risk-weighted assets Archives - the patient investor

March 14, 2019March 14, 2019

Aussie banks get a wake up call from across the Tasman

I have long called for Australian banks to increase their equity capital in order to withstand a potential banking crisis in Australia. The Murray Commission found that banks, in a crisis, would act as “an accelerant rather than a shockabsorber”.

Now the RBNZ has announced plans to force the big four banks to hold more capital in their New Zealand banking operations. From Clancy Yeates at the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has mounted a firm defence of its plan to force Australia’s major banks to hold $NZ12.5 billion ($A12.12 billion) more in capital in their banking operations across the Tasman, saying the “highly profitable” businesses would have to accept lower returns.

In an interview on Wednesday, RBNZ deputy governor Geoff Bascand also justified the plan to bolster bank balance sheets by emphasising the social costs of banking crises and arguing New Zealand could not rely on Australian parent companies for a bail-out in severe shock.

……The big four Australian banks made $4.4 billion in cash profits from their New Zealand operations in 2018 representing about 15 per cent of their total combined profit with ANZ tipped to experience the most significant hit.

Mr Bascand said the central bank had estimated the big four’s NZ return on equity, until recently 14 to 15 per cent, would decline by between and 1 and 3 percentage points as a result of the change.

Earlier, Bascand said:

“At one time, the owners of a bank had plenty of skin in the game; in fact, there was a time when banks got most, or all, of their money from their owners. However, over the last century, banks have started to use less of their own money and more of other people’s, and the balance has almost entirely reversed. While we are not attempting to turn back the clock …..We believe that more ‘skin in the game’ for banks will result in:

Banks being better able to absorb large, unexpected losses

Society being less at risk from banking crises

Reduced fiscal risk…..As the global financial crisis illustrated, when banks fail there can be a severe domino effect that puts pressure on governments to step in with financial support

Bank shareholders and management being less inclined to take excessive risks”

(Gareth Vaughan, Interest.co.nz)

The RBNZ proposal calls for systemically important banks to hold a minimum of 16% Tier 1 capital against risk-weighted assets, of which 6% would be a regulatory minimum and 10% would act as a counter-cyclical buffer to absorb losses without triggering “resolution or failure options”. Bear in mind that risk-weighting significantly understates total assets and that leverage ratios, reflecting un-weighted assets, are about 55% of the above (i.e. 8.8%).

The banks have protested, warning that increasing capital will raise interest rates to borrowers.

…..The RBNZ has acknowledged interest rates charged by banks will probably rise as a result of the change, but Mr Bascand said it estimated the impact would be about half a standard 0.25 percentage point move in official interest rates.

If banks’ borrowing rates did rise more sharply than expected, he said the RBNZ could offset this through monetary policy…..

What the banks failed to consider (or mention) is that investors are prepared to accept lower returns on equity if there is lower associated risk. Also banks with strong balance sheets have historically experienced stronger growth. Both lower risk and stronger growth would help mitigate the costs of additional capital.

Question is, why are RBNZ raising concerns about bank capital and not APRA? Another case of regulatory capture?

July 13, 2015

APRA considers two per cent capital adequacy increase

by Robin Christie | 14 Jul 2015

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has stated that the major banks would need to increase their capital adequacy ratios by at least two per cent to meet Financial System Inquiry (FSI) recommendations.

APRA has been comparing the capital position of the Australian major banks against a group of international counterparts, and the results of this study, released today, have led to the two per cent figure being mooted.

The study was implemented as a direct response to the FSI final report’s first recommendation, that APRA should “set capital standards such that Australian authorised deposit-taking institution [ADI] capital ratios are unquestionably strong”. This would mean making sure that Australian ADIs sit in the top quartile of internationally-active banks in capital adequacy terms.

….the statement adds that APRA is committed to ensuring that any capital adequacy requirement improvements occur “in an orderly manner”. This process would take into account Australian ADIs’ ability to manage the impact of any changes “without undue disruption to their business plans”.

While APRA hasn’t made a decision on whether it will go as far as mandating a two per cent increase in capital adequacy ratios…. it has stated that Australian ADIs should be well placed to accommodate its directives over the next few years – “provided they take sensible opportunities to accumulate capital”.

