Sunday 21 February 2010

Let`s Not Follow Greece

Let`s Not Follow Greece



21st February 2010

The Malta Independent on Sunday

Alfred Mifsud





Why have the Greeks found themselves in the financial mess they are in? Was not the euro supposed to save them from their own indiscipline? Is there a risk that we could find ourselves in the same mess, euro and all?

The answer to the first question needs elaboration. The answer to the second and third questions could be simply yes and yes, but some elaboration would not hurt.

Greece never captured the true spirit of EU and euro membership. Unfortunately, they equated EU membership to opportunity to salt away EU funds for regional development and euro membership to opportunity to continue to spend and borrow at cheap rates as if there is no tomorrow.

Their economy was never re-structured to remain competitive within the framework of open trade and a monetary union. Their civil services remained over-manned, inefficient and corrupt. Stories that bureaucratic applications for routine government services do not get processed unless accompanied with a thick brown envelope abound.

Their pension system remained over-generous with retirement age at 61 and early retirement on flimsy excuses as common as in Gozo.

Their tax-collection system remained inefficient and tax evasion, a national past time fuelled by conscience whitewashing that it is almost criminal to pay taxes for the government to waste in useless expenditure.

Hand in hand with all this, Greece lost competitiveness as wages increased beyond anything justified by efficiency gains.

Unavoidably, deficits grew and grew even when the world economy was feasting and they blew up during the international financial crisis causing increased expenditure through auto- triggering of social expenditure stabilisers and collapse in tax revenues.

But everything got over-complicated by the fact that Greece had made it a habit of hiding its financial misdemeanours by submitting inaccurate, sometime false, statistical data to avoid triggering imposition of external discipline and escape corrective measures from the EU and euro central authorities. It is now resulting that Greece also played financial tricks to artificially slim down its budget deficit and total debt during the process of accession into the euro monetary system. Had this financial trickery not been conducted through complicated financial derivatives, with the help of major international banks like Goldman Sachs and J P Morgan, Greece would never have had the credentials to join the euro.

In short, Greece is not only guilty of financial recklessness but also of wilful misrepresentation and outright cheating. These failings are prejudicing the credibility of the euro monetary system and putting other euro countries in a situation of having to choose between a rock and a hard place.

If they bail out Greece they would be rewarding cheating and indiscipline, offering an open invitation for other members to rely on bailouts rather than painful but effective structural adjustments, as Ireland is currently undergoing. If they do not bail out Greece they will either see it default on its bonds or pushed into the hands of the IMF for a sovereign financial rescue. Either would be a humiliation for the Euro monetary system and would weaken its credentials as a reserve currency alternative to the US dollar.

The new Greek socialist government is now obliged to sort out this financial mess inherited from a supposedly conservative predecessor. Strange Greek world!! Conservative governments are supposed to balance their budgets and socialist governments are supposed to spend their way to high deficits. But since George W. Bush drove a horrifying hole in US public finance from the surplus he inherited from liberal President Clinton, this world has been turned upside down, including two huge financial bubbles in a decade. Conservative governments are being forced to adopt Keynesian policies to avoid a depression, and a socialist Greek government is being forced to right-wing Washington Consensus style of savage adjustment to avoid total financial collapse.

Can you recognise some local traits in the Greek tragedy? I certainly can, though in a much more contained degree, at least so far.

We are losing our international competitiveness too, and like the Greeks we no longer have an exchange rate adjustment tool to bring about an instant correction. Our wages continue to grow in a manner unrelated to productivity. Our public sector remains over-manned, inefficient and overpaid when considering the benefits and security of their job tenure.

Our social services remain unsustainable, and the universally free public health system will sooner or later, probably much sooner than government thinks, bankrupt the country. Our pension system has thankfully been adjusted to bring retirement age to 65 over a protracted period but even this may not be enough.

Our tax collection system remains ineffective. Tax evasion, if not a national past time, is by no means uncommon. The final withholding tax on property sales has been a retrograde step in efforts to close the tax net on evaders through electronic checks among government’s three main sources of current revenues, income tax, VAT and excise/import duties. The culture of tax evasion remains well rooted.

