Code is Law versus Contract is Law

“Code is Law” has been one of the slogans of the blockchain and cryptocurrency world. The core belief is that the intentions of the parties do not matter, and the only thing that matters is the actual software code that implements these intentions. Even if somebody finds a bug in the code, and exploits it to make money, “Code is Law” would regard this as a legitimate activity. The correct response to such a hack is to write better code in future.

Mainstream finance does not accept this idea. In 2022, Avi Eisenberg hacked Mango Markets, a decentralized finance (DeFi) trading platform on the Solana blockchain, and took out over $100 million. He claimed that he was an applied game theorist who had simply implemented a highly successful trading strategy that fully conformed to the rules of Mango Markets as embodied in their code (“Code is Law”). A jury did not buy this argument and convicted him for market manipulation in April this year. Courts obviously take into account the intentions of the parties.

Or do they? This week the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s ruling confirming an arbitration award that required the seller of a supermarket chain to pay the private equity buyers twice the purchase price. No that is not a typo. It was not the buyer paying the seller, but the seller paying the buyer, and that too twice the purchase price. The Chancery Court agreed that “the outcome that the Buyer achieved in this case was ... economically divorced from the intended transaction,” and the arbitrator also expressed a similar view. But Delaware law embraces strict contractarianism - “Contract is Law.” The arbitrator would not consider the intentions of the parties, and the courts would not step in either.

The US Justice Department and the CFTC prosecuted Essenberg for market manipulation. Should and would the Justice Department and the SEC prosecute the private equity buyers for market manipulation?

How is “Contract is Law” different from “Code is Law?” Do not the moral hazard argument work equally well in both cases? If “Contract is Law” encourages all parties to draft better contracts and read them more carefully, “Code is Law” encourages everyone to write better code and review them more carefully.

Posted at 2:18 pm IST on Thu, 14 Nov 2024         permanent link

Categories: blockchain and cryptocurrency, law, manipulation

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Art of risking everything

In my last post about my resuming my blog, I asked for suggestions on the scope and nature of the blog. Several comments requested me to write about the books that I have been reading recently, and I have embraced this idea. The caveat is that these would not be book reviews, but would be my reflections on what I took away from the book. Moreover, they would be highly opinionated, and would largely be about finance even if the book is not about finance.

Today’s book is On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything¹ by Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise and famous mostly for founding the election forecasting site FiveThirtyEight. This book is not about finance at all, and I had great difficulty wading through four uninteresting chapters about gambling and poker before getting to the relatively small bit of finance in the middle. The finance portion is mainly about venture capital and cryptocurrency.

Underlying all the disparate chapters in the book is the broader theme about attitude towards risk, and this is of great interest to any finance professional. Nate Silver begins by distinguishing between the “river” and the “village”, where the people in the river are given to analytical and abstract thinking and are competitive and risk tolerant (This is a bit of an oversimplification because Silver mentions a few other cognitive and personality traits also). The difficulty with this characterization is that in finance, attitude towards risk is not binary (risk averse versus risk tolerant), but encompasses a broad spectrum of risk aversion coefficients. The theoretical range of the Arrow-Pratt measure of relative risk aversion² is from negative infinity to positive infinity, but for most people, it probably lies between 1 and 10. Therefore, a finance professional would quite likely regard a risk aversion coefficient of around unity as being quite risk tolerant, though technically any risk aversion coefficient greater than zero signifies risk aversion. Zero represents risk neutrality and negative coefficients signify risk seeking.

At certain points in the book, Silver seems to imply that somebody with a risk aversion coefficient of unity or even somewhat higher belongs in the “river”. For example, twice he says that most gamblers regard the Kelly criterion³ as being too aggressive and prefer bets of only quarter to half of the Kelly bet size. The Kelly criterion corresponds to a risk aversion coefficient of exactly unity, and so this implies that most gamblers have risk aversion coefficients significantly above unity. At other points in the book, Silver seems to suggest that people in the river seek out any positive expected value opportunities which suggest risk neutrality (a coefficient of zero) if not risk seeking. Of course, Pratt showed that a rational person would take at least a tiny slice of any positive expected value opportunity. This is because risk aversion (which is a second order phenomenon) can be ignored for infinitesimal bets. Perhaps, this is what Silver means, but, in that case, the logic applies only to highly divisible bets.

At times, I got the feeling that all expected utility maximizers are in Silver’s “river”, and only people confirming to prospect theory or behavioural finance are in his “village”, but Silver mentions prospect theory only in a footnote and in the glossary, and he does not describe this as a “village” trait. He does emphasize that “river” people perform Bayesian calculations, and the distortion of probabilities in prospect theory would perhaps not be “riverine”. What I do not understand after reading the whole book is whether a highly rational expected utility maximizer with a risk aversion coefficient of 25 belongs in the “river” or not. The problem is that while Silver praises river people for “decoupling” (keeping different aspects of a problem separate), he works throughout with a tight coupling of the cognitive and personality traits of the “river” people.

Silver cheerfully admits to being a “river” person, and often suggests that the “river” is winning. But there is some ambiguity about what it means for the “river” to win. Does it mean that the “river” people collectively win, or that the typical or average “river” person wins? This distinction is illustrated by Silver’s discussion of the Kelly criterion on pages 396-400 (if you do not have the book in front of you, Brad Delong’s blog post which Silver cites in an end note provides a very similar treatment). Mathematically, the Kelly criterion maximizes long run wealth. The intuition is that when you have positive expected value investment opportunities, you definitely want to bet on them (recall Pratt’s result that the optimal bet size is never zero), but if you bet too much, you may be ruined and then you lose the opportunity to make more positive value bets in future. Long run optimization must therefore ensure long run survival to allow wealth to compound over those long horizons, and this leads to an optimal size of the bet.

Imagine three groups of people: (a) the “village” whose inhabitants do not participate in risky assets at all because of behavioural reasons or infinite risk aversion, (b) the Kelly “river” filled with venture capitalists who bet the optimal fraction of their wealth at each round on various risky (positive expected value) ventures, and (c) the risk neutral “river” comprising risk neutral founders who bet their entire wealth on their respective risky (positive expected value) ventures. Note that this is my analogy, and Silver does not use this interpretation during the discussion on Kelly. Most inhabitants of the Kelly “river” will outperform the “village” handsomely because Kelly ensures high returns with negligible chance of being ruined. But the risk neutral “river” will outperform both of the others on average. Almost everybody here would be ruined, but the one person who managed to survive would make so much money that the average wealth of the risk neutral “river” will be far higher than even the Kelly “river”. (For simplicity, I assume that the different ventures are independent.)

If you care more about the group rather than yourself, then the risk neutral “river” is possibly optimal in the sense that collectively this group is better off than the others. But the “river” people were supposed to be competitive and not collectivist and socialistic. So it is not clear whether this is the “river” at all. Brad Delong’s blog post uses the multiple universes interpretation of quantum physics to suggest that even if you are ruined in this universe, there is a parallel you in some other universe who has made it big. I think that this is closer to theology than to finance.

Silver’s book does have a long discussion about venture capitalists and founders and seems to suggest that the venture capitalists have to be rational, while the founders have to be irrational to willingly accept large probability of ruin. I do not agree because as Broughman and Wansley⁴ have pointed out, risk sharing between the VC and the founder can ensure that founders do well even when the venture fails. Recall Adam Neumann making a fortune even as WeWork went bust.

At the end of the book, I was left with the impression that Silver wants to self identify not with cold blooded rational calculators, but with daring risk takers, and this tendency colours a great deal of the discussion in the book. This attitude is best captured in the last of his thirteen habits of successful risk-takers: “13. Successful risk-takers are not driven by money. They live on the edge because it’s their way of life.” Nevertheless, by ignoring his personal preferences, I could learn many interesting things from the book, and some of these ideas are useful in finance as well. The “river” and the “village” are I think a useful way of thinking about classical and behavioural finance even if that was not what Silver had in mind at all.

Notes and references:

Posted at 1:36 pm IST on Wed, 30 Oct 2024         permanent link

Categories: behavioural finance, interesting books, risk management

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Resuming my blog

My blog has been suspended for nearly four years now. My term as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Reserve Bank of India ended early this month, and I am now looking forward to resuming my blog.

However, posting is likely to be erratic for the next couple of months as I would be making a career transition subsequent to my retirement from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad at the end of this calendar year. This career transition has yet to be finalized, and so I am unable to provide any details at this stage.

I am also contemplating some changes in the scope of the blog like a bit more of macro finance and perhaps more of finance pedagogy. Please feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

Posted at 11:27 am IST on Tue, 22 Oct 2024         permanent link

Categories: miscellaneous

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Migration of my website and blog

My website and blog have now been migrated to my own domain https://www.jrvarma.in/. Earlier, they were hosted at my Institute's website at https://www.iima.ac.in/~jrvarma/ and https://faculty.iima.ac.in/~jrvarma/.

My blog has been suspended for some time and is likely to remain suspended till October 2024. However, all old blog posts (along with the comments) have been migrated to the new location (https://www.jrvarma.in/blog/). There is also an rss feed and an atom feed, though these will be useful only when the blog resumes.

There is no change in the WordPress mirror https://jrvarma.wordpress.com/, and so those who were following my blog at WordPress can ignore this migration.

Posted at 1:20 pm IST on Mon, 14 Nov 2022         permanent link

Categories: miscellaneous

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Revisiting Jensen’s Agency Costs of Overvalued Equity

After the dot com bust, Michael C. Jensen wrote a paper comparing overvalued equity to managerial heroin:

When a firm’s equity becomes substantially overvalued it sets in motion a set of organizational forces that are extremely difficult to manage — forces that almost inevitably lead to destruction of part or all of the core value of the firm. (Jensen, M.C., 2005. Agency costs of overvalued equity. Financial management, 34(1), pp.5-19.)

What is amazing about the equity overvaluation created by meme-based investing (the reddit and Robinhood retail investors) is that far from destroying companies, it is resuscitating companies that were earlier presumed to be beyond salvation. On Tuesday, AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. raised $230 million by selling 1.7% of its equity to a hedge fund, Mudrick Capital, which promptly turned around and sold the shares into the market at a profit. AMC which claims to be “the largest movie exhibition company in the United States, the largest in Europe and the largest throughout the world with approximately 950 theatres and 10,500 screens across the globe” was struggling because of the pandemic and had plenty of uses for the money: it stated that:

The cash proceeds from this share sale primarily will be used for the pursuit of value creating acquisitions of additional theatre leases, as well as investments to enhance the consumer appeal of AMC’s existing theatres. In addition, with these funds in hand, AMC intends to continue exploring deleveraging opportunities.

With our increased liquidity, an increasingly vaccinated population and the imminent release of blockbuster new movie titles, it is time for AMC to go on the offense again.

The prospectus related to this sale described the risks very clearly:

it is very difficult to predict when theatre attendance levels will normalize, which we expect will depend on the widespread availability and use of effective vaccines for the coronavirus. However, our current cash burn rates are not sustainable.

during 2021 to date, the market price of our Class A common stock has fluctuated from an intra-day low of $1.91 per share on January 5, 2021 to an intra-day high on the NYSE of $36.72 on May 28, 2021 and the last reported sale price of our Class A common stock on the NYSE on May 28, 2021, was $26.12 per share.

the market price of our Class A common stock has experienced and may continue to experience rapid and substantial increases or decreases unrelated to our operating performance or prospects, or macro or industry fundamentals, and substantial increases may be significantly inconsistent with the risks and uncertainties that we continue to face; ​ our market capitalization, as implied by various trading prices, currently reflects valuations that diverge significantly from those seen prior to recent volatility and that are significantly higher than our market capitalization immediately prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the extent these valuations reflect trading dynamics unrelated to our financial performance or prospects, purchasers of our Class A common stock could incur substantial losses if there are declines in market prices driven by a return to earlier valuations;

AMC shares rose after this capital raise, and AMC followed up on Thursday with a at-the-market offering of an additional 2.3% of its shares that raised $587 million at a price of $50.85 per share. The prospectus came with an even more blunt disclosure:

We believe that the recent volatility and our current market prices reflect market and trading dynamics unrelated to our underlying business, or macro or industry fundamentals, and we do not know how long these dynamics will last. Under the circumstances, we caution you against investing in our Class A common stock, unless you are prepared to incur the risk of losing all or a substantial portion of your investment.

Michael Jensen considered the possibility that capital raising could eliminate overvaluation, but ruled it out:

Some suggest that one solution to the problem of overvalued equity is for the firm to issue overpriced equity and pay out the proceeds to current shareholders. I have grave doubts that this is a sensible or even workable solution for several reasons.

AMC has shown that Jensen’s fears about regulatory obstacles and disclosure requirements were totally misplaced. But Jensen also raised an ethical issue which goes to the very foundations of corporate finance:

I believe it is impossible to create a system with integrity that is based on the proposition that it is ok to exploit future shareholders to benefit current shareholders. I realize this is not a generally accepted proposition in today’s finance profession, not even among scholars, but it would take us too far from my topic today to discuss it thoroughly.

I am not however impressed by this ethical argument because capitalism depends on allowing trades between two parties with differing beliefs and expectations without worrying that one party is mistaken and is therefore being exploited by the other. I see the AMC capital raises as capitalism working nicely to harmonize heterogeneous beliefs and expectations through the mechanism of mutually beneficial trades.

Posted at 4:07 pm IST on Fri, 4 Jun 2021         permanent link

Categories: bubbles, corporate governance

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Lessons from the Hertz Bankruptcy for Indian Bankruptcy Law

The pandemic induced Hertz bankruptcy in the US has upended a whole lot of what we thought we knew about how to run a bankruptcy proceeding.

What we used to think

• It is optimal to complete the bankruptcy as quickly as possible. An insolvent business is like a melting ice cube that would lose all value if the bankruptcy were not sorted out very quickly. The gold standard of this approach was the Lehman bankruptcy in which the judge approved a sale agreement (filled with handwritten corrections) after midnight at the end of a chaotic day-long hearing. In India, the law mandates tight deadlines for the whole process, but it has not proved possible to adhere to them.

• The big players know best and everybody else is basically a nuisance. In India, this is written into the law where a bunch of supposedly omniscient and incorruptible “financial creditors” have complete control over the proceedings and everybody else is left to their mercy (I have blogged about this here, here, and here). In the US, this is thankfully only an unwritten law, but there is little doubt that the big distressed debt investors are in charge.

• The Absolute Priority Rule (APR) is the ideal way to distribute value: the sale proceeds or liquidation value should be distributed to creditors in the order of their seniority. This implies that the junior creditors as well as the shareholders often get wiped out. Bankruptcy courts do find ways to bypass the APR, but, to a first approximation, it more or less determines the allocation of value. In India, the APR is twisted to prioritize financial creditors over operational creditors, but in that modified form, it holds sway.

What Hertz taught us

Hertz reminds us that there are many exceptions to the received wisdom that guides our thinking and statutes about bankruptcy.

• Hertz is likely to realize substantial value only because the bankruptcy court has run the proceedings at a leisurely pace allowing a sequence of ever higher bids to emerge as the pandemic abated. In some ways, this was an accident caused by the unplanned bankruptcy filing that was not accompanied by a Debtor in Possession (DIP) financing package, but it is at least partly due to the incessant prodding by the shareholders’ committee.

• The retail shareholders who bought Hertz stock after it filed for bankruptcy were ridiculed at the time, but they now seem to have been at least partly right. The latest bids show that the shareholders will get some payout in bankruptcy after all. Some commentators have even compared the retail shareholders’ optimism to Bill Ackman’s legendary exploits during the General Growth Properties (GGP) bankruptcy.

• Some scholars are now arguing that the Hertz bankruptcy exposes problems with the Absolute Priority Rule and that a Relative Priority Rule makes more sense. Casey and Macey argue that the option value of junior creditors and shareholders should not be extinguished as in the APR, but they should be allowed to recover that value as a payout in the bankruptcy proceeding, a stake in the reorganized firm, or a warrant that allows them to buy shares of the reorganized firm at a predetermined exercise price at a future date (see Casey, A.J. and Macey, J.C., 2020. The Hertz Maneuver (and the Limits of Bankruptcy Law). U. Chi. L. Rev. Online, p.1. available at https://lawreviewblog.uchicago.edu/2020/10/07/casey-macey-hertz/). In fact, I must acknowledge that Casey and Macey as well as Best Interest Blog inspired many of the ideas in this post.

Posted at 1:20 pm IST on Mon, 3 May 2021         permanent link

Categories: bankruptcy, investment

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Archegos and marking academic literature to reality

Last week, Bill Hwang’s family office, Archegos, imploded as it was unable to meet the margin calls emanating from steep declines in the prices of stocks that Hwang had bought with huge leverage. Mark to market is a very powerful discipline that spares nobody however rich or powerful. This ruthless discipline makes financial markets self-correcting unlike many other social institutions.

Academic literature in particular is much more insulated from the discipline of mark to reality. Old papers discredited by subsequent developments or even subsequent research continue to be cited and quoted (this is the replication crisis in economics and finance). To borrow accounting terminology, the academic community tends to carry the old literature at historical cost without sufficiently stringent periodic impairment tests.

There is a large stream of finance and accounting literature which is probably badly impaired by last week’s developments. I refer to the literature that uses percentage of institutional shareholding in a company as a proxy for various things including corporate governance. What we are learning now is that Archegos used over the counter derivatives like swaps and contracts for differences to invest in a range of companies with very high leverage. The banks who sold these derivatives to Archegos bought shares in the companies to hedge the derivatives that they had sold. The shareholding pattern of these companies would then show the Archegos counterparties (banks) as the principal shareholders of these companies though in economic terms, the real owner of the shares was Archegos. Media reports suggest that this includes companies which were targeted by short sellers (and presumably had corporate governance concerns).

In the case of these companies with possibly dubious corporate governance, academics and investors might have been reassured on observing that say two-thirds of the shares were owned by institutions without realizing that much of the holding was the family office of a person who had committed insider trading. I think this is another illustration of Goodhart’s law: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” The lesson that the academic literature must learn from that law is that the longer established a proxy measure is, the more ruthlessly one must apply an impairment test and mark it to reality.

Posted at 9:02 pm IST on Wed, 31 Mar 2021         permanent link

Categories: arbitrage, banks, failure, regulation

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Stock Exchange Outages

A month ago, the National Stock Exchange (NSE), India’s largest stock exchange, suffered a software glitch and suspended trading about four hours prior to the scheduled end of the trading session. As the clock ticked close to the scheduled end of the trading day, there was no news about resumption of trading, and stock brokers decided to close out the outstanding positions of their clients on the other exchange (BSE) to avoid exposure to overnight price risk. About 13 minutes before scheduled close of the trading session, the NSE announced that normal market trading would resume 15 minutes after the scheduled close and would continue for 75 minutes thereafter. Yesterday, the NSE put out a self congratulatory press release providing some details of what happened on February 24, 2021. This is a vast improvement on the very limited information that they released a month ago (24th morning, 24th afternoon and 25th).

It appears that the regulators are also investigating the matter and, perhaps, much effort will be expended on apportioning blame between NSE and its various technology vendors. I wish to take a different approach here and argue that the regulators should simply lay down an downtime target. The computing industry works with Four Nines (99.99%) availability (less than an hour of downtime a year) and Five Nines (99.999%) availability (about five minutes of downtime a year). Let us assume that Five Nines is out of reach for stock exchanges and settle for Four Nines. There would then be no penalty for the first hour of downtime permitted under Four Nines and the penalty per hour thereafter would be calibrated so that the entire profits of the stock exchange are wiped out if the availability drops below Three Nines (99.9%) corresponding to a downtime of about nine hours per year.

