What the $150bn in US fines paid by banks has caused the real economy, can best be described as financial sadism

Sir, Kara Scannell writes: “Demands for accountability ushered in an era where the US government was willing to penalise financial institutions severely, yet most crisis-related actions were civil rather than criminal and few bankers went to prison” “Banks rack up $150bn in US fines since start of the financial crisis” July 7.

If we use Basel II’s basic capital requirement of 8%, that represents an authorized leverage of 12.5 to 1. If we multiply that number times the $150bn in fines paid by banks, we can see that the real economy might have obtained $1.9tn less access to credit.

And of course, punishing the shareholders of banks that way, must cause the cost of bank capital to increase and, as a result, borrowers having to pay more for loans.

And of course, banks tight on capital, will not lend to what requires them to hold more capital, which currently means those perceived as risky, like entrepreneurs and SMEs, something that can only reduce the dynamism of the economy.

Sir, that is pure and unabridged financial sadism. That amount of killed bank credit potential represents about 50% of the Fed’s current QE balance. Need we say more?

PS. I remember having written a similar comment about 3 years ago.

@PerKurowski

Judge Jed Rakoff. Do you not know the Home of the Brave prohibits discrimination against those perceived as risky?

Sir, in Lunch with the FT of September 13, Kara Scanell describes Jed Rakoff as: “A leading authority on white-collar crime, he has made headlines for demanding greater accountability in cases of alleged Wall Street fraud and for launching a one-man mission to prevent banks from dodging responsibilities for the financial crisis…. Rolling Stone magazine calls him a ‘legal hero of our time”.

Had Judge Rakoff known about the false signals, the incentives, and the distortions built into the portfolio invariant credit-risk-weighted capital requirements for banks, he would be ashamed of going after bankers, as he would instead, I he really is a hero, have gone after the bank regulators.

Imagine allowing banks to hold only 1.6 percent in capital, which means over 60 to 1 leverage of equity when lending to sovereigns and the AAArisktocracy, while only a 12 to 1 leverage when lending to the “risky” entrepreneurs and SMEs. As if there was no “Equal Credit Opportunity Act (Regulation B)? But, then again, there might not be any interested in enforcing such Act.

PS. Of course I am not referring to the natural discrimination of the risky that calls for banks to prudently charge higher risk premiums. I am referring to the artificial regulatory discriminations that has no prudence basis whatsoever... since what is really dangerous for banks is what is perceived as safe but that can turn out to be very risky. 

@PerKurowski

What a waste of a good $17bn fine. Oh, if only it had been collected in voting shares of BofA.

Sir, Kara Scanell and Camilla Hall report that “BofA settles for record $17bn claim” August 22, and I cannot but reflect on what a waste of a good fine that is.

The fine is to be paid by BofA in cash and in consumer relief, all payments of course going against BofA’s capital account… in these days bank capital is already so scarce because bank regulators allowed it to become so scarce.

If we multiply be the 20 times leverage implied by the 5% leverage ratio US regulators have announced, those $17bn as capital could have supported $340bn in loans. Oh if only that fine had been collected in voting shares of BofA at current market valuations.

PS. FT reporters... dare to ask The Question!

What if an Eric Schneiderman dared to stand up against those causing the greatest unfairness in the financial markets?

Sir, Kara Scannell, James Shotter, Daniel Schäfer and Alice Ross report on how New York attorney-general Eric Schneiderman is investigating unfairness in the financial markets, “Banks hit by dark pools probe” July 30.

But Sir, you know that those perceived as “absolutely safe” from a credit risk point of view, and who are therefore already the beneficiaries of lower interest rates, larger loans and on softer terms, get even lower interests, even larger loans and on even softer terms, because regulators allow banks to hold less capital against assets deemed as absolutely safe.

And you also know that those perceived as risky from a credit risk point of view, and who are therefore already paying higher interest rates, getting smaller loans and must accept harsher terms, are charged even higher interests, get even smaller loans and must accept even harsher terms, only because regulators require banks to hold more capital against assets deemed as risky.