Where our position remains much stronger than Greece is our ability to finance our own deficits. Greece has a poor government but quite affluent citizens who however prefer to keep their riches out of their taxman’s reach and invest them outside their country. On the contrary, while our government is similarly poor and our citizens may not be as affluent as the Greeks, we generally keep our savings invested in the local economy so that government need not seek foreign banks or foreign investors to finance its needs or excesses.

We should however steer clear of Greek practices to hide our deficit. Hidden problems are more difficult to solve as they get neglected till they explode in full force.

So I am scared stiff by the government’s declared intention to finance infrastructural non-revenue generating projects like City Gate through off-balance sheet securitisation. I am miffed by government nonchalance in funding off-balance sheet social capital expenditure like school development by FTS and ‘investment’ to buy the licenses of transport operators, be they bus owners, hearse operators or taxi licensees.

There is a limit to how much we can abuse the thrift culture that makes financing easy. Let’s not follow Greece.
  

Sunday 7 February 2010

PIGS must be helped to Fly

PIGS must be helped to Fly



7th February 2010

The Malta Independent on Sunday

Alfred Mifsud

 


PIGS is not pigs. It is the new acronym coined by the financial services industry to group together the four euro area countries that are struggling to service their huge budget deficit and to continue financing their burgeoning public debt. PIGS is Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain. It is similar to the more popular acronym BRIC, which was invented to group together the up and coming emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Tension has been building in the market about the ability of PIGS to meet their sovereign debt obligations. These tensions are being expressed in two distinct ways. The market value of their sovereign bonds has dropped to reflect the perceived increase in the risk they carry. They are also visible in the bond insurance market (technically referred to as CDS – Credit Default Swaps) where premiums for insurance against the sovereign default of PIGS show substantial increases.

Let me explain in as non-technical terms as possible why the situation is serious and is of interest to all other euro members, and indeed all EU members.

Members of the euro monetary system take certain obligations on which limit their policy discretions. Most obviously they give up the facility to use the rate of exchange as a policy tool, as they no longer have their own domestic currency but a common currency whose exchange value is fixed by the markets, as influenced by the decisions of the European Central Bank (ECB), and not by the decision of any government of a participating country. Members also hand over monetary policy discretion to the ECB who sets and enforces interest rate levels for the whole euro area that may be out of synch with the narrow requirements of any single component thereof.

Members also take on the obligations to operate a prudent fiscal policy with maximum annual deficits within 3 per cent of GDP but with the aim to achieve balanced budget over the economic cycle. They also pledge to keep their cumulative public debt within 60 per cent of the GDP. Where the public debt is above this level there must be a plan to bring it down to such level over an agreed term.

Failure to abide by such rules could lead to an escalation from warnings to sanctions, including fines.

What benefits would countries get to justify their assuming these rigid obligations? The benefits are basically two. Joining the euro gives a perception of stability and sound macro-economic management and offers the perception of support from the other euro countries to overcome any economic difficulties along the way. I state ‘perception’ because the statute of the monetary union does not provide for any such automatic support and, on the contrary, speaks only of sanctions and penalties on countries that do not honour their fiscal obligations.

No penalties have ever been applied; indeed when a country is going through a bad patch it generally needs support to reform rather than penalties that make a bad situation worse. The penalties are presumably a last resort solution in case a country obstinately refuses to adopt corrective measures to improve its fiscal position and bring it back within the rules.

The other major advantage of being in the euro area is that the credibility gained will permit cheaper borrowing on the international market. Normally, the perception that euro membership is a practical guarantee against the risk of default, the prices of bonds of the weaker members like PIGS are very very thinly above the price paid by the strong members like Germany and France.

Suddenly this reasoning is no longer working. PIGS are being forced by the market to pay much higher coupons on their debt. The flight to safety is reducing the borrowing costs of Germany and France and is increasing the borrowing costs of PIGS.

Furthermore, the assumption that euro membership practically guarantees prudential macro-economic management has been invalidated by the way PIGS has been thrashed by the recession.

Consequently, the major advantages of euro membership are no longer accruing to PIGS, which so far have been forced to carry the burdens on their own. Exiting the euro is no solution to indebted countries. Even if exiting were possible, this would cause them havoc as the cost of their borrowing in their newly re-established domestic currencies would skyrocket and they would incur huge exchange losses on their EUR debt, which suddenly becomes a foreign debt.