Based on the most recent financial statements of the NSE, the penalty for that exchange would be about Rs 2.2 billion (around $30 million) per hour beyond the first hour. The penalty is designed to be large enough to ensure that the shareholders of the exchange weep when the exchange suffers an outage. They would then force the management to invest in technology, and also design management bonuses in such a way that they all get zeroed out when there is a large outage. The exchange would then negotiate large penalty clauses with their vendors so that if a telecom link fails, the telecom company pays a large penalty to the exchange. That provides the incentives to the telecom company to build redundancies. The regulators do not have to do any root cause analysis or apportion blame; they just have to collect the penalty, and use that to compensate the investors.

The other thing that the regulators need to do is to provide greater predictability about resumption of trading after a glitch. I would propose a simple set of rules here:

• If an exchange has suffered an outage and has not resumed trading one hour before the scheduled end of the trading session, all other exchanges (which have not suffered an outage) would extend their trading session by two hours automatically.
• If the exchange suffering the outage is able to resume trading not later than half an hour after the regular closing time, its trading session will also extend two hours beyond the regular closing time.
• If an exchange does not resume trading even half an hour after the scheduled closing time, it is not permitted to resume trading that day.

Stock exchange software glitches have been a favourite topic on this blog as long back as fifteen years ago and I suspect that they will continue to provide material for this blog for many, many years to come.

Posted at 5:07 pm IST on Tue, 23 Mar 2021         permanent link

Categories: exchanges, regulation, technology

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Does Gamestop have a negative beta?

TL;DR: No!

The internet is a wonderful place: it knows that I have posted on Zoom’s negative beta and it also knows that I have posted on Gamestop and r/wallstreetbets. So it quite correctly concludes that I would have some interest in whether Gamestop has a negative beta. Yesterday, I received a number of comments on my blog on this question and my blog post also got referenced at r/GME. According to r/GME, several commercial sources (Bloomberg, Financial Times, Nasdaq) that provide beta estimates are reporting negative betas for Gamestop (GME).

I began by running an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression of GME returns on the S&P 500 returns. Using data from the beginning of the year till March 16, I obtained a large negative beta which is statistically significant at the 1% level. (If you wish to replicate the following results, you can download the data and the R code from my website).

             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)   
beta        -10.54182    3.84200  -2.744  0.00851

The next step is to look at the scatter plot below which shows points all over the space, but does give a visual impression of a negative slope. But if one looks more closely, it is apparent that the visual impression is due to the two extreme points: one point at the top left corner showing that GME’s biggest positive return this year came on a day that the market was down, and the other point towards the bottom right showing that GME’s biggest negative return came on a day that the market was up. These two extreme points stand out in the plot and the human eye joins them to get a negative slope. If you block these two dots with your fingers and look at the plot again, you will see a flat line.

Like the human eye, least squares regression is also quite sensitive to extreme observations, and that might contaminate the OLS estimate. So, I ran the regression again after dropping these two dates (January 27, 2021 and February 2, 2021). The beta is no longer statistically significant at even the 10% level. While the point estimate is hugely negative (-5), its standard error is of the same order.

             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)   
beta        -4.97122    3.62363  -1.372    0.177

However, dropping two observations arbitrarily is not a proper way to answer the question. So I ran the regression again on the full data (without dropping any observations), but using statistical methods that are less sensitive to outliers. The simplest and perhaps best way is to use least absolute deviation (LAD) estimation which minimizes the absolute values of the errors instead of minimizing the squared errors (squaring emphasizes large values and therefore gives undue influence to the outliers). The beta is now even less statistically significant: the point estimate has come down and the standard error has gone up.

             Estimate Std.Error Z value p-value   
beta        -2.7999   5.0462   -0.5548  0.5790

Another alternative is to retain least squares but use a robust regression that limits the influence of outliers. Using the bisquare weighting method of robust regression, provides an even smaller estimate of beta that is again not statistically significant.

            Value   Std. Error t value
beta        -1.5378  2.3029    -0.6678

Commercial beta providers use a standard statistical procedure on thousands of stocks and have neither the incentive nor the resources to think carefully about the specifics of any situation. Fortunately, each of us now has the resources to adopt a DIY approach when something appears amiss. Data is freely available on the internet, and R is a fantastic open source programming language with packages for almost any statistical procedure that we might want to use.

Posted at 2:47 pm IST on Wed, 17 Mar 2021         permanent link

Categories: CAPM, investment, market efficiency

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The rationality of r/wallstreetbets

Much has been written about how a group of investors participating in the sub-reddit r/wallstreetbets has caused a surge in the prices of stocks like GameStop that are not justified by fundamentals. I spent a fair amount of time reading the material that is posted on that forum and am convinced that most of these Redditors are perfectly rational and disciplined investors, and have no delusions about the fundamentals of the company.

Rationality in economics requires utility maximization, but does not constrain the nature of that utility function. It does not demand that the goals be rational as perceived by somebody else. Rationality of goals is the province of religion and philosophy: for example, Plato’s Form of the Good, Aristotle’s Highest Good, Hinduism’s four proper goals (puruṣārthas), and Buddhism’s right aspiration (sammā-saṅkappa). Economics concerns itself only with the efficient attainment of whatever goals the individual has. Even the Stigler-Becker maximalist view of economics (Stigler, G.J. and Becker, G.S., 1977. De gustibus non est disputandum. The American Economic Review, 67(2), pp.76-90) does not seek to impose our goals on anybody else, and does not require that the goals be pecuniary in nature (consider, for example, the Stigler-Becker discussion about music appreciation).

It is perfectly consistent with economic rationality for a person to buy a Tesla car as a status symbol and not as a means of going from A to B. Equally, it is perfectly consistent with economic rationality for a person to buy a Tesla share as a status symbol and not as a means of earning dividends or capital gains. Buddha and Aristotle might take a dim view of such status symbols, but the economist has no quarrel with them.

It is in this light that I find the Redditors at r/wallstreetbets to be highly rational. There is a clear understanding and Stoic acceptance of the consequences of their investment decisions. In this sense, there is greater awareness and understanding than in much of mainstream finance. When Redditors knowingly pay prices far beyond what is justified by fundamentals in the pursuit of non pecuniary goals, they are only indulging in a more extreme form of the behaviour of an environment conscious investor who knowingly buys a green bond at a low yield.

There is overwhelming evidence throughout r/wallstreetbets that these Redditors are focused on non pecuniary goals:

TL;DR: This sub was created to lose money.

/r/wallstreetbets is a community for making money and being amused while doing it. Or, realistically, a place to come and upvote memes when your portfolio is down.

Yo, health check time: Get proper sleep, Eat proper food, Stretch occasionally, HYDRATE. I’m sure we’ve all been glued to our screens all week, but please make sure you take care of yourselves.

There is a crystal clear understanding that most trades will lose money:

Buy High Sell low - what you do as a newcomer.

First one is free - A phenomena where you are so retarded and don’t know what the [expletive deleted] your doing you somehow make money on your first trade.

… if you don’t know any of this there is really no reason for you to be throwing 10k at weeklies you’ll lose 99% of the time.

We don’t have billionaires to bail us out when we mess up our portfolio risk and a position goes against us. We can’t go on TV and make attempts to manipulate millions to take our side of the trade. If we mess up as bad as they did, we’re wiped out, have to start from scratch and are back to giving handjobs behind the dumpster at Wendy’s.

… and also for the most part, they’re playing with their own money that they can actually afford to lose even if it hurts for a year or two.

Options are like lottery tickets in that you can pay a flat price for a defined bet that will expire at some point.

Indeed mainstream regulators could borrow some ideas from r/wallstreetbets on how to disclose risk factors in an offer document. When a risky company does an IPO, a prominent disclosure on the front page “This IPO was created for you to lose money” would be far better than the pages and pages of unintelligible risk factors that nobody reads.

Posted at 8:19 pm IST on Sun, 31 Jan 2021         permanent link

Categories: investment, market efficiency

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SPACs and Capital Structure Arbitrage

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) have become quite popular recently as an attractive alternative to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) for many startups trying to go public. Instead of going through the tortuous process of an IPO, the startup just merges into a SPAC which is already listed. The SPAC itself would of course have done an IPO, but at that time it would not have had any business of its own, and would have gone public with only the intention of finding a target to take public through the merger. Both seasoned investors and researchers take a dim view of this vehicle. Last year, Michael Klausner and Michael Ohlrogge wrote a comprehensive paper (A Sober Look at SPACs) documenting how bad SPACs were for investors that choose to stay invested at the time of the merger. Smart investors avoid losses by bailing out before the merger, and the biggest and smartest investors make money by sponsoring SPACs and collecting various fees for their effort.

As I kept thinking about the SPAC structure, it occurred to me that at the heart of it is a capital structure arbitrage by smart investors at the cost of naive investors. The capital structure of the SPAC prior to its merger consists of shares and warrants. However, in economic terms, the share is actually a bond because at the time of the merger, the shareholders are allowed to redeem and get back their investment with interest. It is the warrant that is the true equity. If the share were treated as equity, it would have a lot of option value arising from the possibility that the SPAC might find a good merger candidate, and the greater the volatility, the greater the option value. A part of the upside (option value) would rest with the warrants. But if the shares are really bonds, then all the option value resides in the warrants which are the true equity. Naive investors are perhaps misled by the terminology, and think of the share as equity rather than a bond; hence, they ascribe a significant part of the option value to the shares. Based on this perception, they perhaps sell the detachable warrants too cheap, and hold on to the equity.

From the perspective of capital structure arbitrage, this is a simple mispricing of volatility between the two instruments. Volatility is underpriced in the warrants because only a part of the asset volatility is ascribed to it. At the same time, volatility is overpriced in the shares since a lot of volatility (that rightfully belongs to the warrant) is wrongly ascribed to the share. One way for smart investors in SPACs to exploit this disconnect is to sell (or redeem) the share and hold onto the warrant, while naive investors hold on to the share and possibly sell the warrant.

Capital structure arbitrage suggests a different (smarter?) way to do this trade. If at bottom, the SPAC conundrum is a mispricing of the same asset volatility in two markets, then capital structure arbitrage would seek to buy volatility where it is cheap and sell it where it is expensive. In other words, buy warrants (cheap volatility) and sell straddles on the share (expensive volatility). At least some smart investors seem to be doing this. A recent post on Seeking Alpha mentions all three elements of the capital structure arbitrage trade: (a) sell puts on the share, (b) write calls on the share and (c) buy warrants. But because the post treats each as a standalone trade (possibly applied to different SPACs), it does not see them as a single capital structure arbitrage. Or perhaps, finance professors like me tend to see capital structure arbitrage everywhere.

Posted at 4:51 pm IST on Thu, 14 Jan 2021         permanent link

Categories: leverage

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Disappointing Investigation Report on London Capital & Finance

Earlier this month, the United Kingdom Treasury published the Report of the Independent Investigation into the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA’s) Regulation of London Capital & Finance (LCF). I read it with high expectations, but must say I found it deeply disappointing. I take perverse pleasure in reading investigation reports into frauds and disasters around the world (so long as they are in English). Beginning with Enron nearly two decades ago, there have been no dearth of such high quality reports except in my own country where unbiased factual post mortem reports are quite rare. So it was with much anticipation that I read the report on LCF which involved a number of novel issues about the risk posed by unregulated businesses carried out by regulated entities. Unfortunately, the Investigation Report did not meet my expectations: instead of providing an unbiased and dispassionate analysis of what happened, it indulges in indiscriminate and often unwarranted criticism of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). In the process, the report very quickly loses all credibility.

The LCF debacle is described well in the report of the Joint Administrators under the Insolvency Act from which this paragraph is drawn. LCF was set up in 2012 as a commercial finance provider to UK companies. From 2013, the Company sold mini-bonds, with trading significantly increasing from 2015 onwards. LCF was granted “ISA Manager” status by the UK taxation authorities (HMRC) in 2017, and LCF started selling its mini bonds under this rubric. (The necessary requirements to qualify for ISA Manager status are fairly limited; it is not a rigorous application process; and ISA Managers are not routinely monitored by HMRC). About 11,500 bond holders invested in excess of £237m in LCF mini bonds. The vast majority of LCF’s assets are the loans made to a number of borrowers a large number of whom do not appear to have sufficient assets with which to repay LCF. At present the Administrators estimate a return to the Bondholders from the assets of the Company of as low as 20% of their investment.

It is evident from the above that the most important issue in the LCF debacle is a failure of regulation rather than supervision. In the UK, mini bonds (illiquid debt securities marketed to retail investors) are subject to very limited regulation unlike in many other countries. (In India, for example, regulations on private placement of securities, collective investment schemes and acceptance of deposits severely restrict marketing of such instruments to retail investors). To compound the problem, the UK allows mini bonds to be held in an Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA). ISAs (Individual Savings Accounts) are popular tax sheltered investment vehicles for retail investors. The UK has taken a conscious decision to allow these high risk products to be sold to retail investors in the belief that the benefits in terms of innovation and financing for small enterprises outweigh the investor protection risks. While cash ISAs and Stock and Share ISAs are eligible for the UK’s deposit insurance and investor compensation scheme (FSCS), IFISAs are not eligible for this cover. Many investors may think that ISAs are regulated from a consumer protection perspective, but the UK tax department thinks of approval of ISAs as purely a taxation issue. To make matters worse, the UK has had extremely low interest rates ever since the Global Financial Crisis, and yield hungry investors have been attracted to highly risky mini bonds especially when they are marketed to retail investors under the veneer of a quasi regulated product - the IFISA. After the LCF debacle, some regulatory steps have been taken to alleviate this problem.

The Investigation Report is concerned about supervision more than regulation, and here the key issue is the regulatory perimeter issue: when an entity carries out a regulated business and an unregulated business, to what extent should the regulators examine the unregulated business. There are some financial businesses like banking where there is intrusive regulation of the unregulated business (the bank holding company). But what should the regulatory stance be on small regulated entities that carry out very limited regulated businesses (for example, confined mainly to financial marketing)? The Investigation Report simply points to the regulatory powers of the FCA to look at the unregulated business, and blithely asserts that the FCA should have been doing this routinely. This is unrealistic and would confer excessive and unacceptable powers to the financial regulators that would make them overlords of the entire society. Imagine that the publisher of the largest circulation newspaper in the country also publishes an investment newsletter that could be construed as financial promotions and is therefore regulated by the financial regulators. Do we want the regulator to have the power to take some regulatory action because it does not like the editorial stance of the newspaper? If you think that I am insane to consider such possibilities, you should examine the criminal prosecution that German financial regulators launched against two Financial Times journalists for its reporting on the Wirecard fraud. The Investigation Report does not reveal any such nuanced understanding and therefore represents a missed opportunity to improve our perspective on such matters.

Since the issuance of mini bonds is itself not a regulated activity, the role of the FCA is mainly in the area of the marketing of the bonds by LCF as a regulated entity authorized to carry on credit broking and some corporate finance activities. I would have expected the Investigation Report to focus on whether the FCA monitored LCF’s marketing (financial promotions) adequately. The Investigation Report documents that FCA received a few complaints on this, and in each instance, the FCA required changes in the website to conform to the FCA requirements. In my understanding, it is quite common for regulators worldwide to require changes in the financial promotions ranging from the font size and placement of a statement to changes in wordings to more substantive issues. The question that is of interest is where did LCF breaches lie on this spectrum (some of them were clearly technical breaches) and how did the frequency of serious breaches compare with that of other entities of similar size that the FCA regulates. Unfortunately, the Investigation Report does not provide an adequate analysis of this matter, other than saying that repeat breaches should have led to severe actions including an outright ban on LCF. That is not how regulation works or is expected to work anywhere in the world.

But these two inadequacies of analysis are not the main grounds for my disappointment with the Investigation Report. What troubled me is the repeated instances of what struck me as prima facie evidence of bias. At first, I brushed these aside and kept reading the report with an open mind, but slowly, the indicia of bias kept piling up and I began to question the objectivity and credibility of the report. At every twist and turn, wherever there was a grey area, the Investigation Report unfailingly ended up resolving this against the FCA. In the process, the credibility of the report was eroded bit by bit. By the time, I reached the end, the credibility of the report had been completely destroyed.

One of the most glaring examples of apparent bias is the discussion about a letter purported to have been sent by one Liversidge to the FCA. The only evidence for this is the statement by Liversidge that he did post the letter. Detailed search of all records at the FCA failed to find any evidence that the letter was in fact received by the FCA. One of the first things that is taught in all basic courses on logic is that it is impossible to prove a negative statement (like the statement that the letter was not received) and that is essentially what the FCA quite honestly told the Investigation Team. The Investigation Report first states that whether this letter was received or not is not relevant to the Investigation. That should have been the end of the matter. But then it goes on to make the statement that “if it had been incumbent on the Investigation to have reached a decision on this point, it would have concluded on the balance of probabilities that the Liversidge Letter was received by the FCA”. This is unreasonable in the extreme: there is no evidence other than the sender’s testimony that the letter was sent at all (let alone received), while there is some evidence that it was not received. The balance of probabilities clearly points the other way.

The Report goes to great lengths to criticize the FCA for the extended timelines of the DES programme which attempted a very significant transformation in the structure, the governance, the systems, the processes, the risk frameworks of supervision at the FCA. This was initiated around end of 2016 or early 2017 with a target completion date of March 2018, but was concluded only by December 2018. Having been involved in exercises of this kind in many organizations, I think spending a couple of years to accomplish something like this is quite reasonable (In fact it strikes me as a rather aggressive timeline). The original timeline of March 2018 appears to me to have been utterly unrealistic. The Investigation Report suggests that the FCA should instead have resorted to some “quick wins, reviews or easy fixes”. I think this suggestion is utterly misguided. “Easy fixes” is precisely the kind of thing that an organization should not do under such conditions. I think it is to the credit of the FCA Board that it did not undertake such a stupid course of action.

Actually, the FCA discovered the fraud on its own from two different angles. First, LCF filed a prospectus with the FCA and the Listing Team had a number of serious concerns on this. Second, during the course of a review of an external database (only accessible to a limited group within the FCA and on strict conditions of use) concerned with another firm, the Intelligence Team found some information on LCF and immediately escalated the matter. While the Investigation Report commends these actions, it states that if other employees at the FCA had similar levels of expertise in understanding financial statements, they would have uncovered the fraud earlier. I was aghast on reading this. Expertise in financial statements is a highly sought skill that is in short supply in the market. That the FCA manages to hire people with that skill in some critical departments is great. To expect that people in the call centre or those running authorizations would have this skill is absurd. If people with such skills thought that they may be transferred to such postings, they would probably not join the FCA in the first place.

