigger the need for resolution could be avoided, making resolution a moot issue.”

A watertight resolution regime may only encourage regulators to aggressively utilise other forbearance mechanisms. Fisher mentions accounting and liquidity relief but fails to mention the most important “alternative bailout mechanism” – the “Greenspan Put” variant of monetary policy.

Preventing Systemic Risk perpetuates the Too-Big-To-Fail Problem

Fisher: “Consider the idea of limiting any and all financial support strictly to the system as a whole, thus preventing any one firm from receiving individual assistance….If authorities wanted to support a big bank in trouble, they would need only institute a systemwide program. Big banks could then avail themselves of the program, even if nobody else needed it. Systemwide programs are unfortunately a perfect back door through which to channel big bank bailouts.”

“System-wide” programs by definition get activated only when big banks and non-banking financial institutions such as GE Capital are in trouble. Apart from perpetuating TBTF, they encourage smaller banks to mimic big banks and take on similar tail risk thus reducing system diversity.

Shrink the TBTF Banks?

Fisher clearly prefers that the big banks be shrunk as a “second-best” solution to the incentive problems that both regulators and banks face in our current system. Although I’m not convinced that shrinking the banks is a sufficient response, even a “free market” solution to the crisis will almost certainly imply a more dispersed banking sector, due to the removal of the TBTF subsidy. The gist of the problem is not size but insufficient diversity. Fisher argues “there is considerable diversity in strategy and performance among banks that are not TBTF.” This is the strongest and possibly even the only valid argument for breaking up the big banks. My concern is that even a more dispersed banking sector will evolve towards a tightly coupled and homogenous outcome due to the protection against systemic risk provided by the “alternative bailout mechanisms”, particularly the Greenspan Put.

The fact that Richard Fisher’s comments echo themes popular with both left-wing and right-wing commentators is not a coincidence. In the fitness landscape of our financial system, our current choice is not so much a local peak as a deep valley – tinkering will get us nowhere and a significant move either to the left or to the right is likely to be an improvement.