Information

Ben Bernanke looks at what the financial crisis means for economics. In the middle of this there is an overview of information and expectations under uncertainty.

Most fundamentally, and perhaps most challenging for researchers, the crisis should motivate economists to think further about their modeling of human behavior. Most economic researchers continue to work within the classical paradigm that assumes rational, self-interested behavior and the maximization of "expected utility"--a framework based on a formal description of risky situations and a theory of individual choice that has been very useful through its integration of economics, statistics, and decision theory.⁹ An important assumption of that framework is that, in making decisions under uncertainty, economic agents can assign meaningful probabilities to alternative outcomes. However, during the worst phase of the financial crisis, many economic actors--including investors, employers, and consumers--metaphorically threw up their hands and admitted that, given the extreme and, in some ways, unprecedented nature of the crisis, they did not know what they did not know. Or, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, there were too many "unknown unknowns." The profound uncertainty associated with the "unknown unknowns" during the crisis resulted in panicky selling by investors, sharp cuts in payrolls by employers, and significant increases in households' precautionary saving.

The idea that, at certain times, decisionmakers simply cannot assign meaningful probabilities to alternative outcomes--indeed, cannot even think of all the possible outcomes--is known as Knightian uncertainty, after the economist Frank Knight who discussed the idea in the 1920s. Although economists and psychologists have long recognized the challenges such ambiguity presents and have analyzed the distinction between risk aversion and ambiguity aversion, much of this work has been abstract and relatively little progress has been made in describing and predicting the behavior of human beings under circumstances in which their knowledge and experience provide little useful information.¹⁰ Research in this area could aid our understanding of crises and other extreme situations. I suspect that progress will require careful empirical research with attention to psychological as well as economic factors.

This can be tied to the modelling of expectations in the UIP model. There may be a non-linear model that is distributed with a negative skew and kurtosis in regular times and collapses into something binary in a crisis.

Not poisoned but starved

Gary Wenk speaks about "brain food" and the way that the shared ancestory of ourselves and plants makes components of our food most effective in affecting our bodies and minds. Amidst this:

No, he does not die, because his species and that of the creature on this foreign planet do not share an evolutionary past or a common ancestor. Although they may both be made of proteins formed from amino acids, their independent evolutionary paths should made it highly improbable that they use similar neurotransmitter molecules within their respective brains and bodies. Every spaceman from Flash Gordon to Captain Kirk to Luke Skywalker should feel safe walking around any planet (except their own) with impunity from animal and plant toxins. For this same reason, the intoxicating drinks and powerful medicines that always seem to be popular in these foreign worlds in science fiction movies would also have totally different effects, if any effects at all, on the brains of our plucky spaceman. Eating otherworldly foods might be the most disappointing and distressing experience of all: Even if they were filling and somehow tasted delicious, as products of utterly alien biochemistries they would probably prove devoid of nourishment for our Earthly bodies. Thus, starvation might be the greatest threat to any future explorers of alien biospheres. Unless, perhaps, they’d brought along a large supply of chocolate.

Risk

Another look at the nature of risk in the coverage of EMH in the FT.

Second is the pro-cyclical nature of value-at-risk, a measure of the risk of loss. Recent high market volatility is sharpening attention towards risk and the need to measure and manage it. At the same time, rapid financial innovation has increased the ability to monitor and control risks, allowing measures like Var to gain further ground. This would all be good news, if the markets were using the right type of Var for establishing the risk limits.

Generally, when prices move down, Var goes up, eventually triggering the risk limits and thus enlarging the troops of sellers. Symmetrically, the reduction of Var in good times encourages traders and fund managers to pile on risk, increasing their risk exposures when prices are already high and while demand is thriving. This can compound the positive feedback mentioned earlier.

The interesting thing here is the way that a period of low volatility will provide a sample of low volatility and increased risk taking. Increased volatility leads to less risk taking. Can we model this?

Mobile phone and microfinance

Amidst a discussion of mobile phones in Kenya in the Guardian, the possibility that microfinance improvements may also be seen.

Besides enabling millions of people to easily communicate over distance for the first time, the mobile phone has spurred a host of other life-improving innovations, including a money transfer service that allows people to send cash instantly across the country via text message.

Washington Consensus

Interesting! I had never seen this before.

From Ronald McKinnon.

John Williamson (1990) did all a great favor by writing down the rules for what he called “The Washington Consensus” for developing countries to follow to absorb aid efficiently:

1. Fiscal policy discipline.
2. Redirection of public spending from subsidies (“especially in discriminate subsidies” toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care, and infrastructure;
3. Tax Reform—broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates:
4. Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5. Competitive exchange rates;
6. Trade liberalization—with particular emphasis on the elimination of quantitative restrictions; any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively uniform tariffs;
7. Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8. Privatization of state enterprises;
9. Deregulation—abolish regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudent oversight of financial institutions.
10. Legal security for property rights.

To provide perspective on these ten rules, the year 1990, when Williamson wrote, is important. It was just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the complete collapse of confidence in Soviet-style socialism. The rules reflect the hegemonic confidence that most people then had in liberal market-oriented capitalism—think Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But, 20 years later, should the meteoric rise of socialist China—both in its own remarkable growth in living standards, and in the effectiveness of its foreign “aid” to developing countries, undermine our confidence in Williamson’s Washington Consensus?

Copyright and competition

De Spiegel discusses work by Wolfgang Menzel that suggests that an absence of copy right in Germany was responsible for a flourishing of ideas. In contrast to England, where copyright laws kept monopoly power over ideas and prevented competition, in Germany there was an outpouring of non-fiction publishing. German publishers reacted to their inability to enforce their rights by using price discrimination to cover the market.

In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.

European money markets

Some interesting comments on the state of the money market in Europe. It appears that things remain very tight and that collateral is increasingly demanded.

What Comotto emphasises, however, is that while that trend may have begun as far back as the 1990s, the recent European crisis has now nearly completely vaporised what little unsecured interbank lending was left in the market. What’s more, the demand for tri-party transactions — where collateral is managed by a custodian rather than bilaterally — has almost doubled from less than 25 per cent before the Lehman crisis to almost 50 per cent since.

This is from Richard Comotto of the European repo market, quoted in the FT's Alphaville. There is a lot more interesting information on the repo and money markets. //

Power law and SMEs

More evidence of a power law.