The Investigation Report finds fault with the FCA for giving LCF permissions to carry out regulated businesses that it did not in fact use. I do not find this unusual at all. To give an analogy, the objects clause in the corporate charter (Memorandum of Association) typically contains a lot of things that the company has no intention of undertaking; it includes these things because of the severe consequences of finding that the company does not have the power under its charter to do something that has suddenly become desirable. Similarly, a regulated business would often want to have a range of regulatory authorizations that it does not expect to use. All the more so because regulators often take an restrictive view of things and take companies to task for all kinds of technical violations. For example, a stock broker who provides only execution services might want to have an advisory licence to guard against the risk that some incidental service that it provides could be regarded as advisory. Similarly, an advisory firm might worry that a minor service like collecting a document from the customer and delivering it to a stock broker might be interpreted as going beyond purely advisory services. That LCF obtained a licence but did not carry out the regulated activity is not in my view a red flag at all. The Investigation Report makes a song and dance about this despite having observed one fact that demonstrates its triviality. The FCA created a system that produced an automated alert whenever a firm did not generate income from regulated activities. Because of the high volume of automated alerts that were created as a result of this, the FCA had to allow these alerts to be closed without review!

It is indeed distressing that this deeply flawed report is all that we will ever get on this episode which raises so many interesting regulatory issues of interest across the world.

Posted at 9:38 pm IST on Tue, 29 Dec 2020         permanent link

Categories: bankruptcy, failure, fraud, investigation

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The value of financial centres redux

When I started this blog over 15 years ago, one of my earliest posts was entitled Are Financial Centres Worthwhile? The conclusion was that though the annual benefits from a financial centre appear to be meagre, they may perhaps be worthwhile because these benefits continue for a very long time as leading centres retain their competitive advantage for centuries. At least, most countries seemed to think so as they all eagerly tried to promote financial centres within their territories. But that was before (a) the Global Financial Crisis and (b) the current process of deglobalization.

Yesterday, the United Kingdom finalized the Brexit deal with the European Union, and the UK government rejoiced that they had got a trade deal without surrendering too much of their sovereignty. There was no regret about there being no deal for financial services. The UK seems quite willing to impair London as a financial centre in the pursuit of its political goals. China seems to be going further when it comes to Hong Kong. It has been willing to do things that would damage Hong Kong to a much greater extent than Brexit would damage London. Again political considerations have been paramount.

Decades ago, both these countries looked at financial centres very differently. After World War I, the UK inflicted massive pain on its economy to return to the gold standard at the pre-war parity. In some sense, the best interests of London prevailed over the prosperity of the rest of the country. Similarly during the Asian Crisis when Hong Kong’s currency peg to the US dollar seemed to be on the verge of collapse, then Chinese Zhu Rongji declared at a press conference that Beijing would “spare no efforts to maintain the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong and to safeguard the peg of the Hong Kong dollar to the U.S. dollar at any cost” (emphasis added). The major elements of that “at any cost” promise were (a) the tacit commitment of the mainland’s foreign exchange reserves to the defence of the Hong Kong peg, and (b) the decision not to devalue the renminbi when devalations across East Asia were posing a severe competitive threat to China. In some sense, the best interests of Hong Kong prevailed over the prosperity of the mainland.

Clearly, times have changed. The experience of Iceland and Ireland during the Global Financial Crisis demonstrated that a major financial centre was a huge contingent liability that could threaten the solvency of the nation itself. Switzerland was among the first to see the writing on the wall; it forced its banks to downsize by imposing punitive capital requirements. Other countries are coming to terms with the same problem. Deglobalization adds to the disillusionment about financial centres.

Today, countries are eager to become technology centres rather than financial centres. How that infatuation will end, only time will tell.

Posted at 7:43 pm IST on Fri, 25 Dec 2020         permanent link

Categories: international finance

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BIS on Bank of Amsterdam: Pot calling the kettle black

Jon Frost, Hyun Song Shin and Peter Wierts at the Bank for International Settlements wrote a paper last month An early stablecoin? The Bank of Amsterdam and the governance of money which disparages past models of (proto) central banking and new incipient forms of central banking to conclude that the modern central bank is the only worthwhile model. They criticize the Bank of Amsterdam (1609–1820) for its flawed governance that led to its eventual failure, and extrapolate from that to dismiss newly emerging stablecoins which (according to Frost, Shin and Wierts) share the same governance problems. The authors think that, by contrast, modern central banks have the right governance structures and right fiscal backstops.

My biggest grouse with this paper is that if we want to criticize an institution that thrived for 170 years and survived for two centuries, we must compare it against an institution that has been successful for even longer. Unfortunately, I am not aware of even one major central bank today that has been successful for the last 100 years let alone 170 years:

• A large number (perhaps the majority) of modern central banks are less than a century old.
• Most older central banks failed in the 1930s when they abandoned the gold standard and defaulted on their convertibility promises.
• Some old central banks that were not directly on the gold standard (but were pegged to the dollar or the pound) failed when they suspended the peg in the 1930s or during or after the Second World War and did not return to the pre-war parities.

It appears to me to be the height of hubris for an association of failed central banks and central banks that are too young to have experienced failure to point fingers at the Bank of Amsterdam whose track record for 170 years was far better than that of any of these banks. In fact, I think that the Bank of Amsterdam’s track record even at the point of failure was better than the stated goal of most central banks today. The best central banks currently target an annual inflation rate of 2%. Over a period of 200 years, this inflation rate will lead to a 98% loss of purchasing power: 200 years from now, a dollar would be worth only 2¢ in today’s money (1.02^− 200 ≈ 0.02). By contrast, at the point when the French revolutionary armies invaded the Netherlands in 1795, and the true state of the balance sheet of the Bank of Amsterdam was revealed, the money issued by the Bank of Amsterdam fell to a 30% discount to gold (Frost, Shin and Wierts, page 24). In other words, over the two centuries of its existence, the money issued by the Bank of Amsterdam lost only 30% of its value for an annual depreciation of less than 0.2% (1.002^{1609 − 1795} ≈ 0.7). At the point of failure, the performance of the Bank of Amsterdam was equivalent to an annual inflation rate one-tenth that of what the best central banks promise today.

If modern central bankers think that they are better than the Bank of Amsterdam (either in its heyday, or on average over its entire life including the point of failure), they need to introspect long and hard whether they suffer from excessive over confidence or amnesia.

Posted at 6:20 pm IST on Thu, 17 Dec 2020         permanent link

Categories: crisis, financial history

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Bankruptcy hardball and bank dividends

When I read the recent BIS working paper Low price-to-book ratios and bank dividend payout policies by Leonardo Gambacorta, Tommaso Oliviero and Hyun Song Shin, I was immediately reminded of the paper Bankruptcy hardball (Ellias and Stark (2020), Calif. L. Rev., 108, p.745) though that is not how Gambacorta, Oliviero and Shin analyse the issue.

Ellias and Stark documented the tendency of distressed firms to declare dividends or otherwise move assets out of reach of the creditors for the benefit of shareholders. This strategy which they called bankruptcy hardball is most closely associated with private equity owners.

As I reflected on the Gambacorta, Oliviero and Shin paper, it struck me that what makes bankruptcy hardball attractive is the high level of leverage rather than private equity ownership. If the assets are worth 100 and debt is 80% of assets (so that equity is 20%), then shifting 10 of assets to the shareholders reduces the value of debt only by 12.5% but increases the value of the shareholders by 50%. If debt is 90% of assets, then the same shift of 10 would be only a 11% loss to lenders but a 100% gain to shareholders. Since private equity is characterized by high leverage, the incentives are much greater in their case. On the verge of bankruptcy, it is true that the leverage would shoot up for all companies (as the equity becomes close to worthless), and it might appear that every firm can play hardball. However, the tactics are more likely to survive legal challenges when they are implemented at a time when the company appears to be solvent, and ideally years before a bankruptcy filing. So the greatest opportunity to play hardball is for those companies that have high levels of leverage in normal times when they are still notionally solvent but possibly distressed.

Apart from firms owned by private equity, there is another example of a business with high levels of leverage in normal times - banking. Banks typically operate with leverage levels that exceed that of typical private equity owned businesses. One would therefore expect banks to also play the hardball game - pay large dividends when they are distressed but still notionally solvent. And that is what Gambacorta, Oliviero and Shin find.

Their key finding is that banks with low Price to Book ratio (the ratio of the market price of the share to the book value per share) tend to pay higher dividends and this tendency becomes even more pronounced when the Price to Book ratio drops below 0.7. Price to Book has been associated with financial distress in the finance literature since the original papers by Fama and French. But the link is even stronger in banking where a low price to book ratio is often driven by the market’s belief that the asset quality of the bank is a lot worse than the accounting statements indicate. In other words, while for non financial companies, a low price to book reflects low profitability, for banks, it often indicates that book equity is overstated (due to hidden bad loans) and the capital adequacy of the bank is a lot worse than what the accounting statements suggest. Price to book is therefore an even more direct indicator of distress for banks than for non financial companies.

For a bank which is already highly levered and whose true leverage is even higher because of overvalued assets, dividends become an attractive device to transfer value to shareholders from creditors. The fact that the bank meets the capital adequacy standards set by the regulators (aided by overvaluation of assets) acts as a cover for the hardball tactic. The fact that many creditors (especially the depositors) are protected by deposit insurance means that creditor resistance is muted.

Gambacorta, Oliviero and Shin talk about the wider social benefits of curtailing dividends (increasing lending capacity), but there is a more direct corporate governance and prudential regulation argument for doing so. Regulators have already recognized the role of market discipline in regulating banks (Pillar 3 of the Basel framework). From this it is a short step to linking dividend and other capital distributions to a market signal (price to book ratio).

Posted at 5:46 pm IST on Thu, 10 Dec 2020         permanent link

Categories: bankruptcy, corporate governance

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Negative beta stocks: The case of Zoom

One of the questions that comes up every time I teach the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) in a basic finance course is whether there are any negative beta stocks, and if so what would be their expected return. My standard answer has been that negative beta stocks are a theoretical possibility but possibly non existent in practice. Every time I have found a negative beta in practice, there was either a data error or the sample size was too small for the negative beta to be statistically significant. I would also often joke that a bankruptcy law firm would possibly have a negative beta, but fortunately or unfortunately, such firms are typically not listed. (The answer to the second part of the question is easier, if the beta is negative, the expected return is less than the risk free because it hedges the risk of the risk of the portfolio and one is willing to pay for this hedging benefit).

But now there is an interesting real life case of a negative beta stock: Zoom Video Communications, Inc. Not only is this a large company by market capitalization, but it is also a familiar company with so many online classes taking place on Zoom. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a plausible argument has been going round why Zoom should have a negative beta. The argument is that if the pandemic rages, the economy collapses while Zoom soars, and if the pandemic retreats, the economy recovers, and people go back to face to face meetings, and the Zoom boom is over.

Interestingly, the data supports this nice theory:

• The US declared Covid-19 to be a national emergency on March 13, 2020 a couple of days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it to be a global pandemic. From March 13, 2020 till August 21, 2020, Zoom has a beta of -0.39, and it is statistically significant (t-statistic is -2.09, and p-value is 3.97%). All betas in this post are relative to the S&P 500 index.
• This was a dramatic change from the pre-pandemic days. In the period from its IPO in April 2019 till the end of 2019, Zoom had a beta of 1.81 (with a t-statistic in excess of 5 and a p-value less than 0.01%). (The numbers are similar if we extend the end date till the Italian lockdown on February 23, 2020). In a few weeks, the high beta stock became a negative beta stock.
• More interestingly, Zoom appears to be going back to a high positive beta stock once again. I used July 1, 2020 as a break point and obtained the following results for two sub-periods since the pandemic began.
• March 13, 2020 to June 30, 2020: beta is -0.43, t-statistic is -2.21 and p-value is 2.9%.
• July 1, 2020 to August 21, 2020: beta is 2.66, t-statistic is 2.41 and p-value is 3.7%.

A better example of beta changing dramatically (going from around two to negative and then back to around two) within a few months without any change in the business mix of the company would be hard to find.

Negative betas may be a once in a 100-year event (the last global pandemic of comparable severity was in 1918), but the Zoom example illustrates the importance of estimating betas more carefully using shrinkage estimators and Bayesian methods as I explained in detail in a blog post ten years ago.

Posted at 5:37 pm IST on Sun, 23 Aug 2020         permanent link

Categories: CAPM

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Bankruptcy and sovereign backstops during crises

During the difficult economic situation of the last couple of years in India, I have been emphasizing two things:

1. Bankruptcy is a form of protection for firms that are unable to pay their debts on time, and not a punishment for past sins. As such, during bad times, we need a working bankruptcy law and not a suspension of the bankruptcy process. My blog post two months ago argued this in detail.

2. Only the sovereign can absorb tail risks in crisis situations, and second loss instruments are the mechanism through which the government can provide this protection. I have proposed this several times during the last year: Recapitalizing the financial sector this April, Structuring the Yes Bank rescue this March and Real Estate and Infrastructure Resolution last September.

Last week, a leading US bankruptcy scholar, Adam Levitin, along with two co-authors published a white paper describing how the US government should respond to economic crises like Covid-19. (Adam Levitin’s book “Business Bankruptcy: Financial Restructuring and Modern Commercial Markets” is the best book on financial restructuring that I have seen).

When it comes to assisting large US firms, the core of Levitin’s proposal is a combination of bankruptcy restructuring and sovereign second loss backstop.

a capital injection in the form of preferred stock, conditioned upon the cancellation of existing common equity interests and dollar-matched conversion of unsecured debt to new common equity interests

This is a very simple bankruptcy regime: existing shareholders are wiped out, creditors become owners and therefore bear first dollar of loss, and the sovereign provides second loss protection through the preferred stock. If the company and its stakeholders do not like this standardized regime, they can resort to the normal bankruptcy process (Chapter 11) which works in the US even in crisis times like these (unlike in India).

Posted at 6:52 pm IST on Mon, 6 Jul 2020         permanent link

Categories: bankruptcy, crisis

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Necro-bumped some old posts by mistake

Those of you who are following me on Twitter or Facebook might have observed some old posts of almost a decade ago pop up as new posts. This necro-bumping happened by mistake as I updated a large number of posts from 2005 to 2015 to change internal URLs to reflect a domain name change that took place some five years ago. I was informed that my Institute might choose not to retain the old domain name for much longer and that it was prudent to update the old links. I did not realize that the plugins that I use for linking my blog to Twitter and Facebook treat updated posts as new posts and post them as such. Those who rely on RSS and Atom feeds would not have seen any problem as these stone age tools are much smarter than the modern social media plugins.

The moment I realized what was happening, I disabled the Twitter and Facebook plugins before editing the rest of the posts, and re-enabled the plugin at the end.

Posted at 7:53 pm IST on Mon, 15 Jun 2020         permanent link

Categories: miscellaneous

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Going concern assessment in the Covid-19 environment

My colleague, Prof. Sobhesh Kumar Agarwalla, and I wrote a piece in the Hindu BusinessLine last Friday about Going Concern assessment in the Covid-19 environment. We argue that:

Rather than leave it to the judgment of the management and auditors, it would be better if companies made assessments based on a common template of assumptions laid down by the regulators

The article is reproduced below:

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The going concern concept requires that the financial statements of a company must normally be prepared under the assumption that the business will continue to operate and will not be liquidated. Therefore, the going concern value of a business is typically much higher than the breakup or liquidation value. However, this assumption has to be abandoned if there is significant doubt about the entity’s ability to continue as a going concern.

Management must make the going concern assessment based not only on information that exists on the balance-sheet date but events occurring after the balance-sheet date for conditions existing at the balance-sheet date (Ind AS 4). As Covid-19 was declared as a global pandemic by the WHO before March 31, 2020, the financial reports prepared for the financial year 2019-20 should reflect a post-Covid going concern assumption.

While the management is primarily responsible for the going concern assessment, the auditors are required to provide their opinion by applying professional judgment and professional scepticism based on the management’s representations and their independent assessment. A modified opinion is warranted if the management fails to recognise the financial impact of Covid-19 appropriately.

While assessing the going concern assumption, the management (and the auditor) will have to consider all available information and make reasonable estimates and judgments about current and future profitability and cash flows, liquidity and solvency issues like debt repayment schedules, borrowing and refinancing capabilities, asset valuation, financial conditions of key customers and suppliers, etc. (Ind AS 1).

Some of the factors are internal to the organisation, and the management is probably better placed than anybody else to assess these. However, neither the management nor the auditors have any particular expertise in making judgments about macroeconomic and public health factors like the lingering impact of Covid-19.

We believe that it would be dysfunctional to leave the post-Covid going concern assessment to the management and auditors. First, different companies (and auditors) will make different assumptions about the future evolution of the pandemic, and produce completely different financial assessments for companies whose economic position might be quite similar. Comparability of financial statement across companies would be fatally compromised.

Second, the preparation of financial statements and the conduct of the audit under the current environment is already quite challenging. There is no merit in wasting precious resources of both the management and the auditors on a useless debate regarding macro assumptions about which neither has any expertise.

Default assumptions

Investors and other users of financial reports would benefit from all companies making going concern assessments based on a common template of assumptions laid down by the regulators (including Ministry of Company Affairs, National Financial Reporting Authority, Reserve Bank of India, and Securities and Exchange Board of India).

Neither the management nor the auditors would be allowed to deviate from these default assumptions unless there is compelling evidence to the contrary. The management and the auditors would be shielded from liability for a wrong going concern assessment so long as this assessment was based on the default assumptions.

It might appear that we are asking the regulators to perform an impossible task of laying down default assumptions for the entire Indian business sector in an environment where the regulators themselves are overburdened and struggling to perform their normal functions. However, there are simple ways of setting the default assumptions: for example, the default assumption might be that while the first quarter of 2020-21 (April-June) has been more or less wiped out, there will be a V-shaped recovery and revenues for the remaining three quarters (July-March) will be similar to the corresponding period of 2019-20 with a possible adjustment for the historical annual growth rate.

If the regulators have enough time and information, they might lay down different recovery assumptions for certain sectors. For example, the tourism and travel industry may be subjected to a more pessimistic assumption.

Standard practices

Some analysts might think that our assumptions are too crude, simplistic and optimistic, but practices similar to what we recommend are, in fact, quite standard globally. Central banks performing a stress test of all banks under a common set of assumptions about macroeconomic shocks is standard practice across the world. On Covid-19 itself, we have already seen private contracts using an approach similar to what we recommend. For example, Live Nation Entertainment renegotiated its debt covenant so that the actual EBITDA of certain quarters of 2020-21 would be replaced by that of corresponding quarters of 2019-20.

Second, in times of crisis where financial stress is widespread, some degree of regulatory forbearance is a well-established policy response, and that principle justifies a lenient assumption. Finally, nobody knows for sure what will happen, and we have to just get on with life.

Moreover, if regulators are not satisfied with a simple assumption about a common recovery curve for the entire economy or different sectors, regulators can instead specify assumptions about macroeconomic factors like GDP growth, inflation rates, interest rates, unemployment, foreign exchange rates, industrial production, crude oil prices, household consumptions and savings rates, tax rates, economic reliefs, import policy, labour laws, government grants and concessions, and require each company to turn these macro forecasts into forecasts about its revenues and cash flows.

Another issue with the going concern test is that even if a company is balance-sheet solvent, it may be cash-flow insolvent because of lack of liquidity and access to financing. The regulators must also require companies to assume that the current accommodative monetary policy and central bank liquidity support policies would continue during the forecast horizon.

The central bank may also lay down additional assumptions to be used by financial institutions to deal with issues related to collateral valuation, debt covenant requirements, and initiation of bankruptcy proceedings.