This is the strongest and most serious test for euro sustainability so far. As is normal, the strength of a floating structure is not tested in calm waters. It is tested during a severe storm and this is the first real severe storm since the euro area was created.

As members of the euro, the developments are of direct interest to Malta. Our fiscal position, especially the true one if many off-balance items are brought into the mainstream budgetary calculations, is not much better than that of PIGS. Where we score better is that the private sector here is liquid with very high savings ratios so we have not had to get to excited about whether the government would be able to fund its borrowing requirements.

What saved us so far is the savings culture that our forefathers instilled in us as a nation.

This savings culture is evident in the way consumption has been cut back during these difficult times.

This cutback in consumption creates short-term problems for the retail and distribution business sector, but in the longer term it preserves macro-economic stability.

As a member of the euro we must do our part to ensure that the integrity of the system is preserved. Obviously the first approach is to place the burden and responsibility for the necessary macro-economic adjustment on PIGS themselves. Failure to do so would create dangerous moral hazard precedents and would remove the political will to undertake the necessary reforms.

But in acknowledgement of the pain of the reforms and as an incentive to stick them out, rather than risk some violent protestations (Greece is well known for such theatrics) that could risk the very democratic stability of sovereign member governments, the system has to offer rewards and encouragement for persistence. They must not be left alone. They must not be left to face their future borrowing needs from the markets at high rates, as this works against the very nature of the needed reforms.

To restore the benefit of borrowing at cheap rates through the overall support of the whole euro area, new initiatives are needed for PIGS to borrow through euro-wide sovereign bonds or to channel such borrowings through special programmes of the European Investment Bank whose bonds would be counter-guaranteed by all the governments of the euro area.

As a last resort, Greece should be channelled to the IMF to organise a reform programme, which would be supported and aided by the EU, as has already been done for Hungary, Latvia and Rumania. Greece is a euro member and the involvement of the IMF could be a humiliation for the monetary system; but if the alternative is worse than humiliation than let’s get on with it. After all, if the humiliation were translated into some euro weakening against other currencies, the benefits in international competitiveness would more than justify the embarrassment of humiliation.

This is the time to show that the euro monetary system is also a tool of solidarity for those of its members who go through difficult times. Otherwise it can just as well be dismantled.
 

Tuesday 2 February 2010

A Failure of Regulation


  
A Failure of Regulation.
How to reform Regulation to avoid a relapse.

Chapter 1 – A Failure of regulation

Much has been said and written on the causes of the financial crisis of 2007/2009.

 

Fingers have been pointed at the lax monetary policy operated by the Fed following the recovery from the bursting of the tech bubble. Others have made a connection with the liquidity created by the structural payments imbalances which forced surplus countries to dump their excess savings on the US credit markets, forcing long term rates to lose their linkages with the Fed’s traditional control over short term interest rates.

Who can forget the amazement of Alan Greenspan at seeing the Fed’s loss of influence over the long term end of the interest rate curve, which amazement Greenspan had described as ‘conundrum’?

Some have blamed the crisis on the inability of banks to self regulate and their indulging in excessive leverage to reap increased profits, leading to outrageous executive bonuses.

Some have blamed the lax control on the initiation of sub-prime mortgages and on the distribution model for mortgage backed securities by major banks who had no contact whatsoever with the mortgage borrowers underlying their CDO’s; such that banks were totally blinded by their defective mathematical models on the true credit worthiness (or lack of it) of the borrowers underpinning their exposure to sub-prime mortgages.

Why not blame the Rating Agencies who at the very least have to carry responsibility for stamping high ratings too liberally on the Alt A super senior tranches of the CDO’s, performing the financial equivalent of the miracle of Cana, transforming water ( probably dishwater) into fine wine?

Should we exculpate the gullible mortgage borrowers who allowed themselves to be duped into believing they can afford mortgages clearly beyond their ability to service, purely on the utopian expectation that such mortgages can be continually refinanced as their property undergoes an eternal increase in market price?

A few have also blamed the US Treasury for mishandling the problems of Lehman Brothers which was the triggering event for the financial meltdown and the near complete seizure of the credit markets in the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. They argue, in my view rightly, that allowing Lehman to file for bankruptcy made a dangerous situation tragic, and the extremes could have been avoided if Lehman were nationalised and subjected to an orderly wind down.