The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, an independent trade body, calculates that just 6 per cent of the highest growth businesses generated 54 per cent of new jobs over the last decade.

This is important because it means that it is a few high quality SME creations that generate all the social benefit as well as the profit. More from the Financial Times Lex column,

Changes in microsctures

Raijiv Sethi raises the idea that increased focus on algorithmic trading is removing the support for smaller size capitalisation and reducing the number of public limited companies.

In addition, stock market structure today is geared for large‐capitalization stocks with typically symmetrical order books but disastrous for the vast majority of small‐capitalization stocks with asymmetrical order books (where there is not naturally an offsetting buy order to match against a sell order and vice versa)... The “Flash Crash” was an example of where even normally liquid securities went to a state of “asymmetry” and price discovery broke down...

[Until] all trades, quotes and other messages in all interrelated markets are tagged and traceable to the trading venue, broker and ultimate investor, and disclosed to the market, markets will not be perceived as fair... With full tagging, tracking and reporting and the application of posttrade analysis and test bed techniques such as Agent‐Based Models, regulators and market participants will... once and for all be in a position to judge the impact of other participants and to regulate and plan accordingly...

Liquidity Preference

Keynes:

Because... our desire to hold Money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future.... The significance of this characteristic of money has usually been overlooked; and in so far as it has been noticed, the essential nature of the phenomenon has been misdescribed. For what has attracted attention has been the quantity of money which has been hoarded... supposed to have a direct proportionate effect on the price level through affecting the velocity of circulation. But the quantity of hoards can only be altered either if the total quantity of money is changed or if the quantity of current money income (I speak broadly) is changed; whereas fluctuations in the degree of confidence are capable of... modifying... the premium which has to be offered to induce people not to hoard. And changes in... liquidity preference... affect, not [consumer] prices, but the rate of interest.

Keynes and uncertainty

Keynes in the 1937 Journal of Economics take another look at uncertainty.

By ‘uncertain’ knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty; nor is the prospect of a Victory bond being drawn. Or, again, the expectation of life is only slightly uncertain.... The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of an European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters their is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know. Nevertheless, the necessity for action and for decision compels us as practical men to do our best to overlook this awkward fact and to behave exactly as we should if we had behind us a good Benthamite calculation.... How do we manage?... (1) We assume that the present is a much more serviceable guide to the future than a candid examination of past experience would show it.... (2) We assume that the existing state of opinion as expressed in prices and the character of existing output is based on a correct summing up of future prospects.... (3) Knowing that our individual judgment is worthless, we endeavour to fall back on the judgment of the rest of the world which is perhaps better informed....

The key here seems to be a vague and embryonic outline of some of the ideas of behavioural finance. How do we deal with uncertainty when there is no basis to make an estimate of probabilities? What short-cuts can the mind use to deal with these issues? One of the things that Keynes suggests here and the The General Theory is the idea that we assume that things will be rather similar to how they have been in the past. This is probably a reasonable starting point. It is conservatism. Another thing that Keynes suggests is that we look to the opinion of others. Here we get the basis for a social construction of belief.

Market making or trading

There is a lot post on the FT's Alphaville looking at the position of Jerome Kerviel. There is a blurring of the distinction between market-maker and proprietary trader. The fact that cash positions were carried over from one day to the next is taken as a sign that there was more than just market-making going on.

Run on the bank

Pepy's diary 13th June 1667, in the wake of the Dutch attack on Chatam:

I presently resolved of my father’s and wife’s going into the country; and, at two hours’ warning, they did go by the coach this day, with about 1300l.in gold in their night-bag. Pray God give them good passage, and good care to hide it when they come home! but my heart is full of fear: They gone, I continued in fright and fear what to do with the rest. W. Hewer hath been at the banker’s, and hath got 500l. out of Backewell’s hands of his own money; but they are so called upon that they will be all broke, hundreds coming to them for money: and their answer is, “It is payable at twenty days — when the days are out, we will pay you;” and those that are not so, they make tell over their money, and make their bags false, on purpose to give cause to retell it, and so spend time. I cannot have my 200 pieces of gold again for silver, all being bought up last night that were to be had, and sold for 24 and 25s. a-piece.

Power law

O2 indicate that the use of bandwidth is partly determined by a power law.

More here from the Guardian.

Instead, it said that a tiny number – just 1% 0.1% (corrected: incorrect figure given by O2 initially) of smartphone users – are using 36% of its total mobile data traffic, and that they needed to be encouraged to change their behaviour.

Identity economics

George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton's identity economics is reviewed by Whimsley.

Greed is good

What determines utility? Eric Falkenstein argues that envy is more important that greed. This is consistent with some of the findings of behavioural experiments. This can provide a better understanding of bubbles as it would indicate that keeping up with other bubble followers is one reason that many people are sucked in. It also suggests that the best investment strategy is one that is individualistic and greedy. An example would be Warren Buffett and the technology boom. It also suggests that hedge funds that follow an independent strategy and do not worry about relative performance will be better in the long run.

Subordinated debt

Amidst a discussion of the difficulties facing Greek restructuring of its debt, John Dizard gives a good overview of subordinated debt.

As I have written, Greece is in a better legal position to reschedule its sovereign debt on favourable terms than, say, Argentina back at the end of 2001. About 90 per cent of Greek sovereign debt is in the form of bonds governed by Greek law.

That means if Greece wants to reschedule the interest rate and maturity of its debt, its national parliament can just pass a law decreeing the new terms. Investors would have no legal recourse.

The practical problem with doing that unilaterally is that Greece is still running large fiscal and trade deficits, so it cannot yet run its economy on a cash basis, as Argentina and others did after their defaults. That is why the European Union-International Monetary Fund stabilisation package is needed to cover maturing debt issues and also the continuing twin deficits, at least for the three years the facilities are supposed to be in place.

From the Greek point of view, though, it doesn't make sense for the three-year plan to run its course, even if the country meets its financial targets. Assuming it all works, Greece would have a substantially higher debt that would not be in the form of loosely covenanted Greek-law bonds, but virtually un-defaultable obligations to European governments, the EU and the IMF. The notion that banks or bond investors would be willing, at that point, to offer deeply subordinated credit to Greece is mere fantasy.

Profits from prop trading

In the continued search for profits generated by prop trading, this from the FT story on the likely effect of bank regulation on revenues

The so-called Volcker rule would be slightly less feared. Prop trading is not as profitable over the long run as many realise, but if banks are also forced to stop investing in hedge funds and private equity, normalised earnings could fall by about 2 per cent, according to Goldman Sachs.

