Creeping Recognition that Regulation Has Created a Liquidity Death Star

Reason number one (by far) that I believe that clearing and collateral mandates increase systemic risk is that they transform credit risk into liquidity risk. Large price moves during stressed market situations require those with losing positions to make large variation margin payments in a very tight frame. These payments need to be funded, and funded immediately. Thus, variation margining causes spikes in the demand for liquidity. Furthermore, clearing in particular creates tight coupling because failures-or even delays-in making VM payments can put the clearinghouse into default, or force it to liquidate collateral in an illiquid market. The consequences of that, you should shudder to contemplate.

To be somewhat hyperbolic, clearing mandates create a sort of liquidity death star.

Recognition of how dangerous spikes in liquidity demand precisely when liquidity supply evaporates creates a major systemic risk is sadly insufficiently widespread, particularly among many regulators who still sing paeans to the glories of clearing. But perhaps awareness is spreading, albeit slowly. At least I hope that this Economist article indicates a greater appreciation of the collateral issue, although it fails to draw the connection to central clearing, and how clearing mandates can dramatically exacerbate collateral shortages:

WHEN the financial system teetered on the brink of collapse in 2008, the biggest problem was a lack of liquidity. Banks were unable to refinance themselves in the short-term debt markets. Central banks had to step in on a massive scale to offer support. Calm was eventually restored, but not without enormous economic damage.

But has the underlying problem of liquidity gone away? A research note from Michael Howell of Crossborder Capital argues that, in the modern financial system, central banks are no longer the only, or even the main, providers of liquidity. Instead, the system looks a lot like that of the Victorian era, with banks dependent on the wholesale markets for funding. Back then, the trade bill was the key asset for bank financing; now it is the mysteriously named “repo” market.

. . . .

Bigger haircuts mean that borrowers need more collateral than before in order to fund themselves. “When market volatility jumps, funding capacity drops in tandem and often substantially,” writes Mr Howell. The result, a liquidity squeeze at the worst possible moment, is a template of how the next crisis may occur (although regulators are trying to reduce banks’ reliance on short-term funding).

And again, it is at these times when the need to fund VM payments will kick in, exacerbating the liquidity squeeze. Moreover, clearing also ties up a lot of the assets (e.g., Treasuries, or cash) that firms could normally borrow against to raise cash. Perversely, that collateral can be accessed only if a clearing member defaults on a variation margin payment.

Just what the liquidity supply mechanism will be in the next crisis in the new cleared world is not quite, well, clear. As the Economist article (and the Crossborder Capital note upon which it is based) demonstrate, central banks lend against collateral, and the collateral constraint will already be binding in stress situation. Presumably central banks will have to be much more expansive in their definition of what constitutes “good” collateral (a la Bagehot).

It still astounds me that even though every major financial crisis in history has been at root a liquidity crisis, in their infinite wisdom the betters who presume to govern us thought they were solving systemic risk problems by imposing a mechanism that will sharply increase liquidity demand and restrict liquidity supply during periods of market stress. That should work out really, really swell.