Bear in mind that capital adequacy ratios are measured against risk-weighted assets, where asset values are adjusted for the perceived risk of default. Australian banks have historically used risk weightings as low as 15% for residential mortgages compared to 50% in the US. That means that a bank with a capital ratio of 10% would only hold 1.5% capital against residential mortgages. And a 2% increase, to a capital ratio of 12%, would only increase capital cover to 1.8%. Revision of risk weightings is more important than an increase in the capital ratio, especially given Australia’s precarious property market.

August 28, 2014

Banks hold more risk than before GFC | Chris Joye

Chris Joye explains why risk-weighted capital ratios used by Australia’s major banks are misleading and why true leverage is more than 20 times tier 1 capital.

It was only after 2008 when regulators allowed the majors to slash risk-weightings on home loans from 50 per cent to 15 per cent today that we have seen their reported and purely academic tier one capital measured against these newly “risk-weighted” loan assets which shrunk in value spike from 6.7 per cent in December 2007 to 10.5 per cent in June 2014.

By arbitrarily boosting the risk-free share of major bank home loans from 50 per cent to 85 per cent via the regulatory artifice that is a risk-weighting, one gets the fictional jump in their tier one capital that everyone believes is real.

July 21, 2014

Jon Cunliffe: The role of the leverage ratio….

Sir Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability of the Bank of England, argues that the leverage ratio — which ignores risk weighting when calculating the ratio of bank assets to tier 1 capital — is a vital safeguard against banks’ inability to accurately model risk:

….. while the risk-weighted approach has been through wholesale reform, it still depends on mathematical models — and for the largest firms, their own models to determine riskiness. So the risk-weighted approach is itself subject to what in the trade is called “model risk”.

This may sound like some arcane technical curiosity. It is not. It is a fundamental weakness of the risk based approach.

Mathematical modelling is a hugely useful tool. Models are probably the best way we have of forecasting what will happen. But in the end, a model — as the Bank of England economic forecasters will tell you with a wry smile — is only a crude and simplified representation of the real world. Models have to be built and calibrated on past experience.

When events occur that have no clear historical precedent — such as large falls in house prices across US states — models based on past data will struggle to accurately predict what may follow.

In the early days of the crisis, an investment bank CFO is reported to have said, following hitherto unprecedented moves in market prices: “We were seeing things that were 25 standard deviation moves, several days in a row”.

Well, a 25 standard deviation event would not be expected to occur more than once in the history of the universe let alone several days in a row — the lesson was that the models that the bank was using were simply wrong.

And even if it is possible to model credit risk for, say, a bank’s mortgage book, it is much more difficult to model the complex and often obscure relationships between parts of the financial sector — the interconnectedness — that give rise to risk in periods of stress.

Moreover, allowing banks to use their own models to calculate the riskiness of their portfolio for regulatory capital requirements opens the door to the risk of gaming. Deliberately or otherwise, banks opt for less conservative modelling assumptions that lead to less onerous capital requirements. Though the supervisory model review process provides some protection against this risk, in practice, it can be difficult to keep track of what can amount to, for a large international bank, thousands of internal risk models.

The underlying principle of the Basel 3 risk-weighted capital standards — that a bank’s capital should take account of the riskiness of its assets — remains valid. But it is not enough. Concerns about the vulnerability of risk-weights to “model risk” call for an alternative, simpler lens for measuring bank capital adequacy — one that is not reliant on large numbers of models.

This is the rationale behind the so-called “leverage ratio” – a simple unweighted ratio of bank’s equity to a measure of their total un-risk-weighted exposures.

By itself, of course, such a measure would mean banks’ capital was insensitive to risk. For any given level of capital, it would encourage banks to load up on risky assets. But alongside the risk-based approach, as an alternative way of measuring capital adequacy, it guards against model risk. This in turn makes the overall capital adequacy framework more robust.

The leverage ratio is often described as a “backstop” to the “frontstop” of the more complex risk-weighted approach. I have to say that I think this is an unhelpful description. The leverage ratio is not a “safety net” that one hopes or assumes will never be used.

Rather, bank capital adequacy is subject to different types of risks. It needs to be seen through a variety of lenses. Measuring bank capital in relation to the riskiness of assets guards against banks not taking sufficient account of asset risk. Using a leverage ratio guards against the inescapable weaknesses in banks’ ability to model risk.

July 13, 2014

Keep bank regulation as simple as possible, but no simpler

Reading Andrew Bailey’s summary of what the Bank of England has learned about bank capital adequacy over the last decade, it strikes me that there are four major issues facing regulators.