There is also this from Tyler Durden

So with a delay of about six months since Zero Hedge started pounding on the topic of prop trading as the last bastion of perfectly legal front-running, which co-opts clients into "efficient" flow execution with the few remaining monopolist entities left on Wall Street in exchange for assorted prop trading desks taking advantage of complete flow visibility (i.e., the hedge fund nature of all modern Wall Street bail out recipients) which is simply a way to run alongside (or in front of) whale orders, thus providing guaranteed and risk free returns, the administration has finally realized what we have claimed for many months: that prop trading is nothing but a quasi-illegal operation, which was made explicitly and perfectly permissible with the adoption of the disastrous Gramm-Leach-Bliley act. As long as prop trading exists, Goldman (which is reporting earnings tomorrow, and we expect will announce another quarter of 90%+ profitable trading days only thanks to it taking full advantage of a thorough visibility of the FICC and equity flow market and a commingled prop and flow order book) will have record earnings, until such time as the Minsky Moment in Goldman's balance sheet arises again and blows up the financial system one more time.

Measuring inflation

The Cleveland Fed reports some new research by Bryan and Meyer that tries to break price changes down into those that are frequent and those that happen only occasionally. The occasional changes are seen as being affected by the outlook for future inflation and therefore provide a signal about inflation expectations. They produce a flexible price index and a sticky price index. The sticky price index seems to contain some valuable information that improves the forecast of future inflation.

No need for bank diversification?

The FT's Lex asks why BoA is divesting assets in strongly growing Brazil and concludes that increased capital requirements and reduced leverage reduces the need for diversification to stabilise earnings.

A potential answer is that global banking models are being subtly revised in response to increased regulation. One of the little understood mysteries of the boom years is why banks expanded internationally when there were no synergy benefits and shareholders could themselves diversify more efficiently. The reason was leverage: if you are 30 times geared, it is crucial to have a stable earnings base. Geographic diversification was one way to get it, even if returns in individual countries were low.

Exchanges, liquidity and stock gyrations

The wild swings in US equity markets that were seen last Thursday have generated a lot of talk about the current structure of equity markets and the increased role of automated trading.

It appears that, with multiple exchanges, the closure of some markets may just increase the reliance on more peripheral, less liquid alternatives. The traditional specialist on the floor of the NYSE is no longer a backstop to prevent a collapse in price.

James Hamilton

Another notion that's popular with many financial gurus these days is the claim that you can eliminate certain risks to your portfolio with the right strategy of automatic trading and stop-loss sell orders. Again that claim invites an economic question-- if you are getting an insurance policy, who is selling it to you? I believe the implicit answer is, you are counting on the market-maker to insure you by taking the other side of your escape transactions. But the curious thing about such an insurance policy is that the market-maker gets to decide what premium to charge you after you ask to collect on the policy. You just might find that the state of the world when you and your buddies all most desperately want to cash in on your insurance is exactly the time when the premium proves to be ruinously expensive.

Paul Kedrosky

But all of this changes market microstructure in insidiously destabilizing ways. For the first time we have large providers of this shadow liquidity, algorithms and high-frequency sorts, that individually account for large percentages of daily trading activity, and, at the same time, that can be turned off with a switch, or at an algorithmic whim. As a result, in market crises, when liquidity was always hardest to find, it now doesn't just become hard to find, it disappears altogether, like water rushing out sight via a trapdoor to hell. Old-style market-makers are standing aside as panicky orders pour in, and they look straight at shadow liquidity providers and say, "No thanks. You battle bots take it". And, they don't

The FT on algorithmic trading.

The FT looks at the regulatory impact.

Larry Tabb, chief executive of consultancy The Tabb Group, says: “We really need to step back and think about centralisation versus fragmentation and who is providing liquidity. It opens the up market to a whole series of questions about how we want our markets to function.”

Trading Places

Increased risk

European banks are suffering increased funding costs as a result of fears over Greek contagion. From the FT.

A key measure of bank risk, the overnight index swap spread on futures contracts in the eurozone, rose to a record high this week. This measures the premium over “risk-free” overnight rates of three-month rates, which carry greater credit risk.

Another warning sign is a significant shift to overnight lending by banks, particularly within troubled areas of the eurozone. Of the €450bn ($589bn) in daily turnover in the European money markets, 90 per cent is now in overnight lending, according to interdealer broker

Article 125 of the Lisbon Treaty

1. The Union shall not be liable for or assume the commitments of central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of any Member State, without prejudice to mutual financial guarantees for the joint execution of a specific project. A Member State shall not be liable for or assume the commitments of central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of another Member State, without prejudice to mutual financial guarantees for the joint execution of a specific project.

2. The Council, on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the European Parliament, may, as required, specify definitions for the application of the prohibitions referred to in Articles 123 and 124 and in this Article.

Deep knowledge

The FT covers the case against the rating agencies and highlights the fact that there was knowledge within the institution about the reputational risk being taken. The FT suggests that this was profit-motivated, which is certainly part of the story. However, it may also be the case that these dispirit, lower-level voices could not be hear above the jingling of the tills ringing in new business. The challenge of governance is to give more weight to these voices.

he e-mails show signs of the agencies’ knowledge of the impending financial collapse. But in the interests of maintaining market share both S&P and Moody’s felt the need to continue their practices – even though many employees had misgivings.

“Screwing with (the model’s) criteria to ‘get the deal’ is putting the entire S&P franchise at risk – it’s a bad idea,” said one S&P employee. Another S&P employee described the drive for revenue and its effect on the relationship between banks and rating agencies as “a kind of Stockholm syndrome”.

Yet another captures that alleged conflict of interest almost perfectly: “Rating agencies continue to create an even bigger monster – the CDO market,” wrote an S&P staffer. “Let’s hope we are all retired by the time this house of cards falters.”

The agencies also failed to incorporate their growing awareness of fraud in the lending industry into their rating practices, as it was seen as a potential block to revenue.

In January 2007, an S&P analyst rating a Goldman Sachs CDO with subprime loans issued by Fremont Investment and Loan, which had just stopped using 8,000 of its brokers because they were agreeing loans with some of the highest delinquency rates in the country, asked superiors whether to take Fremont’s reputation into account.