These, and others, are all valid contributory causes to the financial turmoil experienced in 2008/2009. What is however underpinning most of these causes is a failure of regulation.

If regulation were effective banks would not have been allowed to over-leverage and take extreme risks jeopardising their own existence. If regulation were effective banks would not have turned their investment banking divisions into hedge funds financed by ordinary deposits. If regulation were effective banks would not have been allowed to warehouse enormous quantities of Alt A high rated sub-prime CDO’s on their own balance sheet and would not have been allowed to take substantial risks off balance sheet through SIV’s and such like investment vehicles. If regulation were effective Banks would have had a much more comfortable cushion of own capital to face the downturn and financial crisis without the resulting loss of confidence.

So this financial crisis has been a failure of regulation. This is not to say that Bank Regulation, if properly dosed and rigorously applied, could have saved the economy from the entire crisis. But even if a crisis would have occurred it would have been an asset price crisis and not a credit crisis. It would have hurt investors who invested their own money in over-priced assets but would not have affected the strength of the banking system through clogging of the credit mechanism and erosion of banks’ capital through market value losses on their assets.

With proper regulation the 2007/2009 crisis could have been an asset price property bubble like the technology bubble of the year 2000 where the banking system remained strong and capable of keeping the plumbing of the credit markets operating efficiently to help pull the economy out of a mild recession or even prevent such recession altogether.

So yes this financial crisis was mostly a failure of bank regulation!

And if proof were needed that this was so, one need look no further than the testimony given by the ‘eminence gris’ of light touch regulation and self regulation, the longest serving Chairman of The Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan.

On the morning of October 23, 2008, Greenspan, who had retired from the Fed for some 33 months earlier, was back on Capitol Hill to give evidence before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, that was enquiring into what led to the sub-prime crisis.

Chairman of the Committee, Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman, asked:

“Dr Greenspan, you were the longest serving Chairman of the Federal Reserve in history and during this period of time you were, perhaps, the leading proponent of deregulation of our financial markets.... You have been a staunch advocate for letting markets regulate themselves. Let me give you a few of your past statements :

“There’s is nothing involved in federal regulation which makes it superior to market regulation”

“There appears to be no need for government regulation of off-exchange derivative transactions”

“We do not believe a public policy case exists to justify government intervention”

My question for you is simple. Were you wrong?”

Greenspan replied:

“Partially. I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms. ..... The problem here is something which looked to be very solid edifice, and, indeed, a critical pillar to market competition and free markets, did break down. And I think that, as I said, shocked me. I still do not fully understand why it happened and obviously, to the extent that I figure out what happened and why, I will change my views.”

Greenspan, an acolyte of the great libertarian philosopher and believer in free markets, Ayn Rand, admits in Congress that he made a mistake! News rarely comes in crisper formats.

He continued:

“ To exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. What I am saying to you is yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I have been pretty distressed by the fact..... I found a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.”

Waxman retorted:

“You found a flaw? In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right. It was not working.”

Greenspan replied:

”Precisely! That’s precisely the reason I was shocked. Because I had been going for forty years, or more, with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

A greater admission than that is almost impossible. The person who had persuaded Congress that it was not necessary to regulate financial derivatives and that the evolution of financial derivatives without any regulatory strings attached was a blessing, as risk was spread thinly across a wide spectrum of investors, ensuring that when the shock came no single institution would be brought down, could not preview that the opacity of the system he allowed would on the contrary threaten to bring down the whole system.

So let me repeat in block capitals:

THE 2007/2009 FINANCIAL CRISIS WAS A GROSS FAILURE OF BANK REGULATION.


Chapter 2 – Self regulation model was bound to fail

So Greenspan admits he made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

But how could any rational person make such mistake? Anybody with an average level of intelligence can understand that in the game theory the prisoners will never go for the optimum solution which would clearly result from their rational collaboration if they were dealing with each other through open communications. The market is much more complicated than the prisoners’ dilemma. Rather than just two players there are hundreds of players each trying to outperform peers.

It would be utopian to expect banks to behave collectively in a rational manner by uniformly avoiding undue exposures to protect from systemic risk, as if banks had perfect knowledge of each others’ strategies and a clear vision of the consequences resulting from departure from such perfect collaboration.