Posted at 4:58 pm IST on Mon, 18 May 2020         permanent link

Categories: accounting, bankruptcy, corporate governance

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Indian corporate bonds need a buyer and not a lender

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced yesterday that it is setting up a Rs 500 billion Special Liquidity Facility for Mutual Funds (SLF-MF). This is basically a refinance window for banks that lend to mutual funds to help them handle redemption pressures in an environment where corporate bonds are both stressed and illiquid.

I believe that SLF-MF does not solve the real problem at all, because mutual funds by their very design need to liquidate assets to meet redemption. Unlike banks and hedge funds, mutual funds are not designed to use leverage: the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Mutual Fund Regulations state:

The mutual fund shall not borrow except to meet temporary liquidity needs of the mutual funds for the purpose of repurchase, redemption of units or payment of interest or dividend to the unitholders:

Provided that the mutual fund shall not borrow more than 20 per cent of the net asset of the scheme and the duration of such a borrowing shall not exceed a period of six months.

Some mutual funds do talk and act as if the 20% limit allows them to borrow to juice up their returns or to speculate on prices rising in future. But the regulations are clear that this is not the intention, and any mutual fund that borrows for such speculative purposes is actually running a hedge fund in disguise. The proper use of borrowing is to deal with operational timing mismatches where a fund is not able to sell assets and realize the proceeds in time to meet the redemption needs.

Back in 2008, when the RBI launched a facility similar to SLF-MF during the Global Financial Crisis, I explained why mutual funds cannot borrow their way out of redemption trouble:

A mutual fund is very different from a bank. When a bank borrows to repay depositors, there is a capital cushion that can take losses on the assets side. When this capital is gone, the bank also needs to be recapitalized and cannot solve its problems by borrowing from the central bank. A mutual fund does not have any capital separate from the unit holders. This means that the only prudent way for a mutual fund to repay unit holders is by selling assets. If it borrows, then it is exposing remaining unit holders to leveraged losses.

The problem that the mutual fund industry faces today is in many ways worse than in 2008. Until Covid-19, open end debt mutual funds could offer redemption on demand to their investors because there was a liquid market for the bonds that these funds held in their portfolio. Now, the assets have become illiquid and hard to value while the investors are still able to demand instant liquidity. This mismatch can be solved only by some combination of two things: (a) the liquidity of the assets could be improved by a market maker of last resort, or (b) redemption could be restricted. The SLF-MF does neither of these, and merely postpones the problem till the maturity date of the borrowing.

Any financial crisis is ultimately resolved by allocating and absorbing losses. Everything else is a stopgap arrangement that merely postpones the day of reckoning. In times of crisis, there is sometimes merit in such postponement because it buys time for a more orderly loss allocation. But, whenever we kick the can down the road, we must ensure that by doing so we do not make matters worse in terms of making the losses bigger or making the ultimate loss allocation less fair or more difficult. The SLF-MF does not pass this test because it rewards those who redeem and penalizes those that remain in the fund (thereby incentivizing a run on all debt mutual funds):

• Those who choose not to redeem will find their mutual funds morph into leveraged hedge funds. (Some mutual funds are already seeking a relaxation of the 20% borrowing limit to 30%).
• Freed from the mark to market discipline of selling assets at market prices, mutual fund net asset values (NAVs) could become increasingly untethered from reality. In all likelihood, those who redeem will exit at an inflated valuation, thereby inflicting losses on those that remain. Sophisticated corporate houses and other smart investors who are redeeming today will get a good deal and the unsophisticated retail investors still holding on to their units will be left with all the rotten overvalued assets.

What then are the solutions to the problems of the mutual fund industry today? I will first outline three solutions that I do not recommend:

• Halt all redemption and turn the funds into listed closed end funds that investors can sell on the exchange at whatever price they fetch in a free market. This might work when the problem is confined to a handful of funds, but the problem in Indian debt mutual funds is too big for this solution. Debt mutual funds are now systemically important as the RBI implicitly recognized when it invoked its financial stability mandate to justify the SLF-MF. So this solution is not recommended.

• Provide a sovereign guarantee to all funds. The US did this during the Global Financial Crisis for Money Market Mutual Funds, but this is not a viable solution for funds with high credit risk that are at the epicentre of the crisis in India.

• The sovereign (or central bank) steps in as the buyer of last resort for corporate bonds instead of as a lender of last resort. This is a well established model that has worked very well around the world:

  • Korea implemented this solution in 1999 after the bankruptcy of several large conglomerates (Chaebol) during the Asian Crisis.

  • The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of Japan (BOJ) have been buying corporate bonds for many years now as part of their quantitative easing and they have expanded such buying significantly after Covid-19.

  • The US has created the Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility to buy corporate bonds. The US government provided $75 billion of equity for a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) which will be able to borrow from the US Fed to buy corporate bonds of up to $750 billion.

  However, in the current situation, this model creates too much of moral hazard. This is because the corporate bond markets were already under stress for business cycle and other reasons even before Covid-19. Mutual funds and their investors who took on credit risk to earn a higher return in good times should not get a free pass when things had soured even without Covid-19. That makes me hesitant to recommend this solution.

My preferred solution is for the mutual fund industry itself to create the buyer of last resort with only limited support from the sovereign. It is guided by the principle that whenever we bail out the financial sector we do so not to help the financiers but to protect the real economy which depends on a well functioning financial sector. In these troubled times, the real economy cannot afford the loss of any source of funding. This is the same principle that guided my proposal earlier this month for a preemptive recapitalization of banks and non bank finance companies.

My proposal is similar to the US Fed’s Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility mentioned above with one critical difference. Instead of the equity for the SPV coming from the government, it should come from the mutual funds themselves. When investors redeem from a mutual fund, and the fund is not able to sell bonds in the market, it can sell the bonds to the SPV at a fair value as determined by the SPV. The mutual fund will be required to contribute a percentage of the fair value as equity stake in the SPV and will receive only the balance in cash. If we follow the US and require 10% equity for the SPV, then a mutual fund selling bonds with a fair value of 100,000 to the SPV will have to contribute 10,000 towards the equity of the SPV. The SPV will use the equity of 10,000 to support 90,000 of borrowing from the RBI which allows it to pay 90,000 as the cash component of the purchase price to the mutual fund. The equity contribution of the mutual fund to the SPV has to come from the investors of the mutual fund. So an investor redeeming 100,000 from the fund would get 90,000 in cash and get the remaining 10,000 in the form of units representing the equity stake in the SPV.

This means that a large part of the credit risk of the bond remains with the redeeming investors as a whole. If the SPV ultimately realizes only 96% of the fair value of all the bonds that it bought, then its equity will come down to 6% from the original 10%. The redeeming unit holder will have got (a) 90,000 in cash and (b) shares in the SPV worth 10,000 originally, but worth only 6,000 when the SPV is wound down. The redeeming investor ends up with 96% of the original fair value of the bonds which matches the 96% ultimate realized value of the bonds. On the other hand, if the SPV realizes 103% of the fair value, then the original equity rises to 13% and the redeeming investor recovers 103,000 (90,000 in cash plus shares in the SPV worth 13,000).

Let me discuss some possible objections to the proposal:

• There would still be a large sovereign backstop in this arrangement. The central bank would lose money on its loans if the bond loses more than 10% of the (fair value) purchase price. Such a large loss on a diversified portfolio of bonds can arise only when there is a systemic economic collapse, and it is the job of the central bank and the sovereign to prevent such an economic collapse. In any case, nobody other than the sovereign can absorb this tail risk on a large scale.

• The RBI will have to lend directly to the SPV instead of indirectly via the banks (because the banks are in no position to absorb the tail risk of an economic collapse). There is no legal bar on the RBI doing such lending. Section 18(3)(c) of the RBI Act allows the RBI to lend to any person when, in the opinion of the RBI, a special occasion has arisen making it necessary or expedient that such action should be taken for the purpose of regulating credit in the interests of Indian trade, commerce, industry and agriculture. If the current situation does not warrant the use of Section 18, then that section might as well be scrapped.

  Central banks around the world have realized that as the financial sector evolves from a bank dominated system to a market dominated system, the central bank’s financial stability mandate broadens substantially. Supporting systemically important financial markets becomes as important if not more important than supporting systemically important financial institutions. As a consequence of this, the central bank has to be as much of a market maker of last resort as a lender of last resort.

• Both the SPV and the RBI will need expertise to value the bonds and analyse their risks. In the US, the Fed has hired Blackrock to provide these services and has also designed mechanisms to deal with potential conflicts of interest. Similar arrangements should be possible in India as well.

Finally the proposal reflects a realistic evaluation of the current situation:

• The mutual funds under stress today took a conscious decision to take higher credit risk to earn higher returns. In good times, investors in these funds did earn these higher returns commensurate with the risks. There is no justification for any bailout of these investors who took a wrong investment call.

• Setting aside concerns about possible mis-selling, these mutual funds were legitimate products serving legitimate investment needs. The stresses in these funds today are due to the adverse business conditions today (some of which predate Covid-19). Similar stresses are present in the banking system as well, but they are less visible there as banks do not follow mark to market accounting in their banking book.

• India needs a vibrant corporate bond market, and a vibrant mutual fund industry. From a financial stability perspective, it is important to support these systemically.

• The economic impact of Covid-19 is unknown at this point. Only the sovereign balance sheet can absorb the tail risks of such an uncertain magnitude. Fortunately, by absorbing this risk, the sovereign makes catastrophic outcomes less likely, thereby mitigating the risk that it absorbed.

Posted at 7:09 pm IST on Tue, 28 Apr 2020         permanent link

Categories: bond markets, crisis, mutual funds

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WTI crude futures in India

India’s commodity derivatives exchange, MCX trades crude oil contracts that mirror the WTI Futures contract traded at CME/NYMEX in the US. When the US contract settled at an unprecedented negative price this week (the seller had to pay the buyer to take their crude away), the Indian contract followed suit. Press reports state that brokers who had bought MCX crude futures suffered a loss of Rs 4.35 billion and have gone to court against the exchange’s decision to settle at a negative price.

I like to think that I have better things to do than take sides in this fight, but I also think that everybody involved in the Indian crude futures market has behaved recklessly. Since around mid-March, it has been clear that WTI crude in the US was experiencing extreme dislocation, and that highly perverse outcomes were likely, though nobody could have predicted the precise outcome. Prudent traders should have stopped trading the MCX crude oil futures in late March, and a prudent derivative exchange should have suspended trading in the contract in early April. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is currently overburdened with keeping the markets functional during Covid-19, but otherwise, they should have forced MCX to suspend the contract.

Unfortunately the Indian commodity derivatives ecosystem is borrowed lock, stock and barrel from the equity derivative ecosystem. Everybody thinks that a commodity is just another stock price ticker (to trade), another stock price chart (to do technical analysis) and another time series of prices (to compute VaR margins). People tend to forget that commodities are intensely physical, and, unlike stocks, do not come with limited liability. However much we may try to “financialize” and “virtualize” the commodity, its “physicality” never really goes away.

This will therefore be a long post discussing the gory details of crude oil (and WTI crude futures in particular) to explain why I think all parties involved in the MCX crude oil futures behaved recklessly this month.

Economic rationale for Indian crude oil futures

The biggest difference between a futures market and matka gambling is that the futures contract has an economic rationale: it helps economic agents to hedge risks that they are exposed to. Many entities in India are exposed to energy price risk and crude oil futures are useful to hedge that risk. Of course, the crude basket that India imports is closer to Brent crude than to WTI, but then MCX has an MOU with CME that gives them access to CME/NYMEX contracts, and that obviously determined their choice.

So long as WTI crude is highly correlated with Brent (and the Indian crude basket), the choice of underlying does not matter too much. In normal times, the correlation is high and the Indian crude oil futures serves a valuable hedging function. In abnormal times, this correlation can break down and then MCX/NYMEX WTI crude futures would cease to have an economic rationale, and its continued trading would become questionable.

Logistical constraints on WTI crude

Historically, it has been observed that there are occasions when logistical constraints create a big divergence between (a) Brent and the Indian crude basket and (b) WTI. The best known example of this was in 2011 when rising production of shale oil led to a glut of crude at Cushing, Oklahama (the delivery location for the WTI futures contract). At the peak of the dislocation in 2011, WTI crude fell to a discount of around $20 to Brent crude (in the pre-shale era, WTI traded at a premium reflecting its sweetness and lightness).

The critical difference between the two major global crude benchmarks is that Brent is a waterborne crude while WTI is a pipeline-delivered crude. Market forces will move waterborne crude from a region of excess supply to one of excess demand. There are relatively few constraints and frictions in this process of market equilibrium. Pipelines are much more rigid: they have limited capacity and fixed endpoints. A pipeline from point A to B is useless if stuff needs to be moved from A to C or from D to B. Even if the movement required is from A to B, the quantity might exceed the capacity of the pipeline and it would then of limited utility. The sea by contrast has practically unlimited transportation capacity and its directional preferences (winds and ocean currents) can be largely ignored in modern times.

The 2011 experience shows that when logistical constraints arise in landlocked WTI crude, its price diverges not just from Brent, but also from prices in the rest of the world, and indeed even from prices in the rest of the US. In the last decade, benchmarks like LLS and ASCI based on crude prices in the coastal US (Louisiana) have risen in importance. The other observation from 2011 was that refined petroleum products in the US tend to track Brent crude better than they track WTI crude when logistical constraints emerge on WTI. All of this means that WTI starts losing its economic rationale as a hedging instrument for Indian entities in such situations. The behaviour of Indian players in April 2020 needs to be evaluated against this background.

WTI Futures Contract

The WTI futures contract is physically settled: all positions outstanding at the expiry of the contract have to give/take delivery of WTI crude at Cushing, Oklahama which is a major pipeline hub of the US. The delivery procedure at CME/NYMEX reflects the rigidity of pipeline logistics:

• The seller specifies the “incoming” pipeline/storage from which delivery would be made.
• The buyer then specifies the “outgoing” pipeline/storage with access to the incoming pipeline/storage.
• Delivery tends to be spread over an entire month: an obligation to deliver 150,000 barrels in May 2020 might be met by supplying 5,000 barrels a day.
• Since the scheduling for crude oil deliveries for May is finalized no later than the 25th of April, the May futures stops trading three business days before that date to allow adequate time for this scheduling to happen.

Rolling out of WTI futures before expiry

What this means is that the only people who can afford to hold the May futures at expiry would be those who have lined up the pipelines and storage facilities at Cushing, Oklahama. Everybody else should trade out of the contract on or before the last trading session (either by closing the position or by rolling it into the next month contract). In fact, it is very risky to wait till the last trading session to exit the contract. If a buyer is trying to trade out of the contract, and other players know or suspect that the buyer does not have access to a pipeline/storage to take delivery of the crude, the sellers will try to take advantage of his predicament. The buyer’s only hope is to find a seller who does not have the crude to deliver and is equally eager to trade out of the contract. This means that prudent traders who want to square out should do so several days in advance when there is a lot of trading by hedgers and speculators who are not physical players in Cushing.

For example, USO (United States Oil), which is the largest crude oil ETF, typically starts rolling out of a contract two weeks before expiry and completely exits it one week before expiry. In fact, both the exchange and the regulator monitor large positions in the near month contract and encourage traders to reduce positions. They are much more relaxed about positions in the next month or more distant months.

The situation in March/April 2020

Early in March, when crude prices were falling due to Covid-19, Russia and Saudi Arabia held talks on cutting output to stabilize the price. When these talks failed, the Saudis (who are among the lowest cost producers in the world) responded by increasing output to crash prices and remind other oil producers of the perils of not cooperating with Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, demand collapsed as the Covid-19 situation worsened and there was a massive glut of oil worldwide. Prices fell far below what even the Saudis had anticipated, but all players hoped that the demand would bounce back as and when Covid-19 lockdowns were relaxed. The natural response was to store cheap oil so that they could be drawn down when prices rose in future.

By mid/late March, concerns were mounting that storage in Cushing was getting full. On March 19, 2020, Izabella Kaminska wrote in the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog that “in a scenario where there’s literally nowhere to put oil, it’s not inconceivable prices could go negative.” She also explained that some oilfields simply cannot be turned off during a short term glut: “temporary shutdowns pose the risk of them never being able to be revived at the same rates again.” So they would keep pumping crude even at negative prices. On March 27, 2020, Bloomberg reported that “In an obscure corner of the American physical oil market, crude prices have turned negative – producers are actually paying consumers to take away the black stuff.” The price was only 19 cents negative, and the grade of crude was a heavy oil that fetched only around $40 a barrel at the beginning of the year when WTI traded at around $60 (in April, this grade went much more negative). The importance of this Bloomberg report was that it confirmed that negative oil prices were not merely theoretical speculation.

Commodities do not come with limited liability

Many people find it counter intuitive that a commodity can have a negative price. However, the assumption of “free disposal” which is beloved of economics text book writers is not valid in the real world, and there are many examples of negative prices for commodities that are normally quite valuable. Before refrigeration became commercially available, it was quite common for fishermen to pay farmers to collect the day’s unsold fish catch and use it as manure. To understand the plausibility of the negative price, you need only imagine a bunch of fishermen trying to catch a night’s sleep with a boatload of rotting fish just outside their huts. Similarly, I have been told that restaurants often pay pig farmers to collect the waste food at the end of day and feed it to their pigs. On a more sombre note, the Bhopal gas tragedy was an unintended “free disposal” of a hazardous substance. The ultimate negative price of that “free disposal” bankrupted the company.

Please remember that crude oil is also a hazardous substance. Almost everywhere in the world, you would need an explosive licence to stock any significant quantity of it. Anybody who has seen images of oil spills at sea and the damage that it does to sea beaches knows that crude is an ugly and foul thing. Paying somebody to take this stuff from you is not at all unreasonable.

Physical versus Cash Settlement

Some people seem to think that the problems of WTI arise from the fact that it uses physical settlement while the Brent futures uses cash settlement. I have been arguing for more than 15 years that apart from transaction costs, there is no difference between cash settlement and physical settlement. The key difference between Brent and WTI is not in the futures market but in the spot market: one is waterborne and the other is pipeline-delivered. (The Brent physical market is in some ways even more out of reach of ordinary hedgers and speculators than WTI: the typical delivery is a ship load of 600,000 barrels. I described the Brent market in gory detail more than a decade ago and I am not masochistic enough to try and summarize that again.)

What about the theory that the Indian MCX futures is cash settled and therefore should not be subject to the travails of the NYMEX physically settled contract. This reminds me of the story about Medusa in Greek mythology: anybody who looked at Medusa would be turned into stone, but Perseus was able to slay her while looking at her reflection in the mirror. Myth is probably the most charitable word to describe the “Medusa” theory that the NYMEX contract was dangerous, but its reflection in the MCX mirror was safe.

What should Indians have done in early/mid April

First of all, anybody who was actually trying to hedge energy price should have run away from the May WTI futures contract as it was crystal clear that it would no longer provide any meaningful hedge of crude price risk or energy price risk in India.

Second, anybody who was in this contract purely as a speculator needed to understand that in early April, the WTI future was no longer a bet on crude; it was purely and simply a bet on storage space in Cushing. If storage remained available at Cushing, then the May future price could not fall too low. The floor for the price was the expected post Covid-lockdown price (proxied by the July/August futures prices) less the cost of storing crude for a few months. In mid April, this floor might have been estimated at around $15 a barrel. On the other hand, if storage got full, there was no floor on the futures price at all. The price could go negative, and if you did not exit the contract in time, the potential for a hugely negative price was clear as daylight. I would put it this way: when you went long WTI May futures in mid April, you were actually shorting Cushing storage space. Unless you had the discipline, attitude and nerves of a short seller, you should again have run away from this contract.