Speculation

Pepy's diary 15th March 1666

So I to the office all the morning, and at noon to the ‘Change, where I do hear that letters this day come to Court do tell us that we are likely not to agree, the Dutch demanding high terms, and the King of France the like, in a most braving manner. The merchants do give themselves over for lost, no man knowing what to do, whether to sell or buy, not knowing whether peace or war to expect, and I am told that could that be now known a man might get 20,000l. in a week’s time by buying up of goods in case there should be war.

CDS

John Kay

But it strains language to breaking point to describe CDS transactions as anything but gambling. The traders in AIG’s financial products division were inheritors of the amusements of Edward Lloyd’s coffee shop rather than the values of Swiss farmers.

I am not sure that this is an accurate description. It seems to me that AIG was taking the risk from the Swiss farmers and receiving the income for total collapse that they did not believe could happen. However, when all the crops failed, AIG could not compensate the farmers and had to be bailed out by the government. There is speculative trading there, but it is not being done by AIG.

Theomdynamics

The first and second laws of thermodynamics: work uses energy and systems are inefficient. A good example with Google search in New Scientist. However, as if often the case when talking about thermodynamics and economics, there is no accounting for the fact that society, unlike the real world, can create something out of nothing.

Things like economies of scale and network effects have confounded people from Smith to Malthus to Marx. In this case, there is a need to compare the cost (lightbulb for one hour) against any possible benefit.

Currency swap

The FT reports that Greece may try to tap US investors with a US dollar-denominated bond, giving some evidence of institutional features that may justify currency swaps.

Greece’s most recent sales of euro-denominated bonds have attracted lower levels of interest and the government is now aiming to issue in dollars, targeting emerging market investors who are attracted by higher yields.

Bond model

Here are some links to research on the yield curve.

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2006/07/reading_the_yie.html

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2006/11/the_yield_curve_2.html

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/09/globalization_a.html

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2009/04/the_yield_curve_6.html

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2006/04/the_yield_curve.html

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/02/accounting-for.html

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2005/06/speculation_on_.html

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/01/why_is_the_yiel.html

Though funding costs are high, there is ample demand at the long end of the market. The FT reports.

Indeed, the first plea of Joanne Segars, the NAPF chief executive in its pre-Budget submission was to ask that borrowing be tilted to the long end of the market where it can do the most to alleviate funding woes for pensions. Already, government issuance of 20-, 30- and 50-year debt has risen sharply. In the fiscal year ending April 2010, issuance of conventional long-dated gilts soared to £33.9bn from £23.4bn just two years earlier. Thirty-year yields have risen, too, from 4.09 per cent at September 30 2009 to 4.52 per cent as at March 31 2010

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Crisis, margin and profits

The FT reports the fall back in margins towards pre-crisis levels.

The trouble is, with margins near pre-crisis levels again for products like rates and forex, the free lunch enjoyed by the smaller boys is being taken away. Scale once more is king. Banks down the order in certain flow products should be asking themselves serious questions. Even including the crisis, the top five banks in equities, for example, have increased their market share by 10 per cent since 2006. As the level of concentration increases again, expect more money – not to mention heat – to be generated in the biggest dealing rooms.

Swaps and noise

Here is an example from the FT about how arbitrage opportunity may be squeezed by noise.

In the wake of the financial crisis, the use of collateral backing derivative trades in order to appease counterparty credit concerns has continued to expand.

This means that once a swap trade is executed, more margin is required if the trade starts losing money.

This daily management of margin also makes it harder to maintain an arbitrage over time as the value of any trade between swaps and Treasuries changes constantly.

Analysts at Credit Suisse say: “This makes it increasingly harder to hold arbitrage strategies to termination as arbitrageurs are forced to realise not just gains but also losses through margin calls resulting in frequent stop outs [forced exits from the trade].

The risk that the trade will move further in the wrong direction before convergence is achieved will limit those willing to take the risk and create some sort of threshold on arbitrage. This may be like a threshold error correction model similar to that seen in PPP.

Growth and bubbles

Here is a section on bubbles and the growth rate by Nick Row.

Shorting bonds

A small FT item on shorting the bond market. There are a number of different ways to do this: futures, repos or CDS.

Shorting bonds can be done using futures or repos [repurchase agreements], or credit default swaps. The last method is not ideal, warned Mr Inker. “There is the risk of governments declaring your contract invalid.” A number of politicians have called for restrictions on CDS trading.

This is a strategy designed to enhance yield in a low interest rate world. Risk-reward is in favour of high yields.

Informal contracts

John Kay summarises the difference between informal and explicit contacts echoing ideas about the need for flexibility in relationships that cover the question of where the firm should end and the nature of the legal background to firm formation: Coase and Williamson highlight some of these issues as informal and adaptive relationships may be more easily managed within the firm.

Lawyers for American companies spent hundreds of billable hours drawing up contracts to which no one ever referred. Their Japanese counterparts engaged in complex business relationships with no formal agreements at all, or ones that covered a single sheet of paper. But the commercial relationships that emerged in Japan’s car industry were more successful in securing component reliability and managing just-in-time inventory than those hammered out by the hard-nosed negotiators of Detroit.

La Porta, DeSilanes, Shliefer and Vishney "Legal Determinants of External Finance" seem to suggest that a more flexible legal system can also better deal with the heterogeneity of conflicts.

Banking, risk and regulation

Excellent article on risk and regulation that looks at the key issues of failure in safe securities and repo markets.

The financial crisis of 2007-09 featured large-scale losses to financial institutions from assets such as AAA rated tranches of mortgage-backed securities. Simultaneously, markets for collateralised borrowing (“repos” or repurchase agreements) froze or experienced severe stress. Investors lending in repo transactions started charging large “haircuts”. In other words, repos could be rolled over only with successively high levels of over-collateralisation, which disrupted the financing model of broker-dealers and in fact caused Bear Stearns to fail in March 2008.

The moral of the story is that regulators need to impose tighter constraints, such as higher capital requirements, on activities such as holdings of AAA rated tranches and repo financing of risky assets where there is a conflict of interest between the privately optimal and socially optimal choices. Bankers will fight such a proposal. But it should be well understood that they have all incentives to ignore the attendant systemic risk

Minsky and risk

Rajiv Sethi: An Ecological Perspective on Financial Market Reform speaks about Minsky and the way that risk was built at financial institutions.

Swap rates

The FT on the relationship between government issuance and swap rates.