Firstly, simple capital ratios as applied by Basel I encourage banks to increase the average risk-weighting of their assets in order to maximize their return on capital. The same problem applies to the Leverage Ratio introduced in Basel III, which ignores risk-weighting of underlying assets. While useful as an overall measure of capital adequacy, exposing any inadequacies in risk-weighted models, it should not be used on its own.

Risk-weighted capital ratios, however, where bank assets are risk-weighted prior to determining required capital, create incentives for banks to concentrate investment in low-risk-weighted assets such as home mortgages and sovereign debt. Consequent over-exposure to these areas increases risks relative to historic norms, creating a trap for the unwary.

A third pitfall is the use of hybrid debt instruments as part of bank capital. Andrew Bailey explains:

Basel I allowed hybrid debt instruments to count as Tier 1 capital even though they had no principal loss absorbency mechanism on a going concern basis. They only absorbed losses after reserves (equity) were exhausted or in insolvency. It was possible to operate with no more than two per cent of risk-weighted assets in the form of equity. The fundamental problem with this arrangement was that these hybrid debt instruments often only absorbed losses when the bank entered either a formal resolution or insolvency process. It was more often the latter in many countries, including the UK, since there was no special resolution regime for banks (unlike today). But the insolvency procedure could not in fact be used because the essence of too big or important to fail was that large banks could not enter insolvency as the consequences were too damaging for customers, financial systems and economies more broadly. There were other flaws in the construction of these capital instruments. They often included incentives to redeem which undermined their permanence. They were supposed to have full discretion not to pay coupons and not to be redeemed in the event of a shock to the bank’s condition. But banks argued that the exercise of such discretion would create an adverse market reaction which would be disproportionate to the benefits, thus undermining the quality of the capital. More broadly, these so-called innovative instruments introduced complexity into banks’ capital structures which resulted from the endeavour by banks to optimise across tax, accounting and prudential standards.

But even use of contingent convertible capital instruments “with a trigger point that is safely above the point at which there is likely to be a question mark as to whether the bank remains a going concern” could cause upheaval in capital markets if they become a popular form of bank financing. Triggering capital conversions could inject further instability. The only way, it seems, to avoid this would be to break the single trigger point down into a series of small incremental steps — or to exclude these instruments from the definition of capital.

I agree that “there is no single ‘right’ approach to assessing capital adequacy.” What is needed is a combination of both a simple leverage ratio and a risk-weighted capital adequacy ratio to avoid creating incentives that may harm overall stability. This implies a more pro-active approach by regulators to assess the adequacy of risk weightings and a healthy margin of safety to protect against errors in risk assessment.

Lastly, banks are likely to resist efforts to increase capital adequacy, largely because of bonus structures based on return on capital which conflict with the long-term interest of shareholders. Higher capital ratios are likely to lead to lower cost of funding and greater stability.

I do however accept that there remains a perception in some quarters that higher capital standards are bad for lending and thus for a sustained economic recovery…… Looking at the broader picture, the post-crisis adjustment of the capital adequacy standard is a welcome and necessary correction of the excessively lax underwriting and pricing of risk which caused the build up of fragility in the banking system and led to the crisis. I do not however accept the view that raising capital standards damages lending. There are few, if any, banks that have been weakened as a result of raising capital.

Analysis by the Bank for International Settlements indicates that in the post crisis period banks with higher capital ratios have experienced higher asset and loan growth. Other work by the BIS also shows a positive relationship between bank capitalisation and lending growth, and that the impact of higher capital levels on lending may be especially significant during a stress period. IMF analysis indicates that banks with stronger core capital are less likely to reduce certain types of lending when impacted by an adverse funding shock. And our own analysis indicates that banks with larger capital buffers tend to reduce lending less when faced with an increase in capital requirements. These banks are less likely to cut lending aggressively in response to a shock. These empirical results are intuitive and accord with our supervisory experience, namely that a weakly capitalised bank is not in a position to expand its lending. Higher quality capital and larger capital buffers are critical to bank resilience – delivering a more stable system both through lower sensitivity of lending behaviour to shocks and reducing the probability of failure and with it the risk of dramatic shifts in lending behaviour.

June 30, 2013

Regulatory blight — or finally seeing the light?