Third, any prudent broker should have stopped allowing their retail clients to trade this contract purely for risk management reasons. The only clients to whom this contract should have been made available were those with deep pockets and known integrity who could be counted on to pay up when things go wrong. Please remember that when prices can go from positive to negative, even 100% margins are inadequate as the loss exceeds the notional value of the position. This is another way of saying that the long crude position is actually a short storage position and there is no limit to the losses of a short position.

Fourth, if the exchange observed a sizeable open interest in this contract in early/mid April, it should have realized that market participants were ignoring one or more of the above three prudential principles. If market participants are reckless, they pose a risk to the exchange if they are unable to meet their obligations. Also, as mentioned above even 100% margins do not cover the worst case risk in this situation. Faced with this problem, I think the exchange should have done two things:

• Suspend trading in May WTI futures in early/mid April. This would imply compulsory settlement of outstanding positions at the prices prevailing at the time of suspension.

• Suspend trading in all WTI futures until the dislocation of the underlying is resolved. Alternatively, trading could be permitted in more distant months. Basically, if the exchange felt that dislocation could affect the contracts n weeks before expiry, they would suspend trading in any contract when it reached n weeks to expiry, while allowing more distant contracts to trade.

Posted at 9:10 pm IST on Thu, 23 Apr 2020         permanent link

Categories: arbitrage, commodities, derivatives, exchanges

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A new chapter in the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code

When India adopted the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) in 2016, it was clear that it was a transitional, stopgap arrangement, and that after the urgent goals of the IBC were met, there would be a need for a more comprehensive and fairer law (I have blogged about this many times, most recently a year ago). Covid-19 has however accelerated this timeline and made it necessary to make urgent modifications in the IBC even before its old goals have been fully achieved.

The pressing goals that led to the enactment of the IBC were two:

1. A bailout of the Indian financial sector (mainly the banking system) which was (and still is) reeling under a massive burden of bad loans. This goal was accomplished in part by expropriating operational creditors.

2. Ousting dishonest promoters who had run their companies to the ground but who were allowed in the pre-IBC regime to remain in control of their businesses. This goal was accomplished by handing over control of the company to a committee of creditors who might not know how to run the business, but could at least keep the promoters out.

Covid-19 is leading to a drastically different situation where an even more pressing goal is coming to the fore: rebuilding businesses that have been devastated by the crisis. To accomplish this new overriding goal, we will have to rethink the mechanisms that the IBC created to achieve its original short term goals.

Expropriating operational creditors

As mentioned above, the bailout of the banking system was accomplished by expropriating the non financial (operating) creditors of the company. This expropriation was accomplished by two legal provisions:

• Section 53(1) of the IBC subordinates operational creditors to unsecured financial creditors in a liquidation scenario. It is important to recognize that contractually, the operational and financial creditor might have ranked equally, but the law effectively tore up these contracts and placed the bank ahead in the queue.

• Section 30(2)(b) states that in a going concern sale, operational creditors need to be paid only what they would have got under the priority scheme of Section 53(1).

• Section 21(2) excludes operational creditors from the Committee of Creditors leaving them without any say in the resolution process.

It is amazing how such a massive expropriation was achieved without any resistance. The reason is that the financial sector was well organized, and the financial sector regulators as well as the sovereign itself (as the owner of a large part of the banking system) were all batting for them. Operational creditors were unorganized and were not even paying attention. It was only when home buyers realized that they were mere operational creditors of some insolvent real estate developers that they woke up and screamed; the backlash from this segment was so strong that home buyers had to be quickly accommodated by an explanation hastily grafted onto Section 2(8)(f) of the IBC. Other operational creditors continue to remain in the lurch.

Such an expropriation of operational creditors does not happen elsewhere in the world. Right now, for example, we are witnessing the bankruptcy of one of the largest electricity companies in the US, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). The bankruptcy arose because of PG&E’s potentially massive liabilities from certain catastrophic wildlife fires allegedly caused by its equipment. The bankruptcy proceedings of PG&E are being driven by the wildfire victims (who, as tort creditors, would count as operational creditors under IBC), while the financial creditors have been relegated to the backseat.

The expropriation of operational creditors under the IBC will be a disaster in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis in India. The disruption caused by social distancing and subsequent lockdown means that most businesses are under acute stress, and are unable to pay their suppliers or their lenders. To prevent complete economic meltdown, we need companies to continue to sell on credit to their customers while old bills remain unpaid. That is the only way that the going concern value of these businesses can be preserved. The cruel twist of the IBC is that if the suppliers do so, the mega bank will come along and steal the entire going concern value that the operational creditors have created and preserved. There is an urgent need to give trade creditors their due to prevent a massive economic contagion in which firms that fail drag their suppliers down with them, and they drag their suppliers down and so on.

Committee of creditors

Until the IBC came along, Indian businesses were well protected from their lenders by mechanisms like the BIFR. There was consensus that this needed to be changed, and ousting dishonest promoters was an important goal of the IBC. The problem was that the Indian judicial system was and is plagued by excessive delays. It was therefore thought that putting the courts in charge will in effect leave the promoters in charge. So the IBC put a Committee of Creditors in charge of the company during the entire resolution process with a tight timeline to either find a buyer for the whole business or to liquidate it.

Since there was general agreement that many of the defaulting promoters were in fact dishonest, this arrangement made sense. A crooked management would be siphoning off money from the business at every opportunity, and ousting them would actually help preserve value even if the creditors or the resolution professionals that they hire were not very good at running the business.

Covid-19 changes this drastically because businesses will be failing for no fault of theirs. Often the incumbent management would not only be honest but also competent. Throwing them out is a stupid thing to do even for the creditors who are trying to maximize their take. In the extremely challenging post-Covid environment, it would take the most skilled management to rebuild the business. The idea that a bunch of people can do this with no knowledge at all of the industry in question is just laughable. The consequence of handing over the business to the committee of creditors would be a sure prescription for destroying all value. It would ruin not only the employees and other stakeholders but even the lenders themselves who would recover a pittance in a firesale of the assets at a time when other lenders are liquidating similar companies in the same industry.

Some people have suggested suspending the filing of insolvency petitions under the IBC for a few months to prevent such a perverse outcome. They forget that an insolvency petition actually protects the debtor because it carries with it a moratorium on enforcement of debt. Without such a moratorium, most companies will be swamped by enforcement actions by secured creditors. Moreover, without a moratorium, any default will allow counterparties to terminate contracts, and this would be the death knell of the business. What we need is a new chapter in the IBC that allows a Debtor in Possession (DIP) insolvency regime for companies that get into difficulty not due to mismanagement but due to external factors (economy wide or industry wide problems).

In other words, India needs a world class bankruptcy regime in short order. In the rest of the world, we see bankrupt airlines operating flights normally while a bankruptcy court is figuring out how to restructure its debt. Similarly, telecom firms file for bankruptcy while continue to serve their customers without interruption. Steel mills continue to run while the bankruptcy proceedings are going on. The reason this does not happen in India is that we designed a stopgap bankruptcy code which did not envisage any of this. The time has come to remedy this shortcoming.

The way forward

I think we need to quickly add a new chapter to the IBC that allows an insolvency resolution process with the following feature:

• The debtor should be allowed to file even prior to a default when it demonstrates that it is balance sheet insolvent.

• The debtor continues to run the business as a going concern as a Debtor in Possession.

• The moratorium should come into force from the date of filing of the petition, though it could be revoked if the petition is rejected.

• Operational creditors should be treated on par with financial creditors.

Initially, this chapter can be limited to Covid-19 bankruptcies, but over time, it could be extended to other “no-fault” bankruptcies.

Posted at 10:03 pm IST on Thu, 9 Apr 2020         permanent link

Categories: bankruptcy, law

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A preemptive recapitalization of the Indian financial sector

Under normal conditions, we want financial firms to have enough capital to assure their survival. In the aftermath of Covid-19, we would want much more. We would want financial firms that are ready to lend to companies that seek to rebuild their businesses, and to individuals trying to rebuild their lives. We would not want financial firms that bunker down and try to conserve their capital because they are scared about their own survival.

If that is the goal, then India’s financial sector will need a large capital infusion for two reasons:

1. At least since the ILFS meltdown, the financial sector has been under stress, and many firms, particularly, Non Bank Finance Companies (NBFCs) are vulnerable.

2. The economic costs of the Covid-19 lockdown (and social distancing) is likely to lead to a rise in both corporate and retail loan defaults. Initial indications from China (which is just coming out of its lockdown) are suggestive of a 5% default rate in credit card loans, and the worst is probably yet to come. A similar phenomenon can be expected in retail loan portfolios worldwide, and India is unlikely to be an exception.

Needless to say, the sovereign is possibly the only source of capital for most NBFCs in the current environment. The government will have to inject capital across the board to NBFCs somewhat like the US did to the banks in 2008 under the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). Indeed the breadth of the capital injection will have to be even broader because the goal is not to ensure that the NBFC survives, but that it has adequate capital to lend freely.

It is also necessary to ensure that this does not become a bailout of the existing shareholders of weak institutions. The broad outlines of such a scheme could be as follows.

The first step would be to determine the amount of capital injection. Starting with the December 2019 balance sheet, the new capital injection could be designed to bring the December 2019 capital adequacy ratio to a level of say 20% of risk weighted assets. This is designed to ensure that even large post Covid-19 loan losses would leave the NBFC with a capital adequacy of say 15% which would be adequate to support a significant expansion of the loan book.

Since an equity valuation is probably impossible under the current conditions, the government’s injection could take the form of redeemable convertible preference shares. The conversion terms would be set such that if conversion happens, the preference shareholder would end up with say 99% of the post conversion capital. In other words, the old shareholders would be diluted out of existence. This would effectively result in the outright nationalization of the NBFC. (Crisis period nationalizations are of course intended to be temporary with the eventual goal of sale, flotation or liquidation.)

But the NBFC could avoid this outcome by redeeming the preference shares two or three years down the line (when the economy and the markets have normalized). A pre-condition for such redemption would be an acceptable post redemption capital adequacy ratio. Hence in most cases, redemption would have to be financed by raising new equity capital at market prices. To incentivize an early redemption, the interest rate on the preference shares could be set at a spread of say 10% (1000 basis points) above the repo rate from the second year onward. The interest rate in the first year could approximate a modest spread over the NBFC’s estimated December 2019 borrowing cost.

The proposed instrument would clearly provide economic capital, but under current regulatory norms, it may not count as Tier 1 capital. If necessary, this gap between regulatory and economic capital could be bridged by regulatory forbearance.

I have focused on NBFCs because that is where the stress is most evident, but it is possible that some weak private sector banks would need the same treatment. The NPA crisis in the Indian banking system and the ILFS disaster have left India’s financial sector too weak to support the credit needs of the Indian economy, and the Covid-19 promises to make things a lot worse. India can ill afford a contraction of credit in these critical times, and decisive action is needed to preserve as much of the financial sector as possible.

Posted at 9:08 pm IST on Thu, 2 Apr 2020         permanent link

Categories: banks, crisis, regulation

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Stock markets during lockdown

I have a piece in Bloomberg Quint today on this subject. Am reproducing this piece below.

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India is in lockdown to halt the spread of Covid-19, and people are asking whether the stock markets should remain open. My answer is simple: the stock markets should remain open at least as long as the banks and ATMs are open; in fact, they should shut just before the online payment systems go down. There might be some short-lived extreme emergencies in which it would be appropriate to shut down the entire financial sector—including the markets and the payment systems—but right now, we are far from being there, and I hope we never get there. I would also emphasise that while extreme emergencies that warrant complete financial shutdown would likely be very short-lived, the current social distancing restrictions could be expected to last for several weeks if not months. A shutdown of the stock markets for such prolonged periods would be unnecessary and undesirable.

The fight against Covid-19 is all about restricting the movement and assembly of people to block the spread of the disease. Modern securities trading is completely electronic and does not need the movement of people or things..In purely technological terms, people should be able to trade stocks and bonds sitting at home without creating any risk of spreading the dreaded disease.It is true that regulators around the world have created stupid barriers to achieving the seamless remote trading that is technologically possible, but that only means that these obsolete and dysfunctional rules need to be changed. I will come to that in a moment.

This Moment, More Than Most, Needs Functioning Markets

Before getting into more details about how to keep the markets open, I turn to why we need a functioning stock market almost as long as the payment systems are running. We need to remember that even as many economic activities shutdown, both individuals and companies have bills falling due. For businesses, revenues have evaporated but expenses have not. They still need to pay rents, salaries, interest and utility bills. The organised workforce might be still receiving wages and salaries, but in the informal sector and for the self-employed, income has collapsed. Monthly expenses still have to be met from some source or the other. Individuals and businesses, therefore, need to draw down their liquidity reserves, liquidate assets and raise new debt to keep making payments as they fall due. The only alternative would be a sweeping moratorium on all debt servicing and bill payments. The world has not reached that point yet, though some countries might need to consider that at some future stage.

Equities and bonds—or mutual funds holding equities and bonds— are the assets that are being liquidated today to meet the bills. Over the last five years, a large amount of retail savings has flowed into equity and balanced funds through Systematic Investment Plans. Similarly, businesses will need equity markets to bolster their balance sheets; rights issues, preferential allotments, loan against shares might all have a role in keeping these companies afloat. The United States has been discussing a fiscal stimulus that includes a budget for the bailout of critical large businesses that are impacted by Covid-19, and India might also need similar measures. Such rescue packages also need a functioning stock market to price and calibrate such injections of taxpayer money.

While companies would be trying to borrow, the environment does not permit normal due diligence. Many lenders would rely substantially on information revealed in the equity markets because these markets are much more liquid than bond markets. Shutting down equity markets would indirectly shut down parts of the bond market also as information channels get blocked.

Over-Centralised Systems

Finally, let me turn to the regulatory obstacles to trading from home. These regulatory obstacles have arisen because global security regulators, beginning with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, have been asleep at the wheel for the last two decades.Back in 2001, the 9/11 tragedy in New York demonstrated that stock markets had become so excessively centralised that the destruction of a small part of a single city forced the United States to shut down the entire national stock market. More than a decade ago, I blogged about a similar situation in India where local elections in Mumbai led to the shutdown of the stock markets nation-wide..Stock exchanges around the world have been obscenely profitable, and yet securities regulators have not forced them to invest sufficiently in business continuity.

In the case of the European Central Bank’s real-time gross settlement system Target2, the main site has a hot backup site with a synchronous copy in the live region, and, in addition, there is an asynchronous copy to two other sites in a separate testing region; all the four sites spread across three countries are permanently staffed. Compared with that, the business continuity planning of most stock exchanges across the world is a joke.

Securities regulators have made things worse by compliance requirements that encourage intermediaries to centralise key functions in a single geographic location. Regulators forgot that we must not create any single point of failure in systemically important securities markets. Keeping the markets open in difficult times like today will force the regulators to sweep out the whole cobweb of dysfunctional rules that stand in the way of a robust and resilient securities market infrastructure. When Covid-19 has passed into the history books, securities intermediaries should also be forced to rectify the deficiencies that come to light at their end during these troubled times.

Let us all hope that regulators in India will have the courage to keep the stock markets open and that the liquidity and price discovery in these markets will contribute their tiny little bit to help individuals and businesses to cope with the economic distress that is emerging today.

Posted at 12:40 pm IST on Wed, 25 Mar 2020         permanent link

Categories: exchanges, regulation

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Structuring the Yes Bank rescue

I have been trying to wrap my head around the Reserve Bank of India’s draft scheme of reconstruction of the Yes Bank Ltd under which the government owned State Bank of India (SBI) intends to rescue Yes Bank by picking up a minority equity stake without first wiping out the equity shareholders. It is very hard to make a good estimate of the value of Yes Bank without a highly intrusive due diligence for which there is no time now. However, the working assumption has to be that while the deposits and senior debt are hopefully not yet impaired, the equity and junior debt could conceivably turn out to be worthless. Any rescuer would therefore legitimately demand that its capital infusion be senior to existing equity.

The obvious solution of using preference shares is not available because:

• Under the Basel III framework, preference shares do not count for the most important CET1 (Common Equity Tier 1).

• The Companies Act 2013 does not allow the issue of perpetual preference shares, and instruments that are not perpetual do not count even for AT1 (Additional Tier 1) capital under Basel III.

The next best solution would be to first wipe out the existing equity shareholders and then compensate them in one of the following ways:

• Issue warrants to the existing shareholders to buy the new shares at the same price as SBI. Since SBI proposes to inject Rs 25 billion for a 49% stake, the warrants could be designed to allow existing shareholders to buy 51% for Rs 25-26 billion at any time during the next five years (if necessary, the strike price of the warrant could increase at 10-20% every year). This would have the additional advantage of improving the capital adequacy of Yes Bank.

• Existing shareholders could be given an option to buy out (a part of) SBI’s stake anytime during the next three years at a price that guarantees SBI an IRR (internal rate of return) of 30-40%.

• Existing shareholders could be given Contingent Value Rights that entitle the shareholders to receive new equity shares at the end of five years if the realized losses on the existing assets is below a specified threshold. The threshold could be set at a level that would imply an acceptable level of CET1 today.

To my mind, there are three compelling arguments for wiping out the existing shareholders:

1. This protects the interests of the taxpayer who is indirectly paying for the bailout because the rescuer is a public sector bank.

2. It avoids the counter intuitive outcome that Yes Bank’s AT1 bonds are wiped out, but the share capital is left intact.

3. It would strengthen Pillar 3 of the Basel framework which aims to promote market discipline as an integral element of bank regulation. I complained a year and a half ago that the quiescent shareholders of Yes Bank had failed to discipline the management. It would be a good idea to send a clear signal to the shareholders that if they are too quiescent, they stand to lose everything.

Exotic financial instruments have a bad name these days, but as I wrote seven years ago, they have proved invaluable in designing rescue packages for the financial sector.

Posted at 8:16 pm IST on Sat, 7 Mar 2020         permanent link

Categories: bankruptcy, banks, failure

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bZx attack translated into mainstream finance

A few days back, the cryptocurrency based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform bZx was subject to an attack/exploit/arbitrage in which the hacker made a gain of over $ 300,000 without investing any capital at all. There are a lot of detailed explanations of this attack from a crypto and smart contract perspective (the BzX Full Disclosure is quite good and Korantin Auguste’s description is even better).

My purpose here is to translate the entire set of operations into equivalent transactions in mainstream finance. I find that each individual element of the attack occurs quite commonly in mainstream finance. What is new is the ability to compose these together and execute them within seconds. What is also new is the ability to obtain unlimited leverage by eliminating information asymmetry.

Mainstream Equivalents

In terms of mainstream finance, the components of the attack are:

• Trade A: Buying a large quantity of any security in an illiquid market very quickly will raise the price massively. This trade will cause a large loss as the security is bought at an inflated weighted average price.

• Trade B: Trade A is immediately reversed by selling the same security very quickly. Since the security is sold at an inflated weighted average price, Trade B produces a large profit which is ideally equal to the loss made by Trade A.

• Leverage and Bankruptcy: Trades A and B together cancel out and would ideally exactly break even. To make the combined trades profitable, Trade A must be financed with a lot of debt and encapsulated in a limited liability vehicle which is put into “bankruptcy”. If this can be done, a major part of the losses of Trade A will fall on the creditors of the Trade A vehicle, while the profits of Trade B will of course accrue to the attacker.