In normal market conditions, yields on government bonds, such as US Treasuries, UK gilts and German Bunds, trade at a discount to swap rates. This is because swap rates are based on a funding rate that is linked to the interbank lending market. This rate is higher than the repo rate used for financing government bonds. Swaps are money market instruments whereas Treasuries reflect triple A sovereign risk.

Toxic asset

Track a toxic asset with NPR.

Remember those complicated bonds full of home mortgages? The ones that almost brought down the economy? A team of reporters with NPR's Planet Money used $1,000 of their own cash to buy a tiny piece of one — and plan to track it until it dies

Extreme value

Arthur Charpentier shows very clearly the way that mean square error and average absolute error can diverge as outliers appear.

(I allowed negative income for simple calculations and have a nice design). We concluded that gap significantly different between the standard deviation (L2) and the absolute difference (L1) simply means that there are probably outliers in the database (outliers defined "significantly different" means " outliers ").

Lehman

The FT looks at the Lehman repo transactions but what stands out is the huge increase in risk-taking.

Lehman’s rapid growth saw net assets increase by 48 per cent, or almost $128bn, from the fourth quarter of 2006 through the first quarter of 2008. But the bulk of the assets, according to the report by court-appointed examiner Anton Valukasreleased on Thursday, were in illiquid assets that could not easily be sold. Such assets nearly doubled to $175bn in that same time frame

The repo issue is that this was used to disguise the extent of the leverage and the precarious financial position that the investment bank had engineered. If they were conducting this financial engineering, they were aware of the increase in risk that was being taken.

Sussex history

Sussex history and Charles 2.

Moral Hazard and selection

Mark Thoma puts together an excellent item on moral hazard and natural selection. The banks do not even have to believe that what they are doing is risky. So long as the most successful continue to rise and the relative failures throw in the towel, risk will increase. There is also a good point about the nature of beliefs and the way that they are only over-turned after sufficient weight of contrary evidence.

Robin Hood Tax

A nice example from Tim Harford of the risk that Tobin tax increases volatility.

The tax would certainly be attractive if, like a tax on carbon dioxide or congestion, it reduced destructive activities. But would it? James Tobin and John Maynard Keynes both proposed taxes on financial transactions and each believed that the tax would reduce financial volatility. This is possible but far from obvious, when you realise that the tax might encourage bigger, more irregular financial transactions. An analogy: if I have to pay a charge whenever I use a cash machine, I make fewer, larger withdrawals and the amount of money in my wallet fluctuates more widely. Bear in mind, too, that the most bubble-prone asset market is for housing, which is bought in very lumpy, long-term chunks

Governance

John Lewis vs EasyJet. Below the political rhetoric is an interesting argument over the nature of governance. Labour plans to concentrate on mutualism with people paid to participate; the Conservatives aim for pick-and-mix services.

From the Guardian.

Labour is planning to rebrand one of its local authorities as Britain's first "John Lewis council", offering council tax rebates to residents in exchange for helping to run services, in a direct challenge to the Conservatives' pioneering "easyCouncil".

Paul Samuelson

In the New Yorker being interviewed by John Cassidy.

Rights issue

This is a very good overview of rights issue regulations around the world from the FT.

Chinese revaluation

Calculated Risk links to a number of sites talking about Chinese revaluation.

Interest rates and financial growth

Looking at the relationship between the level of interest rates and the size of the financial sector suggests that relatively high interest rates encourage the growth of the financial sector. The high interest rates allow an inflow of funds which have to be managed.

This can take a panel analysis.

1990 or first available year 2007 or latest available year average interest rate

India 11.9 14.2
Russian Federation 0.8 14.7 8.86
Slovak Republic 14.8 16.9 4.93
Czech Republic 16.9 17.3 3.24
Norway 17.4 17.9 4.59
Poland 10 18.4 8.42
Greece 16.7 19.4
Turkey 11 20.2 17.5
Mexico 20.7 20.3 9.31
Finland 16.2 21.2 3.18
Korea 14.9 21.6 4.67
Spain 17.2 22.1 3.18
South Africa 16.1 22.1 9.12
Portugal 20.2 22.4 3.18
Hungary 14.6 22.6 4.9
Switzerland 16.2 23.6 1.58
Austria 17.7 24.2 3.18
Denmark 21.5 24.7 3.38
Sweden 20.3 24.8 2.91
Brazil 25.4
Canada 22.7 25.6 3.32
Iceland 16.7 26.2 10.63
Japan 20.7 26.7 0.36
Italy 20.1 27.6 3.18
Ireland 16.4 28.1 3.18
Netherlands 20.7 28.3 3.18
New Zealand 25.4 28.3 6.35
OECD total 24.3 28.4
Belgium 22.6 29 3.18
Germany 23 29.2 3.18
Australia 25.2 29.8 5.72
United Kingdom 21.6 31.9 4.54
United States 24.8 33.1 3.2
France 27.1 33.3 3.18
Luxembourg 28.5 47.3 3.18

(file is OECD rates and size of the financial sector)
There is probably a need for some dummy variables to account for the US reserve currency status, UK history and the developments in Ireland and Luxembourg. What other explanatory variables?

The carry trade

The FT explains the carry trade.

Contagion

The Epicurean Dealmaker highlight a way that contagion can spread from one market to another.

Well, consider this. A fund with a highly levered balance sheet, and its investment fingers in many pies, is hit with losses in one of its sub-portfolios. Due to the nasty two-edged bite of leverage, its equity drops significantly, and the only way it can restore its risk profile is to raise more equity or liquidate some of its investments. Given the poor market conditions in the affected sub-portfolio, it is often more prudent to liquidate securities in other sub-portfolios. But this, as you can imagine, puts downward price pressure on securities in those previously unrelated markets. Presto, contagion. This is the "common holder" problem which some believe is the primary culprit.

US bond auctions

A very interesting item on US bond auctions and the way that indirect bidding has become more apparent.

For the past year, as the size and number of US Treasury debt sales each month has surged in order to fund the gaping US budget deficit, there has been increasing evidence of “direct” buying activity. But last week the trend became particularly apparent when big chunks of the three and 10-year note auctions were bought by domestic investors such as large money managers, hedge funds and smaller US financial institutions.

Monetary policy

John Plender makes that point that monetary policy was asymmetric.