This comment by Tim Congdon (International Monetary Research Ltd) on the UK shadow Monetary Policy Committee refers to the “regulatory blight” on banking systems as regulators switch from risk-weighted capital ratio requirements to a straight-forward, unweighted leverage ratio which requires some banks to raise more capital. What he fails to consider is that risk-weighting has contributed to the current parlous state of our banking system. Under risk-weighting, banks concentrated their assets in classes with low risk-weighting, such as residential mortgages and sovereign government bonds, where they were required to hold less capital and could achieve higher leveraged returns. The combined effect of all banks acting in a similar manner achieved a vast concentration of investment exposure in these asset classes, with the undesirable consequence that the underlying risk associated with these asset classes soared, leading to widespread instability across the banking system and fueling both the sub-prime and Euro zone sovereign debt crisis.

My last note for the SMPC opened with the sentence, ‘The regulatory blight on banking systems continues in all the world’s so-called “advanced” economies, which means for these purposes all nations that belong to the Bank for International Settlements.’ As I explained in the next sentence, the growth of banks’ risk assets is constrained by official demands for more capital relative to assets, for more liquid and low-risk assets in asset totals, and for less reliance on supposedly unstable funding (i.e., wholesale/inter-bank funding). The slow growth of bank assets has inevitably meant, on the other side of the balance sheet, slow growth of the bank deposits that constitute most of the quantity of money, broadly-defined. Indeed, there have even been periods of a few quarters in more than one country since 2007 in which the assets of banks, and hence the quantity of money, have contracted.

The equilibrium levels of national income and wealth are functions of the quantity of money. The regulatory blight in banking systems has therefore been the dominant cause of the sluggish growth rates of nominal gross domestic products, across the advanced-country world, that have characterised the Great Recession and the immediately subsequent years. Indeed, the five years to the end of 2012 saw the lowest increases – and in the Japanese and Italian cases actual decreases – in nominal GDP in the G-7 leading industrialised countries for any half-decade since the 1930s.

It is almost beyond imagination that – after the experience of recent years – officialdom should still be experimenting with different approaches to bank regulation and indeed contemplating an intensification of such regulation. Nevertheless, that is what is happening. The source of the trouble seems to be a paper given at the Jackson Hole conference of central bankers, in August 2012, by Andy Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England. The paper, called The Dog and the Frisbee, argued that a simple leverage ratio (i.e., the ratio of banks’ assets to capital, without any adjustment for the different risks of different assets) had been a better pointer to bank failure than risk-weighted capital calculations of the kind blessed by the Basle rules. The suggestion is therefore that the Basle methods of calculating capital adequacy should be replaced by, or complemented by, a simple leverage ratio.

For banks that have spent the last five years increasing the ratio of safe assets to total assets, or that have always had a high proportion of safe assets to total assets, the potential introduction of a leverage ratio is infuriating. A number of banks have been told in recent weeks that they must raise yet more capital. Because it is subject to the new leverage ratio, Nationwide Building Society has been deemed to be £2 billion short of capital. That has upset its corporate plans, to say the least of the matter, and put the kibosh on significant expansion of its mortgage assets. And what does one say about George Osborne’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme, announced with such fanfare in the last Budget and supposed to turbocharge the UK housing finance market?

The leverage ratio has been called Mervyn King’s ‘last hurrah’, since there can be little doubt that King has been the prime mover in the regulatory tightening that has hit British banking since mid-2007. He is soon to be replaced by Mark Carney, who may or may not have a different attitude. Carney has been publicly critical of Haldane and his ‘Dog and Frisbee’ paper, but that does not guarantee an early shift in the official stance. Indeed, it is striking that – of the bank’s top team under King – only Paul Tucker, generally (and correctly) regarded as more bank-friendly than King or Haldane, has announced that he is leaving the Bank once Carney has taken over.

My verdict is that the regulatory blight on UK banking is very much still at work. Further, without QE, the quantity of money would be more or less static. As before, I am in favour of no change in sterling interest rates and the continuation of QE at a sufficiently high level to ensure that broad money growth (on the M4ex measures) runs at an annual rate of between 3% and 5%. My bias – at least for the next three months – is for ‘no change’. It is plausible that I will be advocating higher interest rates in 2014. However, much depends on a realisation in official quarters that overregulation of the banks is, almost everywhere in the advanced world, the dominant explanation for the sluggishness of money supply growth and, hence, the key factor holding back a stronger recovery. Major changes in personnel may be in prospect at the Bank of England now that Mervyn King is leaving, but the Treasury – which I understand from private information will be glad to see the back of him – has failed to prevent the growth of a regulatory bureaucracy led by King appointees.