  This is quite common in mainstream finance with private equity firms putting their failed companies into bankruptcy while mopping up the gains from their successful companies. Before initiating bankruptcy, private equity firms will pay themselves as much dividends as they can get away with. The shenanigans of TPG and Apollo with Caesars Entertainment are a good example of the state of the art in this field.

• Margin Trade: The natural way to introduce debt into Trade A is to use a margin trade. The margin trade lender will demand two kinds of collateral to back the trade: the security that is bought would have to be handed over as collateral, and in addition a cash margin would have to be provided to cover the risk of any fall in value of the security during the life of the margin lending.

• Short Sale: The margin trade creates one complication: as explained above, the security bought in Trade A will lie in the Trade A vehicle as collateral for the margin trade. The attacker will need a different source of the security to be sold in Trade B. The standard solution in mainstream finance to this problem would be a short sale: the attacker would borrow the security, sell it in Trade B and repay the loan over a few days by buying it back gradually with minimal impact cost.

• Financing all the collateral: The entire sequence of trades requires cash collateral or margins:

  • Cash collateral for the short sale borrow
  • Cash collateral for the margin trade.

  In mainstream finance, this financing will require substantial equity provided by the attacker. This is where the crypto world is different. the radical transparency of smart contracts allows unlimited leverage as discussed later below.

The Five Steps in the Actual Attack

The BzX Full Disclosure enumerates the five steps in the attack. In my explanation of these steps below, I will refer to ether (ETH) as cash because it is the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain in which all these smart contracts are executing. Similarly, I will refer to the token being traded – wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) – as the security. WBTC can be thought of as a bitcoin ETF that trades on the Ethereum blockchain and can therefore be managed by Ethereum smart contracts. The bitcoin underlying WBTC resides in its own different blockchain, and Ethereum smart contracts cannot transfer these underlying coins. WBTC solves this problem because it resides on the Ethereum blockchain. But it must be borne in mind that WBTC is far less liquid than bitcoin.

1. Flashloans (Unlimited leverage with smart contracts): The crypto world is very close to the frictionless theoretical models of economics and finance in which a riskless arbitrage will attract unlimited amount of money. In the real world, there are various leverage constraints and other limits to arbitrage (Shleifer, A. and Vishny, R.W., 1997. The limits of arbitrage. The Journal of Finance, 52(1), pp.35-55.). If one thinks about it deeper, a riskless trade should be subject to a leverage constraint only in the presence of an information asymmetry. It should then follow that if we can find a way to eliminate the information asymmetry completely, then riskless arbitrage should support unlimited leverage.

   The world of smart contracts and immutable code in the crypto world provides an excellent example where we can see this phenomenon in action. The smart contract that makes this possible is the Flashloan which is described in the white paper (alternatively, you can take a look at this simpler explanation). In short, the flashloan borrower presents a smart contract that (a) executes the entire “arbitrage” and (b) repays the loan. This is a single atomic transaction that either succeeds completely or fails completely. The computer code simulates the entire transaction. If at the end, the loan repayment happens, then the transaction goes through and is broadcast on the blockchain. If the loan repayment does not happen, then the entire transaction is reverted – the state is restored to what it was earlier. The loan is not granted and the transaction does not happen.

   In the real world, you cannot give a loan for a factory, check whether the factory actually turns out to be profitable enough to repay the loan, and then undo both the granting of the loan and the construction of the factory if things do not work out. But if everything is virtual and on the blockchain, this is exactly what you can do.

   The attacker borrows cash of 10,000 ETH (roughly $ 2.5 million) using a flashloan. The fact that a completely unknown entity can borrow the equivalent of $ 2.5 million without any collateral and without any risk to the lender is one of the miracles made possible by the smart contracts of Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

2. Compound Transaction (Security Borrow): In this step, the attacker deposits a little more than half of the cash borrowed in Step-1 as margin to support a security borrowing transaction to borrow 112 WBTC (worth roughly $ 1 million).

3. Margin Trade or Trade A: The attacker deposits a little more than one-eighth of the cash borrowed in Step-1 to buy the security with 5:1 leverage. This is a huge whale-size trade in this market (recall that WBTC is an illiquid security) and there is only one liquidity provider that can meet this demand – a market-maker smart contract called Uniswap. This contract which is nicely explained in the Uniswap Whitepaper can always provide unlimited liquidity; but for large size trades, it offers absurdly distorted prices. Let me illustrate its algorithm using the example of market making between the US $ and Japanese ¥. Imagine that the market maker starts with $ 10,000 and ¥ 1 million and an exchange rate of $ 1 = ¥ 100. The smart contract uses a very simple formula to guide its operations. It multiplies $ 10,000 by ¥ 1 million to arrive at the product of 10 billion, and its sole goal in life is to keep this product of 10 billion unchanged during all the trading that it does. Suppose you went to this contract with ¥ 1,000 and asked it to give you dollars, it would give you $ 9.99 at an exchange rate of 100.1 ¥ / $ which is only a slight spread above the fair value of 100.1 ¥ / $ . At the end of this trade, the contract owns $ 9990.01 and ¥ 1.001 million, and the product is still 10 billion. Suppose instead, that you had gone to this contract with ¥ 10 million and asked it to give you dollars, it would have given you $ 9090.91 at the ridiculous exchange rate of 1,100 ¥ /$ . After this trade, the contract is left with $ 909.09 and ¥ 11 million and the product of these two is still 10 billion. This contract never declines a trade because it is too large. It simply distorts the price so much that it has enough money to pay out. The Uniswap market maker contract is designed to be used for small trades (say 1-2% of the available liquidity like the ¥ 1,000 trade, and not for trades of ¥ 10,000 let alone ¥ 10 million.

   But for the attacker, creating a distorted price was the goal and it succeeded in achieving this. It bought 51 WBTC at a price of around 110 as against the fair price of less than 40. This is where a bug in the margin trade contract came into play. The contract required 20% margin (5:1 leverage) and the code was supposed to compute the adequacy of the equity in the position by valuing the security (WBTC) using an external price feed. If it did that, the code would have seen that the trade has negative equity (of about -2,300 ETH or about $ 0.6 million). The 51 WBTC valued at the fair price of less than 40 would be only around 2,000 ETH which is less than half the 4,300 ETH borrowed in the margin trade (the purchase price is around 5,600 while the cash margin provided by the attacker was only 1,300).

   This is where the non recourse or limited liability nature of the margin borrow smart contract comes in. The critical point is that bZx does not have recourse to any other assets of the attacker (for example, its equity in the security borrow of Step-2). The attacker can simply walk away leaving bZx with the loss of $ 0.6 million in this contract. Of course, it loses the 51 WBTC lying in the contract, but that is what happens in any mainstream bankruptcy: you leave the assets behind and walk away from the debt.

4. Dump the borrowed security (Trade B): This trade which is also with the Uniswap market maker smart contract allows the attacker to sell the 112 WBTC borrowed in Step-2 at an inflated average price of 61.4 which is more than 150% of the fair price. I do not understand why the attacker sells more than what it bought in the previous step. As a result of the suboptimal (?) sizing of this trade, the attacker makes a gain of only around $ 0.3 million as against the $ 0.6 million loss caused to bZx.

5. Repay the flashloan: At this point, the attacker has enough cash to repay the flashloan of Step-1 despite the fact that over half of the proceeds of this loan are still locked up in the security borrow of Step-2. Indeed. the equity of the attacker in this security borrow (cash deposit less the value of the borrowed WBTC) is the profit of the attacker.

Conclusion

All the five steps listed above were completed in a few seconds (an Ethereum block is created every 15 seconds on average). What remains is to buy back WBTC to repay the security borrow (Step-2) and recover the cash trapped in that contract. The attacker is in no hurry to do that because it wants to minimize the impact cost of such a large trade. In a couple of days, this is done and the cash gains have been realized.

This shows that the problem with Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is not that the attacker is anonymous, nor that everything happens in a few seconds leaving others with no time to respond. The attacker’s gains are trapped in the security borrow for a couple of days. The difference with the real world is that DeFi has no provision for what in mainstream finance would be called piercing the corporate veil. In DeFi, there is no court to say that the owners of Step-2 and Step-3 are one and the same, and therefore the losses in the latter can be recovered from the gains in the other. In a blog post last year, I discussed the view of some scholars that mainstream finance itself takes limited liability too seriously, but DeFi seems to take the idea of limited liability to even greater dogmatic extremes.

To my mind, the vulnerabilities in mainstream finance and DeFi are broadly the same. In mainstream finance, smart lawyers find and exploit flaws in the legal code (legal terms of the contract): see for example, Matt Levine on Caesars Entertainment, on Hovnanian CDS and on McClatchy CDS. In DeFi, smart programmers find and exploit flaws in the software code. In both cases, the contracts behave differently from what they expected and get upset. For people on the outside with no stakes in the outcome, the exploitation of legal and software bugs are alike examples of intellectual creativity that can be admired, enjoyed or criticized.

Posted at 5:54 pm IST on Fri, 21 Feb 2020         permanent link

Categories: arbitrage, blockchain and cryptocurrency, leverage, technology

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European exchange trading hours and India

For three months now, European fund managers and banks have been pushing the London Stock Exchange (LSE) to reduce trading hours by delaying the market opening time by an hour and a half. The LSE began consultations on this in December and the comment period expired last week. The Investment Association (IA) which represents the fund managers and the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) which represents the banks, brokers and other market participants submitted a response to this consultation reiterating their earlier proposal.

They are quite blunt in their assessment that the overlap with the US trading hours must be preserved, but the overlap with Asia is unimportant:

The overlap between European and US market hours is clearly evident in better metrics on market quality and liquidity during the common hours, including tighter spreads, more liquidity and improved correlations. By contrast, overlap between London and Asia is invisible from a data/metrics-perspective in regards to European equities. Whilst in theory it has been talked about as being beneficial, in practice there is no discernible benefit.

If the proposal is accepted, India would be the only important Asian market with which London trading hours would overlap (unless Singapore or Hong Kong choose to extend their trading hours to overlap with London). Even for India, the overlap with London would drop to one hour or even half an hour unless India chooses to extend its trading hours (see Appendix 1 of the IA/EFMA proposal). I think India needs to analyse its market quality by time and decide whether to shift its trading hours by an hour or so by opening later and closing later to retain longer overlap with London at the cost of a shorter overlap with Singapore. IA/EFMA state:

We do not consider that a reduced availability of trading time affects other global jurisdictions when considering their large market capitalisation and the ability to transact in their markets.

But it would be stupid for India to simply accept this glib statement without its own analysis.

Posted at 9:29 pm IST on Mon, 3 Feb 2020         permanent link

Categories: exchanges, regulation

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My 25% error rate

A month ago, in a blog post about the special open market operation (OMO) of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), I expressed the view that while this was being described as an Operation Twist (purchase of long term bonds and sale of short term bonds), it would end up as a form of Quantitative Easing (QE) with more purchases and less sales. With four such operations now over, my prediction has a 25% error rate. In each of the four operations, the RBI purchased all the bonds (100 billion rupees face value) that it had notified. When it came to sales, the RBI’s acceptance rates were 68.25% (December 23, 2019), 85.01% (December 30, 2019), 100% (January 6, 2020) and 29.50% (January 23, 2020). So I was wrong about one of the four OMOs for an error rate of 25%. The RBI’s average acceptance rate for sales in these four operations works out to a little over 70% implying a net liquidity injection of almost 120 billion.

Posted at 7:58 pm IST on Mon, 27 Jan 2020         permanent link

Categories: monetary policy

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"Low for long" interest rates and retirement planning

Loose monetary policy after the global financial crisis has resulted in low interest rates that are also expected to remain low for a long time. A prudent person beginning a career today must therefore assume that over his or her life time, the average global real interest rate would probably be negative. By taking some risk, the return could be increased by harvesting the equity risk premium. Accounting for taxation and asset management costs, it would still be reasonable to assume that the realized post-tax weighted average rate of return would be close to zero. (A prudent person would not plan for the expected outcome but for an outcome in say the 10-25% lower tail.)

Rising life expectancy would imply that a person must plan for a post retirement life span roughly equal to the working life. For example, a person might work for 35 years from the age of 25 to 60, and then live for another 35 years till the age of 95. (Again, life expectancy does not have to be 95 because a prudent person would plan for the 10-25% tail outcome).

Some expenses may be lower post retirement, but medical and related expenses would be much higher (and these are rising much faster than inflation). The simplest assumption would be that average monthly expenses post retirement would be roughly equal to that before retirement.

The above assumptions lead to a very simple savings rule: you must save 50% of your income during your working life. The logic is straightforward:

1. The assumption that the realized post-tax weighted average rate of return would be close to zero means that the discount rate is zero. In the absence of discounting, one can simply add incomes and expenses over one’s entire life span (time value of money – which is probably half of modern finance – becomes superfluous).

2. The assumption that post retirement life span is roughly equal to the working life together with the assumption that average monthly expenses post retirement would be roughly equal to that before retirement means that total expenses during retirement are roughly equal to that during the working life.

3. I assume that total lifetime income equals total lifetime expenses (no net bequests). Therefore working life expenses (being half of lifetime expenses) must be also half of lifetime income.

4. Assuming that there is no non-investment income post retirement implies a savings rate of 50%.

If in addition, the prudent person is worried about a rising profit share in GDP and a possible secular decline in real wages as artificial intelligence destroys well paying jobs, then the savings rate in the early part of one’s career would have to be even higher.

Casual empiricism suggests that a 50% savings rate is far beyond what anybody plans for today. Several hypotheses suggest themselves:

1. People are not actually risk averse and are planning for median outcomes and not for the 10-25% tail. This implies a significant minority of people will live out the last decades of their lives in poverty.

2. People have adaptive expectations and because of high realized rates of return in the 20th century, they are excessively optimistic about rates of return going forward. If this is the case, even the median person could experience poverty in old age.

3. The worry about “lower for longer”, secular stagnation, and the threat of artificial intelligence is just irrational pessimism, and, in fact, all is well with the world.

4. Ultimately, the state will be forced to step in to provide support in retirement because in an ageing society, senior citizens have too many votes (and they do come out to vote). Since state support will probably be means-tested (and financed by heavy taxation), it is stupid to save too much.

5. Climate change will end civilization as we know it long before our savings run out, and so retirement savings are the wrong thing to worry about.

6. Society will decide that retirement is a luxury that we cannot afford, and we will all be working even with one foot in the grave.

Posted at 4:27 pm IST on Mon, 20 Jan 2020         permanent link

Categories: investment, monetary policy

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Quantitative easing by any name is fine

Update: Rate hike of August 2017 corrected to rate cut.

In early November, I wrote a blog post arguing that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) needs to consider some form of Quantitative Easing (purchase of long term bonds) to address the complete lack of monetary transmission from policy rate cuts to long term rates.

Last week, the RBI announced an open market operation (OMO) that was quickly labelled by market commentators as its version of Operation Twist:

On a review of the current liquidity and market situation and an assessment of the evolving financial conditions, the Reserve Bank has decided to conduct simultaneous purchase and sale of government securities under Open Market Operations (OMO)

The RBI offered to buy INR 100 billion of ten year bonds and sell the same amount of bonds of maturities less than one year. When this OMO was carried out on Monday, the RBI ended up buying the entire INR 100 billion of ten year bonds but it sold only INR 68 billion of short term bonds.

I think this is to be expected. In the current situation, the RBI can ill afford to allow any increase in yields even at the short end. If the RBI repeats the operation, I expect the results to be similar: full offtake of the long end purchase and much lower offtake of the short end sales. If the RBI wants to avoid the suggestion that it is doing any easing or any monetization of the fiscal deficit, we should not have any quarrel with the operation being called a Twist or a Special OMO or whatever. The important thing is get on with this in greater size or more frequently until the ten year yield drops 100-150 basis points below its August 2017 level. (While the OMO did reduce the ten year yield by about 25 basis points, this yield is still about 25 basis points higher than it was before the rate cut of early August 2017).

On the other hand, if the RBI stops with just this one operation, it would leave itself open to the insinuation that this was just a cosmetic attempt to help the banks window dress their balance sheets at the December quarter end.

Posted at 7:54 pm IST on Wed, 25 Dec 2019         permanent link

Categories: monetary policy

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New Zealand goes ahead on bank capital

A year ago, I wrote approvingly about New Zealand’s non-Basel-III approach to bank capital:

One of the dangers of international harmonization of financial sector regulation under the auspices of Basel, FSB and G20 has been the risk of a regulatory mono-culture. New Zealand located at the edge of the world and outside the Basel system is providing a good antidote to this.

Earlier this month, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand announced that it was going ahead with its proposal to raise capital requirements substantially. The only concession that it has made is in terms of allowing more instruments to count as capital. The ruthless focus on preventing banking crises is reiterated:

Banking crises cause not only harmful economic costs but also distressful social issues, such as the general decline in mental and physical health brought about by higher rates of unemployment. These effects are felt for generations.

New Zealand’s reliance on foreign banks for almost all of its banking needs is an interesting choice that many other countries could find worthy of emulation. The Global Financial Crisis highlighted one risk with this approach: bank losses elsewhere in the world could lead to a shrinking of bank credit within the country. While it might be tempting to react to this with a greater reliance on domestic banks, New Zealand is suggesting that you can simply protect your economy with higher capital requirements without worrying about the ownership structure.

I am inclined to think that steadily rising capital requirements for banks coupled with ever increasing reliance on deep financial markets may be the best way to manage the risk of financial crises.

Posted at 10:17 am IST on Thu, 19 Dec 2019         permanent link

Categories: banks, regulation

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Resolution of stock broking firms

The developments over the last week regarding Karvy highlight the urgent need for an operational framework for resolution of stock broking firms and smooth portability of positions in India. Almost two weeks back, the Securities and Exchange Board of India issued an order imposing various restrictions on Karvy Stock Broking Limited, but did not shut down the stock broker.

The order also froze the securities lying in the name of the stock broker on the ground that these securities actually belonged to the broker’s clients. Subsequently, these securities were transferred to the names of around 80,000 clients who had fully paid for the shares. Since the broker had pledged these securities with various bank and non bank lenders, these creditors appealed to the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) which observed today that “a lot of water has flown under the bridge”, and it is not possible to reverse what has already been done.

In this blog post, I will however focus on the problems faced by the clients of Karvy. In its appeal to the SAT, Karvy complained that because of the SEBI restrictions it was unable to execute the instructions given by its clients (especially online clients) on the basis of the power of attorney that is normally used in these cases. On a direction from SAT, SEBI examined this matter but refused to make any concession, and stated that clients were free to issue paper transfer instructions or to fax them. Meanwhile, on Monday, the stock exchange “temporarily” suspended Karvy from its membership, and yesterday the SAT has refused to entertain an appeal against this action.