The academics who dominate modern central banking were ideologically committed to the notion of efficient markets and to exclusive reliance on inflation targetting regardless of imbalances arising from easy credit and soaring asset prices – a spectacular case of one-club golfing. This mindset led to the silly belief that bubbles could not be identified at the time and that it was better to clean up after the bust than to lean pre-emptively against the wind in the boom. Monetary policy was thus asymmetric. Interest rates were reduced when asset prices fell, but were not raised in response to wildly overheating markets.

Risk aversion

Here is an excellent overview of risk aversion.

Geometric Mean
Another alternative to mean-variance is to select the portfolio that has the highest expected geometric mean return. This, in effect, maximizes the expected value of terminal wealth.

The geometric mean is defined as:



where Rij is the ith possible return on the jth portfolio and each outcome is equally likely.

If the likelihood of each outcome is different and Pij is the probability of the ith outcome for the jth portfolio, then



and can be written as,


The resulting portfolio is usually very well diversified and extreme values have a tendency to be eliminated. If a strategy has a probability of bankruptcy then the whole product will become zero.

The geometric mean is a measure of central tendency, just like a median. It is different from the traditional mean (which we sometimes call the arithmetic mean) because it uses multiplication rather than addition to summarize data values. Geometric means are often useful summaries for highly skewed data.

The geometric mean for any time period is less than or equal to the arithmetic mean. The two means are equal only for a return series that is constant (i.e., the same return in every period). For a non-constant series, the difference between the two is positively related to the variability or standard deviation of the returns.

The main problem with this method is that it does not differentiate between investors and thereby does not explicitly refer to risk. If our expected return forecasts were the same, then every investor, irrespective of their circumstances, would hold the same portfolio.

Arguably, this method could be used by a mutual fund that has a broadly diversified group of investors. It is very quick and easy to use.

Maximizing the geometric mean is equivalent to maximizing the expected value of a log utility

Chinese development

Daniel Gross in Slate on China.

Second, much of China's extraordinary development has been based on moving peasants into manufacturing. The key to future job growth, says Stephen Green, chief economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai, will lie in the services sector. And the largest components of the services sector—financial services, entertainment, media—remain firmly in the grip of the state. Going forward, it will become more difficult for a services-based economy to prosper with restraints on communication and expression. China faces a fundamental paradox, says Damien Ma, an analyst at the Eurasia Group. "It needs to have fairly closed information flow for political stability purposes, but doing so stifles innovation."

Friedman and empiricism

John Cassidy interviews James Heckman in the New Yorker about the empiricist side of the Chicago school.

When Friedman died, a couple of years ago, we had a symposium for the alumni devoted to the Friedman legacy. I was talking about the permanent income hypothesis; Lucas was talking about rational expectations. We have some bright alums. One woman got up and said, “Look at the evidence on 401k plans and how people misuse them, or don’t use them. Are you really saying that people look ahead and plan ahead rationally?” And Lucas said, “Yes, that’s what the theory of rational expectations says, and that’s part of Friedman’s legacy.” I said, “No, it isn’t. He was much more empirically minded than that.” People took one part of his legacy and forgot the rest. They moved too far away from the data.

Bank Levy

The FT looks at the details of the bank levy

The charge will be levied on more than 20 of the largest financial institutions based on the size of their assets minus insured deposits and shareholder equity, people familiar with the matter said.

Economics

Robert Solow looks at the arguments against "free market economics" and does a very good job of outlining where rhetoric and reality lie.

Equity as state contingent securities

Chris Dillow in the Investor Chronicle
So, there's a lot wrong with the standard view. Luckily, though, there's an alternative. Don't think of shares as the discounted present value of future cashflows at all. Think of them instead as state-contingent securities that pay off different amounts in different states of the world.
So volatility can be the result of small changes in the probability attached to extreme events rather than large changes in the risk premium. More here.

Class size

The effect of university class size on performance.

We therefore estimate non-linear class size effects controlling for unobserved heterogeneity of both individual students and faculty. We find that: (i) at the average class size, the effect size is ?.108; (ii) the effect size is however negative and significant only for the smallest and largest ranges of class sizes and zero over a wide range of intermediate class sizes from 33 to 104; (iii) students at the top of the test score distribution are more affected by changes in class size, especially when class sizes are very large

Cock up or conspiracy?

Pepy's diary suggests a cock up rather than conspiracy (at his level at least).

I find the Court full of great apprehensions of the French, who have certainly shipped landsmen, great numbers, at Brest; and most of our people here guess his design for Ireland. We have orders to send all the ships we can possible to the Downes. God have mercy on us! for we can send forth no ships without men, nor will men go without money, every day bringing us news of new mutinies among the seamen; so that our condition is like to be very miserable. Thence to Westminster Hall, and there met all the Houblons, who do laugh at this discourse of the French, and say they are verily of opinion it is nothing but to send to their plantation in the West Indys, and that we at Court do blow up a design of invading us, only to make the Parliament make more haste in the money matters, and perhaps it may be so, but I do not believe we have any such plot in our heads.

Bond boom

The FT looks at financial developments over the last decade. One highlight: the boom in the bond market.

The debt markets surged not only in scale but complexity. Since 2000, for example, the amount of US bond market debt has nearly doubled in size, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. That boom can partly be attributed to ultra-low US interest rates in the first half of the decade, coupled with an Asian savings glut, which flooded the financial system with liquidity.

In many ways this is the heart of the financial crisis. Huge international imbalances generate huge international capital flows. These capital flows, in most cases, run form central banks or other official monetary authorities through to liquid capital markets in US dollars. How could the financial sector not increase in size?

EMU

Martin Wolf in the FT highlights the structural problems with the Euro area: without fiscal and labour market mobility, pain can be intense.

This leaves peripheral countries in a trap: they cannot readily generate an external surplus; they cannot easily restart private sector borrowing; and they cannot easily sustain present fiscal deficits. Mass emigration would be a possibility, but surely not a recommendation. Mass immigration of wealthy foreigners, to live in now-cheap properties, would be far better. Yet, at worst, a lengthy slump might be needed to grind out a reduction in nominal prices and wages. Ireland seems to have accepted such a future. Spain and Greece have not. Moreover, the affected country would also suffer debt deflation: with falling nominal prices and wages, the real burden of debt denominated in euros will rise. A wave of defaults - private and even public - threaten.

