"A Printer And A Prayer" - The Three Problems With The Fed "Liquidity Coverage Ratio" Plan

A little over a week ago we wrote that in order to mitigate problems arising from record debt and soaring NPLs, the G-20 had a modest proposal for global banks: more debt. Specifically "in November said leaders will agree "that the world's top banks must issue special bonds to increase the amount of capital which can be tapped in a crisis instead of calling on taxpayers to come to the rescue, industry and G20 officials said." In other words, suddenly the $2.8 trillion in Fed injected excess reserves, split roughly equally between US and European banks, are no longer sufficient, and while regulators are on one hand delaying the implementation of Basel III and its tougher capital rules, on the other they are tactically admitting that whatever "generous" capital buffer banks have on their books right now will not be sufficient when the next crisis strikes."

The proposal for the first time introduced GLACs, or bonds known as "gone concern loss absorption capacity", seen by regulators as essential to stopping the world's 29 biggest lenders from being "too big to fail."

Some of our thoughts at the time: "according to the G-20, instead of having to collapse liabilities to offset that scourge of the New abnormal, namely Non-Performing Loans, banks are hoping to lever up, pun intended, the current scramble for yield and instead beef if up their cash asset, even if it means increasing the liability side of the balance sheet by issuing more debt. Because really all the GLAC do is limit how the banks may use the proceeds from such bond issuance. Then again, these being banks, one can be certain that the moment the GLAC cash is wired in, the funds will be used to ramp risk instead of sitting in a drawer somewhere, awaiting rainy days. Because nobody in a bank is paid for avoiding a crisis, and everyone is paid to generate a return even if it means making the systemic bubble even bigger."

And our summary:

in lieu of being able to actually generate and retain funds from operations, banks will once again scramble to raise epic amounts of debt, only this time, the proceeds will be retained "pinky swear" as a capital buffer, i.e., cash on the books. Cash which nobody makes a single dime in bonus on anywhere in the bank's org chart. Would anyone wish to wager how long before the trillions in GLACs are "mysteriously" found to have funded shanty town developments in Shanghai, to buy the S&P500 at the all time high, and naturally, the purchase of a golden commode or two in various US banks? How could this possibly fail...

And the absolutely brilliant punchline: who do these regulators and "leaders" think will be the purchasers of said debt? Why other systemically important, TBTF banks of course! Which means that, in the by now quite familiar "daisy-chaining" of counterparties and collateral, once one bank fails, its exposure via collateral, repo and certainly, funding of other bank balance sheets, everything will promptly freeze as risk reprices, a la Lehman bonds.

Fast forward to today when, focusing solely on the US, we learned that as part of the domestic "macroprudential" effort to ensure firms don't run out of cash in a crisis, the so-called Liquidity Coverage Ratio, US regulators said banks likely will have to raise an additional $100 billion to satisfy the new requirement, the WSJ reported.

The disclosure is part of the final draft of the so-called Liquidity Coverage Ratio, released by the Fed earlier today, and which was promptly passed on a 5-0 vote Wednesday that will subject big U.S. banks for the first time to so-called "liquidity" requirements. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency adopted the rules later in the day.

According to the WSJ, the thrust of the proposal remains unchanged: Banks must now maintain enough safe assets to equal their net cash outflows over about a month.

Some of the details: "The 15 largest banks - those with more than $250 billion in assets - will have to hold enough cash, government bonds and other high-quality assets to fund operations for 30 days during a time of market stress. Smaller banks - those with more than $50 billion but less than $250 billion in assets - will have to keep enough to cover 21 days. Banks with less than $50 billion in assets and nonbank financial firms deemed by regulators as posing a potential threat to the system will not be subject to the requirements."

And some more:

Under the final version of the rule, U.S. banks with between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets will be able to calculate their liquidity positions on a monthly basis, rather than every day as proposed in the rule's first draft last fall. Those banks also won't have to start meeting the rule until January 1, 2016, giving them an extra year to comply.