Clients are now stuck with a broker who has not been shut down or liquidated but is not functioning any more. It is not acceptable to say that the 1.2 million clients of Karvy can individually initiate the paper work to move their trading accounts to another broker. Contrast this with how the SIPC does this in the United States:

Shortly after the commencement of a liquidation proceeding, a SIPA trustee may transfer customer accounts to another solvent brokerage firm in what is called a “bulk transfer.” The bulk transfer can occur without the consent or participation of any customer, and may result in customers getting access to their property in a few days or weeks. (emphasis added)

It is also instructive to see how this process worked in the case of MF Global which is in many ways similar to the Karvy episode. The SIPC stated that in the MF Global case:

SIPC initiated the liquidation proceeding within hours of being notified by the SEC

The same day (October 31, 2011), there was a court order appointing a trustee to run MF Global:

ORDERED that … the SIPA Trustee, as appointed herein, is authorized to operate the business of MF Global Inc. to: (a) conduct business in the ordinary course until 6:00 p.m. on November 3, 2011, including without limitation, the purchase and sale of securities … and obtaining credit and incurring debt in relation thereto; (b) complete settlements of pending transactions, and to take other necessary and appropriate actions to implement the foregoing, in such accounts until 6:00 p.m. on November 7, 2011; and (c) take other action as necessary and appropriate for the orderly transfer of customer accounts and related property.

Within two days (November 2, 2011), the first set of bulk transfers covering about 50,000 accounts began.

There is an urgent need to create a statutory and regulatory structure to do all this in India, but I suspect that at a crunch, the regulators may be able to achieve some of these goals using existing statutes and by stretching the powers that they already have to protect the interests of investors. The even more urgent need in my view is to create the operational capability to implement this on the ground. It should not take more than a week to just put a brokerage firm into limbo.

Posted at 5:37 pm IST on Wed, 4 Dec 2019         permanent link

Categories: bankruptcy, crisis

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Financial Markets and Monetary Transmission

In an blog post earlier this month, I argued that with a dysfunctional banking system impeding the transmission of monetary policy in India, the central bank must use the financial markets to achieve its goals. A blog post by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York yesterday shows that the markets are better at transmitting monetary policy even in the United States where the banking system is quite healthy. They show that the pass through from Fed rate changes to Money Market Mutual Fund yields is more than 90% (both before and after the global financial crisis) while the pass through to bank interest rates was less than 50% pre crisis and close to zero post crisis.

Posted at 10:02 pm IST on Thu, 21 Nov 2019         permanent link

Categories: monetary policy

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Does India need Unconventional Monetary Policy?

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has reduced its policy rate by 1.35% (135 basis points) during this calendar year, but that has provided little respite to the real economy. I think there are two issues here.

1. First of all, this so-called 135 basis point cut is an exaggerated number because the base for this calculation is the high point of the policy rate of 6.50% in August 2018. At least in retrospect, it is clear that the rate hike in mid 2018 was a mistake which took too long to correct. (In this context, the MPC dissents of that period are fun to read). The more appropriate measure of the rate cut is therefore to ignore the aberration of mid 2018 and focus on the reduction from 6.00% in August 2017 to 5.15% currently to arrive at a number of 85 basis points. Of course, 85 basis points is not to be scoffed at, but my point is that thinking about 85 as if it is 135 has probably made the RBI reluctant to cut rates more aggressively. Had the RBI actually cut rates by 135 basis points from 6%, we would have reached 4.65% instead of 5.15%.

2. Second is the stunning lack of monetary transmission: 10-year Indian government bond yields today are roughly where they were in August 2017 implying zero pass through of the 85 basis points cut in the policy rate. That is the most optimistic measure of monetary transmission because it focuses on risk free rates. Corporate borrowing is what is more relevant for capital investment in the economy, and here the situation is a lot worse because of a dysfunctional banking system that is unable or unwilling to lend for a variety of reasons.

As a result of this lack of monetary transmission, some people appear to have given up on monetary policy as a weapon to revive the economy. These people have started thinking that lower interest rates are simply pushing on a string, and that is better to rely on fiscal policy or supply side reforms. This in my view would be a cop out. Monetary policy has many other weapons still left in its armoury. After the Global Financial Crisis, when central banks in advanced countries found that they could not rely on interest rates because they had hit the zero lower bound, they did not give up. They used unconventional monetary policy that injected liquidity into the system and alleviated the credit crunch in the economy. The RBI should do the same if it thinks that policy rate cuts are not having an impact.

There is a lot that the central bank can do to push the 10-year government bond yield down by say 100-150 basis points to a level more consistent with the current state of the economy. First of all, the RBI could make a “lower for longer” commitment. It appears to me that the mistake of mid 2018 has dented the credibility of the central bank, and the markets are worried that as in 2018, policy rates could be raised again at the slightest pretext. Via the expectations channel, this fear would obviously stunt the monetary transmission to longer term rates. If the central bank could address this concern, and make a credible commitment that it would be more cautious in raising rates, 10-year yields would likely come down substantially. If jawboning the markets does not work, the central bank could simply buy enough long term government bonds to push the yield down to the desired level. Of course, such a policy is incompatible with an interest rate defence of the currency, and necessarily implies a willingness to let the rupee find its level.

What is even more pressing is the need to insulate the real economy from the debilitating effect of a dysfunctional banking system. The problem has been with us since the early 2010s, but for some time, the credit needs of the economy were met by near-banks (NBFCs). During the last year or so, the crisis in near-banks has shut down this channel and we are left with a dysfunctional financial sector (at least when it comes to credit). It is the responsibility of the central bank in situations like this to create mechanisms to maintain the flow of credit.

The RBI likes to acts through banks, but unfortunately, at this point of time, banks (and near-banks) are part of the problem and are definitely not part of the solution. The only feasible channel for maintaining credit flow today is the financial markets. I am convinced that the RBI should provide abundant systemic liquidity through the markets. Instead of complaining about the lack of deep bond markets, the RBI could use this as an opportunity to deepen these markets by acting as the market maker of first resort in a variety of credit markets and the buyer of last resort in key systemically important credit markets. The prime target for asset purchases by the central bank would be high quality residential mortgage backed securities and other securitization instruments, as well as senior tranches of Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) that meet desired quality standards. The advantage of limiting asset purchases to pools of credit (and their tranches) is that it avoids charges of favouritism to individual borrowers. (The European Central Bank has been buying individual corporate bonds, but I doubt that Indian bond markets have the institutional maturity to make this possible.) When it comes to repo-lending, liquidity enhancement and market making, the RBI can target a far wider range of credit instruments.

Any measures that the RBI takes to promote financial markets would be welcome because India urgently needs to transition to a more market dominated financial sector for two reasons. First, Indian per capita income, GDP size and economic sophistication have all reached levels where it is natural for the financial sector to gradually shift from banks to markets. Second, the governance problems in banks and near-banks (whether in the public or private sector) have cast serious doubts about the viability of a bank dominated financial system in India at this point of time.

Posted at 7:28 pm IST on Thu, 7 Nov 2019         permanent link

Categories: monetary policy

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Real Estate and Infrastructure Resolution in India

Prof. Sebastian Morris and I have written a working paper on Real Estate and Infrastructure Resolution in India. We argue that real estate and infrastructure is at the centre of a vicious doom loop sketched in the figure below.

This vicious circle needs to be broken decisively, but merely bailing out the failing/ failed developers would only further crony capitalism. Our proposal uses the financial markets for price discovery and resource mobilization, and is based on the sovereign covering the left tail risk in infrastructure and real estate. The mechanism has the potential to revive these assets with the government earning a handsome return, while being fair to all stakeholders.

Our rationale for the sovereign to absorb the tail risks posed by the doom loop are:

• Being non-tradeable, real estate and infrastructure cannot fall back on a market outside the narrow demand territory. A tradeable sector asset like a steel plant has a floor asset value based on border prices of inputs and outputs even in a situation where domestic demand has collapsed. This truncates the left tail of the asset value distribution and mitigates the tail risks of the tradeable goods sector. There is no floor on Real Estate and Infrastructure asset values independent of the state of the domestic economy. There is no alternate value to assets in harness – all costs are sunk and non-deployable outside the business and the space.

• Real estate and infrastructure are also exposed to sovereign risk (environmental regulation and government policy). Conversely, the government can unlock vast social and private values by removing distortions in the regulation of this sector.

This creates an opportunity for the sovereign to charge a fair insurance premium for providing tail risk cover, and thereby make a profit from the whole transaction in the long run. Our mechanism involves a second loss cover structure similar to the Maiden Lane transactions in the United States in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.

We propose to use financial markets to discover fair prices of diversified pools of real estate assets. Diversified pools overcome problems of asymmetric information, and enable the use of standard valuation models like hedonic regression. More details are in the working paper.

Posted at 9:36 pm IST on Mon, 23 Sep 2019         permanent link

Categories: bankruptcy, crisis

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Abstraction bias or bias bias?

Last month, Steven L. Schwarcz put out a paper, Regulating Financial Guarantors: Abstraction Bias As a Cause of Excessive Risk-taking, arguing that financial guarantors suffer from abstraction bias:

Financial guarantors commit to pay out capital only if certain future contingencies occur, in contrast to banks and other financial firms that pay out capital—for example, by making a loan—at the outset of a project. As a result, financial guarantors are subject to a previously unrecognized cognitive bias, which the author calls “abstraction bias,” that causes them to underestimate the risk on their guarantees.

Reading this paper reminded me of Gigerenzer’s paper (The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics, Review of Behavioral Economics, 2018, 5: 303–336) arguing that:

[behavioral economics] is tainted by a “bias bias,” the tendency to spot biases even when there are none.

Let us look at the examples that Schwarcz presents of “abstraction bias”:

• The bond-CDS basis: Selling CDS protection (insuring a risky bond against default) is equivalent to buying the risky bond if we ignore the issue of how the purchase of the risky bond is funded. Therefore, in an idealized world, the CDS spread should be the same as the credit spread of the bond. Schwarcz argues that abstraction bias causes the CDS spread to be lower than the bond spread. Interestingly, Schwarcz concedes in footnote 89 that the discrepancy between the CDS and bond spreads has arisen only after the Global Financial Crisis. Does Schwarcz think that the Global Financial Crisis led to a rewiring of the human brain creating an abstraction bias where none exited before? The Jennie Bai & Pierre Collin-Dufresne paper that Schwarcz cites in footnote 89 tells a different story: it is all about funding risk and liquidity risk which did change after the Crisis.

• Bond Insurance: Financial Guarantors like MBIA got into big trouble during the Global Financial Crisis by insuring mortgage backed securities against default. Schwarcz’s claim that they charged too little premium for taking on this risk is based on the following analysis. Consider a mortgage backed security that would have been rated BBB without bond insurance and compare (a) the premium for insuring the bond, and (b) the spread of the BBB bond over US government bonds. The fact that (a) is lower than (b) is cited as evidence of abstraction bias. But this is a wrong comparison because even after bond insurance, the resulting AAA mortgage security trades at a significant spread over US government bonds. The correct way of measuring (b) would be to take the spread of the BBB mortgage security over a AAA mortgage security. My sense is that if Schwarcz’s Appendix 1 is corrected in this manner, much of the discrepancy would disappear.

• Standby Letters of Credit: I have great difficulty understanding the claim here because the author says:

  … standby letters evolved on a path-dependent progression from commercial letters of credit, which traditionally are prudent banking instruments.

  …

  … there is evidence that standby letters of credit are much riskier than commercial letters of credit

  The problem is that both standby and commercial letters of credit involve the same alleged abstraction bias. Even if it is true that banks have lost more money on standby than on commercial letters of credit, I fail to see what that tells us about abstraction bias.

I got the feeling that Schwarcz picks up examples where there is significant tail risk that takes the form of a contingent liability. It is the tail risk that makes assessment and valuation difficult, but the author seems to think that it is all about abstraction instead.

Posted at 3:39 pm IST on Sat, 21 Sep 2019         permanent link

Categories: market efficiency

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Legal theory of finance redux

Six years ago, I blogged about Katharina Pistor’s Legal Theory of Finance, and observed that there seemed to be nothing novel about her claim that powerful institutions at the centre of the financial system tend to be bailed out while the small fry are allowed to die. But if one takes the politics out of the theory, the idea of the elasticity of law is an interesting insight. Pistor wrote:

Contracts are designed to create credible commitments that are enforceable as written. Yet, closer inspection of contractual relations, laws and regulations in finance suggests that law is … is elastic. The elasticity of law can be defined as the probability that ex ante legal commitments will be relaxed or suspended in the future

I was reminded of this when I read Emily Strauss’ paper Crisis Construction in Contract Boilerplate which describes how during the Global Financial Crisis, judges in the US interpreted a boilerplate contractual clause to reach a result clearly at odds with its plain language. She writes:

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, trustees holding residential mortgage backed securities sued securities sponsors en masse on contracts warranting the quality of the mortgages sold to the trusts. These contracts almost universally contained provisions requiring sponsors to repurchase individual noncompliant loans on an individual basis. Nevertheless, court after court permitted trustees to prove their cases by sampling rather than forcing them to proceed on a loan by loan basis.

While the reasoning of these decisions is frequently dubious, they gave trustees the leverage to salvage millions – even billions – of dollars in settlements from the sponsors who had sold the shoddy loans, reassuring investors that sponsors would be forced to stand behind their contracts. However, as the crisis ebbed, courts retrenched, and more recent decisions adhere to the plain language requiring loan-by-loan repurchase. I argue that the rise and fall of decisions permitting sampling reflect a largely unexpressed judgment that in times of severe economic crisis, courts may produce decisions to help stabilize the economy.

This phenomenon is in many ways quite the opposite of Pistor’s theory. The dubious decisions referred to above went against some of the largest banks in the world while benefiting a large and disparate group of investors. While Strauss describes this as an attempt to stabilize the economy, it appears to me to be more of fairness and pragmatism trumping the express terms of the contract. But, at a deeper level, Pistor is right: the law can be very elastic in a crisis.

Posted at 7:05 pm IST on Sun, 15 Sep 2019         permanent link

Categories: law, regulation

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Reserve Bank of India’s flip-flops on floating rate benchmarks

Earlier this week, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) issued a circular asking banks to shift from internal to external benchmarks for pricing their floating rate loans. This is the latest in a series of flip-flops by the regulator on this issue over the last two decades:

• External benchmarks (2001 to 2010): The RBI Working Group of 2009 on Benchmark Prime Lending Rate described this period as follows in Chapter 4 of its report:

  In … 2000-01, banks were allowed to charge fixed/floating rate on their lending for credit limit of over Rs. 2 lakh. … banks should use only external or market-based rupee benchmark interest rates for pricing of their floating rate loan products, in order to ensure transparency. … Banks should not offer floating rate loans linked to their own internal benchmarks or any other derived rate based on the underlying.

• Internal benchmarks (2010-2019): Under the RBI Master Directions on Interest Rate on Advances floating rate rupee loans not linked to a market determined external benchmark used the following internal benchmarks:

  1. Between July 1, 2010 and March 31, 2016: the Base Rate.

  2. Between April 1, 2016 and September 30, 2019 the Marginal Cost of Funds based Lending Rate (MCLR).

• External benchmarks (2019 till next flip-flop?): This week’s circular states:

  All new floating rate personal or retail loans (housing, auto, etc.) and floating rate loans to Micro and Small Enterprises extended by banks from October 01, 2019 shall be benchmarked to one of the following:

  • Reserve Bank of India policy repo rate

  • Government of India 3-Months Treasury Bill yield published by the Financial Benchmarks India Private Ltd (FBIL)

  • Government of India 6-Months Treasury Bill yield published by the FBIL

  • Any other benchmark market interest rate published by the FBIL.

These flip-flops reflect the failure of the central bank on two dimensions:

• The failure to create a vibrant term money market with liquid benchmark rates creates dissatisfaction with external benchmarks. In 2009, the RBI Working Group justified the shift to internal benchmarks as follows:

  Banks are finding it difficult to use external benchmarks for pricing their loan products, as the available external market benchmarks (MIBOR, G-Sec) are mainly driven by liquidity conditions in the market, and do not reflect the cost of funds of the banks. … Besides, the yields on some of the instruments may not suggest any representative pricing yardsticks given that they have limited volumes compared to the overall size of the financial market.

• The failure to create a sufficiently competitive banking system means that internal benchmarks do not work well because in the absence of strong market discipline, banks do not use fair and transparent pricing of floating rate loans. The RBI Study Group that recommended the shift back to external benchmarks described the problem as follows:

  First, the experiences with the PLR, the BPLR, the base rate and the MCLR systems suggest that interest rate setting based on an internal benchmark is not transparent as banks find ways to work around. Second, the interest rate setting based on an internal benchmark such as MCLR is not in sync with the practices followed in the modern banking system.

In the next few years, India needs to work on creating both a better banking system and better financial markets. One of the pre-requisites for this is that regulators should step back from excessive micro-management. For example, the RBI Master Directions require the interest rate under external benchmark to be reset at least once in three months while elementary finance theory tells us that if the floating rate benchmark is a 6-Months Treasury Bill yield, it should reset only once in six months. Either banks will refrain from using the six month benchmark (eroding liquidity in that benchmark) or they will end up with a highly exotic and hard to value floating rate loan resetting every three months to a six month rate. Neither is a good outcome.

Posted at 4:35 pm IST on Fri, 6 Sep 2019         permanent link

Categories: banks, regulation

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No Easy Fixes for Limited Liability

US senator and presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren (who also happens to be one of America’s most eminent bankruptcy scholars) has a proposal to make private equity firms liable for the debts of their portfolio companies by ending the limited liability protection that they currently enjoy. Another well known professor of bankruptcy law and financial regulation, Adam Levitin, has weighed in with an attack on the concept of limited liability itself.

Limited liability is a substantial, regressive cross-subsidy to capital at the expense of tort creditors, tax authorities, and small businesses. Limited liability is a relic of the underdeveloped financial markets of the Gilded Age and operates as an implicit form of leverage provided by law. But it’s hardly either economically efficient or necessary for modern business activity.

These extreme claims might have some basis in the Modigliani-Miller theory of corporate leverage, but Levitin does not substantiate them with serious evidence. In fact, the claims appear to be rhetorical in nature because Levitin goes on to say:

In any event the Stop Wall Street Looting Act rolls back limited liability solely for private equity general partners in a surgical manner such that doesn’t affect limited liability more broadly.

…

…, the problem with private equity isn’t limited liability per se. The problem is limited liability combined with other unique and unavoidable features of private equity. Limited liability plus extreme leverage means that there is a seriously lopsided risk/reward tradeoff that incentivizes excessive risk-taking.

The problem is that this limited excision of limited liability does not work in the presence of derivative markets because limited liability equity can be replicated by a call option. Owning the shares of a company with substantial debt is equivalent to holding a call option on the assets of the company with a strike price equal to the face value of the debt. This is essentially the Merton model of corporate debt (Merton, R.C., 1974. On the pricing of corporate debt: The risk structure of interest rates. The Journal of Finance, 29(2), pp.449-470.)

The converse is also true: it is impossible to ban derivatives without banning debt as I argued in a blog post a decade ago. Many proposals for fixing modern finance ignore the ability to replicate one instrument with another set of instruments.

Posted at 9:14 pm IST on Fri, 30 Aug 2019         permanent link

Categories: corporate governance, leverage

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When do algorithms violate the law

I enjoyed reading the judgement of the Federal Court of Australia on whether Westpac Banking Corporation’s computer operated home loan approval system (known as the automated decision system or ADS) violated Australia’s responsible lending laws. The judgement is fun to read, and that might itself be enough reason to read it since delightful court judgements are relatively rate. More importantly, this issue of evaluating algorithms for compliance is going to become increasingly important in the years to come.

The court threw out the case basically on the ground that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) had not done its homework well enough.