A Fistful of Euros makes the same point. If the currency area is not optimal, political will is necessary to overcome pain caused by imbalances. This has already been seen in the 1980s in the UK when divergent economic conditions in the north and south caused schism. The left-leaning Labour councils in Liverpool and other northern cities seeking to stimulate their local economies could be overcome by Thatcher and the central government. Will we get the same kind of conflict between Brussels and some of the periphery governments?

Taylor Rule

Bernanke’s Taylor rule : "Adjust the AEA chart series to take this into account and the Fed still seems to be pinned to the zero bound ie it will be a while before it raises rates unless there is a big upgrade to its forecasts. That is consistent with the guidance language on rates."

Minsky and the Fed

The Economist looks at Minsky and the Fed

The prior negligence is understandable. Not only was Mr Minsky on the fringe of mainstream economics, his core insight is antithetical to the Fed. The Fed’s raison d’etre is stability: stable prices, stable employment, financial stability. But Mr Minsky argued that economic stability encourages more risk taking and leverage, and ultimately produces more instability and bigger recessions.

Banking Risk

Another look at the BIS concerns in the FT. This highlights the dilemma for the authorities and the change in risk appetite that has taken place.

Central banks want private bankers to take more risk. They want them to lend, even if credit demand is weak. More generally, they want to see funds flow out of cash and into the real economy. That, after all, is the point of near-zero interest rate policies and quantitative easing. The result has been a colossal and lucrative carry trade, with both welcome and unwanted consequences.

It is a good point. What could be more risky than lending to a small company? What is a more complex and opaque asset that a small business loan? By contrast, government bonds, while at risk from 1994-style tightening, look relatively safe. In addition, if bond prices collapse, the subsequent losses can be blamed on irresponsible government fiscal policy.

Carry trade

Amidst a report on a BIS invitation to bankers and monetary officials to discuss "risk-taking", there is this from the FT:

“For example, low financing costs coupled with a steep yield curve may make participants vulnerable to future increases in policy rates – a situation reminiscent of the 1994 bond market turbulence which followed the Federal Reserve’s exit from a prolonged period of low policy rates.”

This is a good example of the carry-trade and something that could be studies through the effect on the yield curve of the 1994 move towards tighter monetary conditions.

Bank regulation and lending

The FT reports on a study by Barclays Capital that assess the impact of new banking regulations on bank lending. The latest BIS proposals suggest that banks, particularly those that are deemed 'too big to fail', hold more capital and more closely align deposits and lending.

BarCap's expectation that regulators will cap the 20 groups' loan-to-deposit ratios at 100 per cent would mean that all banks, except the Swiss, would have to increase deposits dramatically if they are to avoid a politically damaging shrinkage of their lending. The worst hit would be Dexia, which could have to shrink lending by nearly 70 per cent, and Danske Bank, where the contraction would be 55 per cent.

Behavioural Economics

An overview of behavioural economics.

Composition of international capital flows

A survey of international capital flows. The abstract.

In an integrated world capital market with perfect information, all forms of capital flows are indistinguishable. Information frictions and incomplete risk sharing are important elements that needed to differentiate between equity and debt flows, and between different types of equities. This survey put together models of debt, FDI, Fpi flows to help explain the composition of capital flows.

With information asymmetry between foreign and domestic investors, a country which finances its domestic investment through foreign debt or foreign equity portfolio issue, will inadequately augment its capital stock. Foreign direct investment flows, however, have the potential of generating an efficient level of domestic investment.

In the presence of asymmetric information between sellers and buyers in the capital market, foreign direct investment is associated with higher liquidation costs due to the adverse selection. Thus, the exposure to liquidity shocks determines the volume of foreign direct investment flows relative to portfolio investment flows. In particular, the information-liquidity trade-off helps explain the composition of equity flows between developed and emerging countries, as well as the patterns of FDI flows during financial crises.

The asymmetric information between domestic investors (as borrowers) and foreign investors (as lenders) with respect to investment allocation leads to moral hazard and thus generate an inadequate amount of borrowings. The moral hazard problem, coupled with limited enforcement, can explain why countries experience debt outflows in low income periods; in contrast to the predictions of the complete-market paradigm.

Finally, we analyze a risk-diversification model, where bond holdings hedge real exchange rate risks, while equities hedge non-financial income fluctuations. An equity home bias emerges as a calibratable equilibrium outcome.

Type 1 and type 2 errors

Amidst a fantastic discussion of the trade off between different types of error, Cosma Shalizi quotes this section from James:

There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion, — ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error, — these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A.
Believe truth! Shun error! — these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. Clifford ... exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true. I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford. We must remember that these feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe tbat worse things tban being doped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.

This seems to resonate with the idea that over-confidence is at the heart of entrepreneurial development and the creation of new ideas. Without the failure, there is not likely to be success.

Investment bank income

The FT overview of investment bank 2009 earnings.

Bank barriers

Amidst an interesting look at new entrants to the banking industry the FT notes:

Analysts say that one of the biggest challenges for smaller banks is the onerous capital and liquidity requirements. Holding more high-quality capital – which yields low rates of interest – lifts costs, which are harder for smaller institutions to absorb, and constrains the business they can do. And new banks will have to meet these requirements upfront.

It seems that the new regulations on capital requirements will add to the scale economies associated with banking and make it harder for smaller players to break into the market.

Models and economics

Paul Krugman suggests that it was Keynes and Samuelson's effective use of economic models to understand and combat the great depression that helped gain the ascendancy over more complex and nuanced historical and institutional explanations. However, it appears that we reached a point where the institutional and historical context was lost. The model is just a model and the model used must be suited to the situation. The situation can probably only be assess with institutional and historical knowledge.

The current crisis does not appear to be that different from previous crises: there is a period of calm complacency and de-regulation; there is excess credit growth and increased risk-taking as the consequence of risk disappears into the background. What is new is the institutional and historical context: the international financial system is inter-connected; there is a huge increase in savings that is being intermediated between developing and developed countries; there is demand for safe assets.

Aggregation

Tim Harford discusses the issue of aggregation or the phenomenon of clustering of economic specialisation.

Recall the four possible hypotheses: knowledge spreads within industries; ideas are generated when different industries rub together; people learn from being around lots of smart people; or people benefit from the density of a labour market, which helps them find the perfect job.

There is evidence that all four have an effect. Even with the development of modern communications, it still seems that place matters.