If having a well-capitalized banking system requires some “regulatory blight” then lets have more of it. Three cheers for Mervyn King and the (un-weighted) leverage ratio. Let’s hope that Mark Carney follows a similar path.
via David Smith’s EconomicsUK.com: IEA’s shadow MPC votes 5-4 for quarter-point rate hike.

May 2, 2013

End Too-Big-To-Fail | Sen. Sherrod Brown [video]

Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), along with unlikely ally Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), is launching an effort to increase capital requirements for big banks and remove risk-weighting of assets as proposed under Basel III.

May 1, 2013

In Brown-Vitter Bill, a Banking Overhaul With Possible Teeth | NYTimes.com

Jesse Eisinger from ProPublica skewers big banks’ objections to increasing capital buffers as proposed by the bipartisan Brown-Vitter bill:

Goldman Sachs and S.& P. estimate the big banks might be forced to raise $1 trillion or more. That’s a lot, so much that the leviathans’ agents cry out that they couldn’t sell that much stock. But they don’t have to raise it all at once. And they can retain their earnings and stop paying dividends in addition to selling shares.

In putting that argument forward, they don’t realize they make Senator Brown’s and Senator Vitter’s case for them. If investors are so terrified of the big banks that they won’t buy their stock, that’s a terrific problem. Most of the big banks trade below their net worth, an indication that investors don’t trust them. Brown-Vitter might actually help banks by restoring that trust.

April 29, 2013

Deutsche Bank Plans Capital Boost | WSJ.com

A welcome development reported by LAURA STEVENS , DAVID ENRICH and ULRIKE DAUER at the Wall Street Journal:

FRANKFURT–Deutsche Bank AG [DBK.XE] said Monday it will raise €2.8 billion ($3.65 billion) in fresh capital in a dramatic about-face for the bank, which has repeatedly said it won’t turn to shareholders for help boosting its capital cushion.

The bank, Europe’s second-largest by assets, has long faced doubts from investors and analysts about whether it has enough capital to absorb potential future losses and to meet increasingly stringent regulatory requirements……

Deutsche Bank has long been considered thinly capitalized but have always countered with the argument that the leverage is justified by the quality of the assets on their balance sheet. Low risk-weightings provided a false sense of security, with Greek and other PIIGS government bonds rated as zero-risk in the past, encouraging banks to leverage up on precisely the wrong kind of assets. It is time for risk weightings to be removed from bank capital ratios. The bipartisan bill sponsored by US senators Sherrod Brown and David Vitter is a step in the right direction.

April 11, 2013

Time to clean up the Banks

Gabriele Steinhauser at WSJ writes:

A group of key crisis managers believes cleaning up weak banks is the only way to get Europe’s economy to grow again, after superlow interest rates and large-scale liquidity injections from the ECB have failed to produce the desired results. These officials see continued doubts over the health of many lenders as the main reason banks are reluctant to lend to companies, especially in the continent’s weaker countries.

“We’ve been stuck in this rubbish for five years, because we’ve been doing everything to prevent the banks from being recapitalized properly and the stress tests from being stringent enough,” said a senior EU official. “If we don’t do this, we will stay in this trap until 2020.”

The time has come to clear up the mess from the GFC and strengthen bank balance sheets — not only in Europe — so that a similar financial crisis is unlikely to ever happen again. Moves are also afoot in the US where Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and David Vitter (R-La.) are working on a bipartisan bill to end too-big-to-fail banks. The bill does not attempt to break up big banks but focuses on improving bank capital ratios. Risk-weighted capital ratios as suggested by Basel III disguise banks’ true leverage and encourage risk-taking. Australian banks are particularly exposed to low risk-weighting of residential mortgages. Eliminating risk-weighting would force banks to strengthen their underlying capital base and discourage risk concentration in low risk-weighted areas.

The biggest obstacle to change, however, is the banks who benefit from an implicit taxpayer-funded guarantee in the event of failure. Being able to rely on a bailout enables them them to take bigger bets than their balance sheets would otherwise allow. Columbia University’s Charles Calomiris points out that the banks are able to get away with this because they are supported by populist democratic governments who trade off banking instability in return for political (and financial) support.