Reality is different. Banks operate in strong competition with each other and the markets judge banks’ management by their quarterly results. If one bank departs from perfect collective rationality and starts operating more aggressively, taking on more leverage to achieve better short term results, it will not be long before many of the other operators will be forced by market expectations to adjust their strategies to compete as aggressively. Before you know it risk has notched up a few steps across the whole financial markets.

Greenspan argument must have assumed that since banks’ management are themselves substantial shareholders in the organisation they lead, mostly as a result of having part of their remuneration packages paid in blocked shares or share options, they would, in self-interest, steer clear from taking short term risks that could prejudice the value of their long term investment in the equity of their own firms.

Reality has proven otherwise. The CEO’s of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers at the time of their failure ( or in case of Bear Stearns near failure before it was saved by JP Morgan Chase in a Fed/Treasury assisted takeover) had most of their personal wealth locked up in equity holdings of the organisation they were leading.

But it is clear that beyond a certain level of wealth, the motivation comes more from the honour and satisfaction of winning ( or perception thereof) in the markets, rather than in cautious capital preservation.

Especially when banks reach a certain level of size which helps to solidify the perception of being too big to fail, bank managements consider themselves protected enough on the downside to take further risks to extend the upside.

Only proper and effective regulation could force banks to avoid leverage and exposure which could present risks to the whole system. In the absence of a situation where banks are broken down into extremely small pieces, resulting no doubt in substantial and very undesirable lack of efficiency in serving clients as they need to be served in a global economy, regulation has to be pro-active enough to bring into line, in a very timely manner, any bank that breaks away from the long term collaborative maximum return option of the prisoners’ dilemma, in order to secure for itself short term advantage over its competitors.

This is the antithesis of the self-regulation so adored in the Greenspan era. It is regulation which has to be dynamic and effective in the old traditional way where a Regulator’s nod, wink or raised brows would be more important than the written rule.

This is particularly relevant in the area of risk management. History shows that financial strategies that start as a risk management tool, end up being themselves an instrument for leveraging risks. This is exactly the history of how Credit Default Swaps (CDS) came into being. They were ‘invented’ by the JP Morgan gang in order to reduce balance sheet credit risks of the Bank versus major corporations. They finished up being copied and imitated by the whole market that extended the concept to sub-prime mortgage area where statistical evidence of past performance was much more thin than in case of corporate defaults over the economic cycle. It is no coincidence that J P Morgan was one of the banks least hit by the sub-prime crisis. As ‘inventors’ of the CDS they had better appreciation than competitors of the inadequacy of their ‘invention’ in the mortgage field, especially as there was no historical data related to property values in the context of a nation-wide property crash.

In the next Chapter I will discuss what sort of regulation model is the most effective. Given now that there is a wide consensus on the need of effective Regulation and on the ineffectiveness of the self-regulation model, the next challenge is the promulgation of a globally accepted and harmonised Bank Regulation model which discourages or allows no space for regulatory arbitrage and which is dynamic and effective to ensure that we do not face a recurrence of the financial crisis, at least in our lifetime.

But before leaving this Chapter, I would touch on the reconfirmation of Ben Bernanke as the most important guardian of the international financial system in his capacity as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in the US.

Bernanke’s reconfirmation process was hard work. Given that he was appointed by a Republican President and was being put up for re-confirmation by a Democrat President, one would have been forgiven for thinking that his re-confirmation would have sailed plainly through the US Congress. It was not so. In the end the 30% negative vote was the highest a Federal Reserve Chairman nominee ever got and even some of those who in the end voted for Bernanke’s re-appointment were quite critical in the appointment hearings. In the words of one Republican Senator who voted for Bernanke’s re-appointment in spite of critical posture during the hearings, he justified voting for Bernanke on the fear that in case of failure, the President would nominate someone worse. The sort of better the devil you know approach.

The reason for this ambivalence versus Bernanke’s suitability for the job is not difficult to understand. As a fire-fighter once the financial crisis started, Bernanke performed admirably. With a deep knowledge of how the crisis of 1929 led to the Great Depression of the thirties and fully understanding the policy errors made by the Federal Reserve at the time which only compounded the risks of depression, Bernanke was probably the best man to have in the position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve during the crisis.