McKinsey and the role of the US dollar

McKinsey discussion of the international role of the US dollar. McKinsey: What Matters
This follows their own cost-benefit analysis of the US dollars' position that concluded that the benefits were rather modest. There are three main issue for me:

1) If International Seniorage is so good, why do we have rules against dumping goods. Seniorage allows countries to dump goods for paper. It harms local industry at the expense of that overseas.
2) The issue of international currency faces international pressure to allow sufficient currency to help the world economy. Though it can be argued that this pressure can be ignored (as the BBK was largely able to do in the micro-environment of the EMS), it was not the case with the US from 1998 through 2005. Monetary policy was too loose as a result.
3) International reserve currency status is a version of the Dutch disease: international demand for the currency pushes up the exchange rate and harms manufacturing interest.

The Valuation Channel of External Adjustment

The IMF looks at the valuation channel for international adjustment.

The Valuation Channel of External Adjustment

Tobin tax

The FT looks at the Tobin tax and the some of the practical limitations of its use.

FT.com: UK - A tax on short-term debt would stabilise the system

Yield curve

The yield curve steepens. This increases the cost of borrowing for government, increasing the attraction of long-dated index-linked borrowing (see below). It should also help to reacapitalise banks. The steep yield curve is the most simple of the carry trades - borrow from the government at one rate and lend back to them at another. There is a liquidity risk, but...Even that can be hedged.

FT.com / UK - Federal Reserve renews vow to keep rates low

Ha - and you don't know it

Just to remind myself:

im in ur base, killing ur d00dz

or

im in ur fridge eating ur foodz

im in ur sweatshop making ur shooz

Financing the deficit

It is hard to see why the government does not take advantage of this imbalance of supply and demand to lock in very low real rates. It is clear that this is not just a hedge against inflation, this is due to pension fund demand to match the duration of assets and liabilities and to remove the inflation risk. With a huge amount of funding to be done, now seems to be the time to find out how much demand there is for this sort of security.

FT.com / Lex / Macroeconomics & markets - UK 50-year inflation-protected gilts: "Far, far away, there is bond. And, like many childhood stories that take place in another age and another land, it shares some of the qualities of a fairy tale. It is government-guaranteed to protect investors against the ogre of inflation for the next half century. Lately, it has delivered six-league boot-sized returns; since March, a gain of almost 40 per cent. As a fairytale hero, however, the UK’s 2055 index-linked gilt looks spent. Over the past three centuries, real UK yields have averaged 3 per cent. This bond offers a 10th of that, a mere 32 basis points."

Loss aversion

US treasury's loss aversion (and the risk of political backlash) halts the sale of Citigroup holding.

BBC News - Citigroup shares sale planned by US government 'halted': "The Treasury had been planning to sell $5bn worth of shares, but reports say it has reconsidered after the price was set below what it paid.
That would mean the US would have taken a politically unpalatable loss."

Equity analysis

The FT assesses a study of relative returns on equity over the last decade compared to the return on tbills.

Quasi-sovereign debt

The FT Lex column assesses the effect of Dubai on the quasi-sovereign debt.

So investors in quasi-sovereigns are likely to demand a higher risk premium. Analysts at the Royal Bank of Scotland suggest rating agencies may review assumptions on sovereign support, potentially bringing a wave of downgrades. In that case, the effects could be felt far and wide, from Russia’s “Kremlin Inc” companies such as Gazprom and Russian Railways, to South African or Israeli utilities. Borrowing costs will rise, at an awkward time for quasi-sovereign borrowers. For investors, Dubai is a reminder of the need for careful homework. And that if bonds offer a higher yield than sovereign debt, there is good reason.

Another issue is the way that uncertainty over backing for the debt encourages over-investment. This can also be seen in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If investors are able to convince themselves that there is state backing, the return looks very attractive and money flows into, encouraging additional bond issuance. The small risk premium remains due to the uncertainty, but this is not sufficient to compensate for the real risk. These developments, as has been the case in the US housing market and is now likely to be the case in Dubai, will lead to reduced investment in the likes of those entities that have been identified by the FT column.

Demand for money

Andrew Bailey from the Bank draws attention to the recent demand for cash which is probably a reflection of reduced confidence in the banking system.

As a share of nominal GDP, the value of notes in circulation declined from 6% in 1970 to a low point of 2.4% in the mid-1990s but has since stabilised and then increased, noticeably over the past two years. He explains that from a macroeconomic perspective, sustained low inflation has increased confidence in the real value of the currency since the mid-1990s, while more recently demand for banknotes has risen during the recession, particularly for £50 notes. This recent trend contrasts with the pattern in previous recessions. Rising demand for notes might reflect some loss of confidence in banks and very low interest rates, which reduce the opportunity cost of holding banknotes as a non-interest bearing asset. Andrew Bailey says that is “…pretty good prima facie evidence that there has been an increase in demand for banknotes as a store of value”. This pattern has been seen in other major currencies.

The cost of finance

Looking at the Kraft attempt to take over Cadbury, the FT makes the following observaton:

An investment grade company would look at paying between 300-325 basis points above Libor for bank debt today. Before the economic crisis an equivalent borrower could have obtained those funds for less than 100 basis points.

That compares with the average cost for investment grade companies issuing bonds for acquisitions of about 120-125 basis points over Libor. "There is an overwhelming trend to use the capital markets," said Ivor Dunbar, co-head of global capital markets at Deutsche Bank. "The cost of financing is more attractive and the banks generally cannot compete with that at present."

Dark Pools

There is an item in the FT looking at possible SEC regulation of Dark Pools. It includes the following:

“Before computerised ‘dark pools’ existed, traders often chose to keep their bids and offers undisplayed . . . by giving a ‘not-held’ order to the floor brokers on the exchange who would then keep sensitive orders ‘in their pocket’,” said Dan Mathisson, head of the advanced execution strategies unit of Credit Suisse, to a US Senate panel in late October. Dark pools migrated from brokers’ shirt pockets to their computer systems by the late 1980s, and some of the largest systems are managed today by Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and LiquidNet.

These Dark Pools are increasingly controlled by investment banks and other financial institutions that run virtual market-making that are run by machines and controlled by algorithmic black-boxes. The system can take prices from major exchanges like the NYSE and the LSE and provide some price improvement for customers. The black-box can take positions based on simple mathematical rules and can be over-ruled by operators. The system remains very much dependent on the pricing information provided by major exchanges.