Banks with more than $250 billion in assets will have to comply starting this coming January but will have until July 2015 before they must calculate the liquidity ratio on a daily basis.

Staff at the Fed estimated that the rule under consideration Wednesday would require big U.S. banks to raise an additional $100 billion of high-quality liquid assets, for a total of about $2.5 trillion.

Fed officials didn't make changes in response to the industry's concerns about the rule's treatment of municipal debt securities, which weren't classified as safe "high-quality liquid assets" that could count toward a bank's compliance. But Fed Gov. Dan Tarullo said staff would reconsider that point in the future and "develop some criteria for determining which such bonds fall into this category and thus might be considered for inclusion" as a high-quality liquid asset.

The shortfall as illustrated visually by the WSJ:

On the surface, this is all great macroprudential news: forcing banks to hold even more "high quality collateral" is a great idea, to minimize the amount of money taxpayers will have to fork over when the system crashes once again as it certainly will thanks to the unprecedented Fed micromanaging interventions over the past6 years.

There are just three problems.

• First, when it comes to high quality collateral, there just isn't enough, a complaint the TBAC made loud and clear in early 2013 and which served as the basis for our assessment that Tapering will have to take place at least until such time as the US once again is forced to plug massive deficit funding holes, and thus the Fed can monetize copious amounts of debt once more.
• Second, when one considers that the last time the financial system imploded it took not the paltry $700 billion TARP widely trumpeted as the "total" bailout cost, but closer to $14.4 trillion to keep the system from collapsing. As such, $100 billion - if and when the banks' funding mechanisms lock up again in the absence of a perpetual Fed backstop - is nothing but pocket change, even if added to an existing pool of some $2.5 trillion in "high-quality liquid" assets. Furthermore, when the system is locked up in a funding spasm, the last thing any counterparty will bother with is purchasing liquid securities from insolvent competitors at par or even 50 cents on the dollar. In fact, due to the systemic interconnectedness, the only possible buyer of these liquid assets will once again be... you guessed it... the Fed.
• Third, and this is where this whole "macroprudential" scheme crashes under the weight of its own illogic, is when one considers that the source of the funding of any one bank's debt issuance proceeds, are other banks and financial intermediaries, all part of the same group of chain-linked counterparties, which hold on their shoulders over $200 trillion in notional derivatives, and where even one collateral chain breach means net becomes gross and the derivative exposure collapes into the singularity of the next bailout. Basically stated, banks X will be selling debt to bank Y in exchange for cash, thus boosting bank X' capital line item, while depleting bank Y's. And when the moment comes to rescue the liquidity depleted bank Y, what then?

In other words, not only is this latest window dressing too little to make a dent, or that there simply isn't enough of the high quality, liquid collateral needed to prefund a disaster fund, but at the end of the day, all that is happening is a circular pickpocketing where liquidity is simply rotated in a circle without any exogenous funds entering or leaving the banking sector. And as everyone knows, it isn't any one banks that is insolvent: it is the entire banking sector in total, confirmed quickly when one recalls that Hank Paulson "forced" all the banks to accept TARP funding to restore confidence in the US banking system: not a piecemeal bailout.

Which is why we appreciate both the attempt to pull the wool in front of everyone's eyes, and the humor behind it - the sad truth is that all of the above is not only meaningless, but it will likely further concentrate collateral and liquidity shortfalls away into the weakest banks whose failure will just make the TBTFs even bigger and even more systematically important.

What is worst of all, is that this example clearly indicates that when it comes to macroprudential policy, all the Fed really has, is an attempt to reallocate liabilities among the banking sector, in the process further obfuscation each bank's total exposure. As to the most important issue, collateral chains and counterparty exposure should the "weakest link" in said chain fall, the Fed's weapons are the same two it had during the last crisis: a printer and a prayer.

Everything else is still nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Source