He was a financial fire-fighter par excellence and performed admirably, often going to the extreme edges of the legal limits of his authority to save the system from imploding whilst the legislators were totally out of their depth in understanding the seriousness of the crisis, let alone in providing timely legal solutions for it.

As a fire-preventer however Bernanke ‘s guilt for not preventing or previewing the crisis could not be much less than that of Alan Greenspan. He was a member of the Board of the Federal Reserve for most of the noughties prior to his appointment as its Chairman In January 2006. And for the short period he was not on the Federal Reserve Board he was the Chairman of President G W Bush’s team of economic advisors with close linkages to the Treasury and the Fed.

There is no evidence that Bernanke ever showed serious dissent with Greenspan’s decisions, especially with his credo in the self-regulation model and on the excessively lax monetary policy following the bursting of the tech bubble.

History shows that Bernanke is a very efficient fire-fighter but if the crisis is behind us who wants a fire-fighting expert to rebuild a shaken edifice? What was needed was someone with a track record of capability to organise both effective legal bank regulation manuals and,perhaps more importantly, someone who can use the moral suasion authority of his position to budge the regulated entities to stay on the straight and narrow.

If such person does not exist, given that we have not experienced a similar financial crisis since the thirties, than my hope is that the experience of 2007/2009 has been a learning experience for Bernanke so that for the future he can be not only an effective fire-fighter, but perhaps more importantly, an effective fire-preventer.


Chapter 3 – An effective Bank Regulation model

Unless we want to roll back globalisation generally, effective bank regulation has to be globally co-ordinated.

The confusion resulting in the Copenhagen Summit on Global Warming held in December 2009 gives a taste of the near impossibility of reaching agreement on globally harmonised effective bank regulation which encompasses not only deposit taking banks, but the whole shadow banking structure.

The world seems caught in a living contradiction which unless resolved will lead from one financial crisis to another. Without global harmonisation, bank regulation would be ineffective. But global agreement on bank regulation is almost unachievable given the varying circumstances in the different jurisdictions. Just as an example: how can Canada be persuaded to breakdown or limit the activities of its major banks when it has had no confidence crisis in its banking sector?

It is quite evident that globalised harmonisation of bank regulation is unlikely to be reached if these regulations are modelled in quantities terms and are based on the experience of jurisdictions whose banking systems went in distress during the financial crisis.

It is more likely that global agreement can be reached if the harmonisation of banking regulation is defined in qualitative terms and in terms of general principles which are universally applicable and could be readily adopted by most if not all major jurisdictions.

A possible suite of such generally defined and qualitative regulation for universal application could include the following:

· All deposit taking banks, non-deposit taking banks ( non-banks that fund their operations through the capital or wholesale money markets), financial organisations who fund themselves on the capital or wholesale money markets for the purpose of performing bank-like operations (including hedge funds and private equity funds that undertake leverage) have to be responsible to a single regulator defined in their home jurisdiction who is to remain responsible for the global operations of the licensed institution.

· All exposures of the licensed institution are to be reported on balance sheet and off-balance sheet exposures are to be prohibited. Contingent exposures are to be reported upon as if they were real exposures and are to be calculated as real liabilities for liquidity and capital adequacy purposes.

· Licensed institutions have to keep a liquidity reserve equivalent to gross deposit withdrawals and market funding redemptions for an average of ___ days as experienced in the previous full financial year.

· Licensed Institutions are to have net tangible pure capital which bears a reasonable relationship to the size of its balance sheet and the risks posed by mismatches of maturities between its assets and liabilities. The size of such reasonable relationship is to be set by home country regulators in consultation with the regulators of host countries where the bank is operating, if such is the case.

· Capital which is subject to regular fixed coupon payment will only qualify as net tangible pure capital up to 50% of its gross value and only if it has no fixed date for redemption or if it has provision for conversion into share capital if circumstances so demand.

The question remains as to how is it possible to have such a loosely worded set of objectives turned into effective globally harmonised system of bank regulation.

I do not consider the lose wording and the generic nature of the established principles as a disadvantage for reaching the final objective. On the contrary I am very sceptic of too specific numerically defined regulation and this for two reasons.

Firstly because gaining general acceptance for such detailed regulation is a very laborious long term project which by the time it is brought to finality, even in the unlikely event that it has not been watered down through compromises to gain wide acceptance, it is generally poised to solve yesterday’s problems rather than tomorrow’s challenges.