[ASIC] does not allege that the alleged defects in the ADS resulted in Westpac extending loans to any consumers who it ought to have found would be unable to meet their financial obligations under the credit contracts or who would be able to do so only in circumstances of substantial hardship. ASIC did originally make several such allegations in relation to specified loans but it abandoned these on the day before the trial commenced. This then is a case about the operation of the responsible lending laws without any allegation of irresponsible lending.

ASIC was claiming that Westpac’s ADS violated the responsible lending laws simply because the rules in the algorithm ignored some data or used imperfect measures for some variables. The court rejected this approach:

It is not enough to point to an individual rule in the ADS and to submit that it does not comply with Div 3. Westpac’s entire system (including manual assessment where referral is triggered) must be examined, and compliance with Div 3 gauged that way.

Of course, the Court is right on this point, and therein lies the challenge in regulating a financial world that is increasingly run on algorithms. It appears to me that financial sector regulators are by and large unprepared for this challenge.

Posted at 7:55 pm IST on Wed, 28 Aug 2019         permanent link

Categories: law, regulation, technology

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Can India seize the Hong Kong opportunity?

As Hong Kong moves ever closer to a military denouement, India needs to think hard about the opportunity it could provide to its own fledgling offshore financial centre. Over the last several years, India has built the foundations for an offshore financial centre at GIFT City in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. A lot of physical infrastructure has been created, exemptions have been made from the normal exchange control regime, tax concessions have been provided, and some small beginnings have been made in offering offshore financial services. But the turmoil in Hong Kong presents opportunities of a vastly different order.

Is India willing to take the key steps that would make it an attractive option to businesses and individuals that may wish to relocate out of Hong Kong now or in the immediate future?

• Are we willing to offer long term residence and work permits to those with an employment record in Hong Kong (and a citizenship of a friendly country)?

• Are we willing to provide a legal and taxation regime that would allow Hong Kong based entities to re-domicile to an offshore financial centre in India with ease?

• Are we willing to hire people with regulatory experience in Hong Kong to staff a unified regulator for our offshore financial centre?

• Are we willing to facilitate global entities with substantial operations in Hong Kong that would like to set up an entity in an Indian offshore financial centre as a fall back option that could quickly take over operations currently carried out in Hong Kong?

Posted at 4:56 pm IST on Wed, 14 Aug 2019         permanent link

Categories: international finance

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QE through unlimited buying of foreign equities

After the global financial crisis, central banks have done many things that were previously considered unthinkable, and Switzerland and Japan have probably been more radical than most others. But as the eurozone slips deeper and deeper into the quagmire of negative yields, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan are now at risk of being perceived as paragons of sound money.

The situation in the eurozone is so bad that the entire yield curve (all the way to 30 years) is negative in Germany and Netherlands, and it is possible that the ECB will be forced to push policy rates even deeper into negative rates. Both the Swiss franc and the Japanese yen have been pushed higher and even Bitcoin looks like a safe haven currency if you look only at a one week price chart.

The pioneers of monetary easing are reaching the limits of their existing unconventional policies, and will have to turn to something even more unthinkable. To compete with the frightening scale of European easing, Switzerland and Japan have to find an asset class that can accommodate almost unlimited buying without running into capacity constraints, creating excessive market distortions, or provoking a severe political backlash. I think at some point they will very reluctantly be driven to the conclusion that there is only asset class that fits the bill and that is global equities.

A portfolio of global index funds can absorb a few trillion dollars of central bank buying without too much disturbance. Political backlash would be muted for two reasons. First, by buying index funds instead of buying assets directly, they avoid getting involved in the sensitive issues of corporate governance and control. Second, every politician likes a rising stock market. Even America’s tweeter-in-chief who sees currency manipulators wherever he looks will probably tolerate a weaker yen if it takes the S&P 500 index to new highs.

Perhaps – just perhaps – falling global equities provide an opportunity for some ordinary investors to front-run the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan before these central banks get into the game.

Posted at 6:08 pm IST on Tue, 6 Aug 2019         permanent link

Categories: investment, monetary policy

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Big Tech 2019 = Big Finance 2005 = Big Risk?

That is the title of my post today in the sister blog on computing. In 2005, Big Finance was at the top of the world, but in 2008, it all came crashing down. It appears to me that Big Tech which enjoys a similar situation of dominance today also suffers from the same kind of hubris that destroyed Big Finance a decade ago. A change in fortunes could be as fast and as brutal as was the case with Big Finance a decade ago. Prudent risk management today demands that individuals and organizations take steps to protect themselves against the risk that one or more of the Big Tech companies would go bust or shutdown their services for other reasons.

Posted at 9:00 pm IST on Fri, 26 Jul 2019         permanent link

Categories: technology

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A petty money dispute holds market to ransom

I am not a lawyer, and so it is with much trepidation that I write about a petty dispute that has been holding the Indian market to ransom. I venture to write only because I am convinced that the issue is not really about legal technicalities, and in any case the entire money dispute is quite petty and trivial compared to the broader issue of market integrity and the sanctity of key market infrastructure.

The facts of the dispute are well brought out in an order issued in May 2019 by the Securities Appellate Tribunal. The genesis of the dispute lies with a brokerage firm, Allied Financial Services, that allegedly stole about $50 million worth of its clients’ securities and pledged them as collateral with its Clearing Member, ILFS Securities, to support an options trade that they had done on the National Stock Exchange (NSE). On the strength of this collateral, ILFS Securities, deposited cash margins with NSE Clearing to support the trade done by Allied. After receiving complaints of fraud, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) froze the collateral lying with ILFS Securities. When the time came to settle the trade, ILFS Securities asked for annulment of the trade. Even if the trade is annulled, ILFS would have to return the option premium and the benefit to them would be a only marginal reduction in the quantum of loss. ILFS Securities’ gain of probably $5-10 million would of course be the loss of the counter parties to the trade.

I deliberately call this a petty dispute because for some of the institutions involved, $5 million or even $50 million is quite likely a rounding error on their balance sheets. Even for the smaller entities, it is not by itself a bankruptcy threatening event. We are not talking about a poor investor whose lifetime savings could be wiped out by the dispute; we are talking about some big institutions which might be somewhat better off or somewhat worse off depending on which way the dispute is resolved. We are also not talking about recovering money from the alleged fraudster; the dispute is all about allocating the losses among different victims of the alleged fraud.

The tragedy is that as a result of this petty dispute, there has been a stay on the settlement of the trade. If not resolved soon, this settlement failure risks causing serious damage to the integrity and reputation of India’s largest stock exchange and its clearing corporation.

The core function of a stock exchange and its clearing corporation is to allow complete strangers to trade without doing any due diligence on each other. If you do an OTC trade or bilateral trade, you have to worry about whether your counter party is trustworthy. On the other hand, when you sell some shares on an exchange, you do not even bother to ask who was the buyer because it does not matter. The whole function of the exchange is to make that question (whom am I trading with) irrelevant and thereby create a national (or even global) market. OTC markets are a cosy club, while exchanges are open to one and all. At the centre of this magical transformation is the clearing corporation that becomes the counter party to all trades (novation) and thereby insulates buyer and seller from each other.

It is this core promise of the clearing corporation that has been called into question by the way this petty dispute has been allowed to fester and linger. A shadow has been allowed to fall on the sanctity of a key market infrastructure. I do not blame the judiciary for this tragedy because the judiciary adjudicates only issues that are brought before it. And it is the money dispute that has come before the judiciary because all the big and mighty entities involved have the wherewithal to hire the best lawyers to argue that this trivial dispute is the most important thing in the world.

The burden of preventing this tragedy lies primarily with the regulator who has the responsibility and mandate to draw the judiciary’s attention to the systemic issues and national interest involved in the smooth functioning of our market infrastructure. A $5 or even $50 million dispute should not be allowed to threaten the integrity of a $2 trillion stock market. As I said, I am not a lawyer, but I find it hard to believe that SEBI would not receive a patient hearing in the highest courts of the land if it made an earnest plea on its statutory duty to protect the investor interest and the public interest. Instead, it has confined itself to narrow legalistic arguments about who has the power to annul a trade and under what conditions. It has allowed the disputants to frame the debate instead of seeking to change the frame of the debate.

Posted at 4:06 pm IST on Thu, 25 Jul 2019         permanent link

Categories: exchanges, law, regulation

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US wants to nurture single stock futures

Two decades ago, when India was trying to set up its equity derivatives market, the most contentious issue was that of single stock futures – market participants were keen on this product, while a large group of sceptics argued that the product did not exist in the US and was in fact confined to a handful of countries. It was also thought to be too similar to the indigenous system of rolling settlement known as badla which was somehow thought to be evil. The compromise was to begin with index futures and defer the launch of single stock futures. In reality, the single stock future was the first equity derivative to become successful in India, and then the earlier products picked up with a significant lag. India also became one of the largest single stock future markets in the world while also creating very liquid index futures, index options and single stock option markets. The Indian experience also demonstrated that each of these four markets catered to a different need. For example, my former doctoral student Sonali Jain in a recent paper, along with my colleagues, Sobhesh Agarwalla and Ajay Pandey and myself found that in India, single stock futures play the role that the options market plays in the US for informed trading around earnings announcements. This implies that single stock futures have some clear advantages over options in informed trading.

With this background, I found it quite amusing to read the joint proposal by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to reduce margins for retail investors in single stock futures (see press release and proposal). The US set up a single stock futures market a decade ago, but it remains tiny. The SEC is now very clear about its desire to promote the growth of this market:

The security futures market can provide a low-friction means of obtaining delta exposures, and relatively high margin requirements … may have played a role in restraining its development.

To the extent that the proposed reductions in margin requirements encourage significant growth in the security futures markets, it may, in time, improve price discovery for underlying securities. In particular, a more active security futures market can reduce the frictions associated with shorting equity exposures, making it easier for negative information about a firm’s fundamentals to be incorporated into security prices. This could promote more efficient capital allocations by facilitating the flow of financial resources to their most productive uses.

There is also a degree of anxiety about foreign markets that have stolen a march over the US in this product:

Lowering the minimum margin requirement also could enable the one U.S. security futures exchange to better compete in the global marketplace, where security futures traded on foreign exchanges are subject to risk-based margin requirements that are generally lower than those applied to security futures traded in the U.S.

To make things more interesting, there is also a public statement of dissent by one of the SEC Commissioners. I never thought that a day would come when it would be easier to obtain consensus between the SEC and the CFTC than to get consensus within the SEC. What is striking about this dissent is that it does not disagree with the goal of promoting single stock futures. Commissioner Jackson says:

So [stock futures] can provide a valuable price-discovery function in stock markets and give investors an important way to diversify.

But he is not convinced that reducing margins are the best way to accomplish this goal. He believes that there are many alternatives that could and should have been considered. As an example, he suggests that:

rather than asking us to lower margin requirements, an exchange could simply reduce the contract size for single-stock futures. … reducing contract size could also increase access to single-stock futures for the most popular securities and improve efficiency. … Indeed, one of the most liquid contracts in the world, the S&P E-mini Futures contract, is the product of cutting the classic S&P Futures contract in half.

To me, what is noteworthy is that, in two decades, the world has moved from frowning on single stock futures to trying to nurture them.

Posted at 12:23 pm IST on Thu, 11 Jul 2019         permanent link

Categories: derivatives, regulation

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Deep fakes in finance?

For the last couple of years, I have been following the phenomenon of Deep Fakes with a mixture of cynicism and disinterest. It is only in the last few weeks that I have begun to worry that this is not something that concerns only a few celebrities, but could become a problem for the financial sector in general.

Last week, I read two things that brought the matter to focus. First was the news report about the fake French minister in a silicone mask who stole millions of euros from some of the richest men of Europe (h/t Bruce Schneier). The minister who was impersonated was quite impressed by the quality of the fake video: “They did a pretty good job. Unfortunately some people fell for it. They did a really good impression of my voice. But no-one can truly pass themselves off as me.”

The second was the following recommendation in the report of the Expert Committee on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises set up by the Reserve Bank of India under the Chairmanship of Shri U K Sinha:

Presently the KYC process is manual and necessitates a physical presence, thus increasing costs and timelines in completing the required KYC processes. As an alternative to enabling e-KYC, the Committee recommends video KYC to be adopted as a part of digital financial architecture as a suitable alternative to performing a digital Aadhaar-based KYC process towards enabling non-physical customer onboarding. (Box XIV- Video Based KYC in Chapter 8)

It appears to me that we will see more of this: only a handful of Luddites will oppose the use of technology that saves cost and eliminates hassles. However, it is part of the folklore of digital security that you can pick any two of Secure, Usable and Affordable – you cannot get all three. Most market architectures would make the natural choice of Usable and Affordable and de-prioritize Security. Deep Fakes would thus emerge as a problem for mainstream finance over a course of time, but I guess it will (perhaps rightly) be treated as a cost of doing business.

Posted at 1:03 pm IST on Tue, 2 Jul 2019         permanent link

Categories: fraud, technology

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The bankers, by contrast, moved on

I just finished reading Hassan Malik’s book Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2018) which is based on his PhD dissertation. I was struck by the close parallels between the excessive risk tolerance that we are seeing in the world today and the complacency and reaching for yield that Malik documents in international lending to Russia between 1906 and 1917.

In his final chapter, Malik describes the sorry fate of small French investors and Russian technocrats after the Russian default of 1918. He then concludes the book with the line that I have used as the title of this post:

The bankers, by contrast, moved on.

In that respect, not much changed between 1918 and 2008.

Posted at 6:15 pm IST on Sat, 29 Jun 2019         permanent link

Categories: banks, interesting books, sovereign risk

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Allowing a corporate body to be a director

A few months back, Joseph Franco published a fascinating paper about a commoditized governance model adopted by a small minority of US mutual funds where the entire governance is outsourced to an unaffiliated entity that specializes in providing governance services. (Commoditized Governance: The Curious Case of Investment Company Shared Series Trusts (February 14, 2019). 44 J. Corp. L. 233 (2018) ; Suffolk University Law School Research Paper No. 19-7. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3334701). Franco concludes that this model is merely an interesting curiosity:

Where a board’s role primarily involves organizational, rather than strategic, oversight of an underlying business, as in the fund industry, commoditized governance may prove attractive for at least some industry participants. In contrast, where a board’s role encompasses both organizational and strategic oversight of an underlying business, as is more commonly the case, commoditized governance will not be a successful governance model. Accordingly, and consistent with practical experience, commoditized governance will exist largely as an exceptional, rather than common, form of entity governance.

This discussion got me thinking about a related idea – would it make sense to let specialized unaffiliated corporate bodies (like LLPs, LLCs or private companies) to become independent directors of large companies? (I do not want to contemplate the recursion involved in letting the independent director be another listed company.)

The current model of allowing only individuals to become independent directors is not working well. First of all, most independent directors have quite meagre wealth, and so when things go wrong, investors can recover virtually nothing by suing the independent directors (They gain much more by suing the auditors or other gatekeepers). At the same time, prosecutors and regulators are very keen to punish the directors, and this keenness often depends more on the quantum of the loss and less on the degree of negligence of the director. This means that highly risk averse people would be reluctant to become independent directors. If the only people willing to serve on the board are those with a high degree of risk tolerance, then the companies that they govern would naturally tend to pursue high risk strategies as was well illustrated by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

Second, most independent directors lack the administrative and analytical support that is often needed to challenge management strategy at a fundamental level. Almost all independent directors can only envy the massive support that non independent directors (venture capitalists, private equity firms, activist investors, nominees of the lenders and representatives of controlling shareholders) get from their respective organizations. Unfortunately, these well endowed non independent directors are often more interested in looking after the interests of their respective constituencies, than the interests of the company itself or its shareholders as a whole.

The governance deficit that we observe in some of the largest companies in the US, in India, and elsewhere in the world, is symptomatic of these fundamental problems of the current model of relying on individuals to serve as independent directors. I think there is much to be gained by shifting to a model of incorporated independent directors. This will also make it easier to impose capital adequacy and skin in the game requirements. Valuation metrics in the financial services industry (for example, asset managers and rating agencies) suggest that a large incorporated independent director service provider would command a valuation of 5 – 10 times revenue. If independent directors are paid 0.5 – 1% of profits, and each incorporated independent director serves on boards of 30 – 100 large companies, then the independent directors of a company would probably have a combined valuation of twice the annual profits of a large company. That would represent a juicy litigation target for shareholders who suffer losses due to a governance failure (probably a more juicy target than the auditors). The large franchise value of the business would motivate these incorporated independent directors to exercise a high degree of diligence in performing their work, and would also make them highly sensitive to reputation risk. Would this not be a major improvement over the current system?

Posted at 3:47 pm IST on Sat, 22 Jun 2019         permanent link

Categories: corporate governance, law

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Bonds and loans

Banks give loans, while mutual funds buy bonds. Recent difficulties of Indian debt mutual funds in dealing with corporate defaults suggest, however, that these lines are quite blurred. Illiquid bonds are like loans in all but name, and then mutual funds start looking a lot like banks with all the attendant risks. Problems of this kind are not unique to India. The suspension of dealing in the LF Woodward Equity Income Fund run by one of the UK’s “star” fund managers raises similar questions about the difference between an equity mutual fund and a venture capital fund.

Both in the Indian and the UK situations, the core of the problem is that while regulators insisted on mutual funds investing in listed assets, “listed” does not necessarily mean “liquid”. The core premise of an open end mutual fund is that assets are sufficiently liquid that (a) no external liquidity support is needed and (b) a fair Net Asset Value (NAV) can be reliably computed. The problem is that many listed assets do not meet this requirement (and, on the contrary, some unlisted assets might).

In India, we have created a large debt mutual fund industry without paying enough attention to creating a liquid corporate bond market. The result is that much of what passes as bonds are loans dressed up in the legalese of bonds and listed on exchanges which collect listing fees but do not provide worthwhile liquidity.

More importantly, we have not encouraged the creation of a vibrant Credit Default Swap (CDS) market. A liquid CDS market would facilitate the flow of negative information about bonds (through shorting the CDS) and would thus hopefully provide early warning signals about impending downgrades and defaults. Currently, distressed bonds are often valued close to par right up to the date of default, and then they just fall off a cliff.

Unfortunately, regulators in India have been hesitant to allow markets that can speak truth to power, while being very happy to create a simulacrum of a corporate bond market.

Posted at 4:25 pm IST on Thu, 13 Jun 2019         permanent link

Categories: banks, bond markets, mutual funds

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Korean derivatives reforms come full circle

Back in 2011, South Korea embarked on a significant clampdown on retail participation in its equity derivatives market which is one of the largest in the world. The result of these measures was to effectively hand over the Korean derivatives market to foreigners. As for protecting retail investors from speculative misadventures, probably the only effect was to divert the speculative energies into bitcoin, exotic structured products and the like. It took the Koreans eight years to realize that the 2011 measures had basically thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Now they are pedalling back furiously and trying to bring Korean investors back into the market. The announcement last week by the Korean Financial Services Commission (FSC) reads like a mea culpa (if you read between the lines).

This episode holds a lot of lessons for India as well as we too have a host of would-be reformers who would love to clampdown on retail speculation in equity derivatives. There is every reason to believe that if they succeed, the results will be similar to that in Korea – the purported cure will be worse than the purported disease.

Posted at 1:26 pm IST on Mon, 3 Jun 2019         permanent link

Categories: derivatives, regulation

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