Secondly because the financial industry is dynamic and any system of regulation defined in too much detail cannot keep pace with the evolution and innovation of the financial markets, especially given that in the past market operators have shown great ingenuity to re-model their operations to work around detailed regulation and still stay within the legal limits though not necessarily the spirit of the regulations.

 It would be indeed a pity if after God only knows how long and laborious the exercise for reaching consensus on globally well defined and numerically controlled regulation, this would be rendered ineffective by the spirit of innovation of the financial industry to circumvent such regulation.

For regulation to be as dynamic as the industry it is seeking to regulate there must be a totally new approach to it. The dynamics of regulation have to be re-jigged so that the spirit of innovation is channelled to work in favour of strengthening of the regulation and not against it.

For this purpose Regulators of the various jurisdictions have to agree on what I consider a simple method to give practical effect for the generally agreed principles to be translated into effective regulation which prevents banking crisis rather than cures it.

A leaf should be taken from the practice in most successful commercial organisations when it comes to Human Resource Management. Every year the organisation has to look at its human resources and after defining which elements are the weakest, (social considerations apart), will take steps to replace its weakest members by the input of new blood. Failure to do so, and human nature being what it is, will inevitably result that over time all human resources tend to lower their performance and the weakest performance will tend to pull down to its level the general performance of the whole organisation.

On the contrary knowledge that the organisation operates a dynamic HR policy that each year cuts out its weakest links will change the dynamics and stimulate the whole corpse to perform better in order to distance themselves from the possibility of their being the weakest link whose head would be next to go on the block.

This Q syndrome could be effectively applied by Bank Regulators for the organisations that fall under their regulatory jurisdiction. Every year each Regulator must look at the strength of the various licensed institutions and rank them in a queue of performance on the basis of the qualitative objectives agreed in the global system of general regulation.

Once the lowest ranking institution is identified, it will be given a few months to correct its weakness or find a market solution through share capital increase, trade sale or merger. Failing such a solution the Regulator will invoke the Resolution Trust powers that it ( or a purposely created organization) has to have to take over the institution and gradually wind it down.

The process of resolution will respect the rights of depositors under any State guarantee, force haircuts on bondholders in accordance with their legal ranking rights. If bond holders are not paid in full and have to suffer a haircut the shareholders have to be wiped out.

By adopting this system the market dynamics are changed with management, bondholders and shareholders forced to keep a balance to achieve market driven growth but staying on the right side of regulation to avoid being the last in the qualitative queue.

It would be easier to reach a global agreement on this system rather than on any system with quantitative controls which do not provide for the different circumstances in different jurisdictions. The final qualitative objectives proposed are applicable for all jurisdictions. Failure of the weakest becomes an annual event and like recurring news it would stop being shocking leading to loss of confidence and systemic risk. The too big to fail concept would thus be buried once and for all.

Regulation can only be effective if it is as dynamic as the banking and financial market that it is seeking to regulate. So specific limits and other quantity criteria will unavoidably render regulation far less flexible than the markets; in such circumstances the markets will take over forcing regulators in Greenspan style to surrender and argue that the market can regulate itself. The 2007/2009 crisis proves that the market cannot regulate itself. On the other hand any stringent quantitative regulation, even if it were possible on a global scale, would suffocate recovery and will limit long term growth.

Critics of this proposed system of Regulation with whom I discussed my ideas have expressed reservations on its applicability on the basis that jurisdictions will use different criteria in their respective jurisdictions to identify their weakest performers. I consider this flexibility in approach as a strength not a weakness as it provides for the different realities in different jurisdictions.


What is important for the system to work is not so much the accuracy or uniformity in the process through which Regulators of the varying jurisdictions reach their judgment to classify the financial institutions under their regulatory purview, but the discipline it enforces on the market to adopt better practices to distance themselves from the bottom rank. It also helps to make orderly resolution of the weakest link in the financial system as a regular annual affair, without major crisis and without propagation of moral hazard in the too big to fail concept.


By continually weeding the system from its weakest performers the financial markets are kept healthy and prudent, leading to crisis avoidance rather than crisis resolution.


Alfred Mifsud

MALTA

2nd February 2010.