And so I ask you Sir, does not the regulatory distortion produced by the risk-weighted capital requirements cause more unfairness in the capital markets than all the dark pools, and all the high frequency trading, and all the Libor manipulation and all the other misdeeds currently scrutinized put together? Of course it does!

What a shame there are no Attorney Generals willing to stand up to bank regulators discriminating based on perceived risk (in the Home of the Brave) … even when equipped with such formidable tools as the Equal Credit Opportunity Act – Regulation B. and all other non-discrimination and non-profiling rulings.

PS. Yesterday I was also censored in my homeland :-)

Banks should pay all fines by issuing voting shares.

Sir, I refer to Kara Scannells’and Stephen Foley’s “Credit Suisse to pay $2.6bn in tax case” May 20 and to all other reports about bank fines.

All these fines go against bank’s capital accounts, and will therefore, because of bank capital requirements, cut down on the credits a bank can give.

And that hurts mostly the innocent… those who will now not get a credit because the bank does not have the shareholders’ equity to back it up with.

The only way out of it is to force all bank fines to be paid by the issuance of bank voting shares, at their current market value, for an amount equivalent to the fine.

To do elsewise is, as I see it, only statist sadism.

Why should banks’ willing spirits but weak flesh be able to resist extreme regulatory temptations?

Sir, I refer to Kara Scannell, Tom Braithwaite and Gina Chon’s report on how government is now, seemingly for political reasons, trying to make up for lost time, by laying it hard on those guilty of producing and packaging lousy mortgages into AAA rated securities, “The paper tiger roars”, October 26.

I am a firm believer that those guilty of it should have been fully prosecuted, from day one, but, what most angers me, is how no blame has been placed on those regulators who, by tempting willing spirits but weak flesh too much, caused the whole problem.

Basel II bank regulations, those which the US also signed up on in June 2004, stated that banks, against loans to unrated businesses, were required to hold 8 percent in capital (equity), but, that against AAA rated securities, 1.6 percent sufficed. And that meant that banks were allowed to leverage their equity 50 times more when holding AAA rated securities, than when holding loans to unrated businesses.

How could regulators have expected the banks to resist such extraordinary temptations? Prosecute, as dumb, and have them parade down avenues wearing dunce caps, those regulators who so tempted our banks.

Fabrice Tourre has been duly scalped, but where is the SEC’s mea culpa?

Sir, I have no doubt whatsoever that the prime responsible for the current financial mess were dumb bank regulators. That’s is why I dislike so much reading when Tracy Alloway and Kara Scanell report “SEC elated after claiming Tourre’s scalp.” August 3.

The whole story can either begin with the little guy, the mortgage underwriter underwriting bad mortgages to the subprime sector; and those bad ingredients were then sold by underwriter bosses to security packagers, who packaged these bad mortgages into very bad subprime sausages; but who were are able to turn these into valuable delicacies, only because of the high credit ratings these received from human fallible credit rating agents. And then the story could end with those selling the sausages to the investors, and some of them, like Goldman Sachs, even taking bets on that these would make their buyers puke. And all involved in the bad sausage chain made huge profits… and should all be ashamed, some more than others.

Or the story can begin with bank regulators, the Basel Committee, who with its Basel II of June 2004 authorized banks to hold AAA rated sausages on their books against only 1.6 percent in capital (equity), which meant they authorized banks to leverage their capital a mindboggling 62.5 to 1 times with these sausages; and who with this created the irresistible profit motivations that induced all humans previously mentioned to break all the rules.

Fabrice Tourre’s own word “More and more leverage in the system, the whole building is about to collapse any time now” says it all. Those directly responsible for that leverage were the bank regulators. Without the explicit blessing of regulations which allowed it, the system would never ever have been able to leverage as much. And the SEC was all in agreement with is, as can be read in its Open Meeting records of April 28, 2004.

Yes, Fabrice Tourre and all others involved in the subprime sausage chain are guilty and should be held responsible. But, if we allow regulators to get away, feeling elated, without even a mea culpa, then we truly have not learned the lessons we most need to learn from this crisis.

And now, let’s find and publish the trail of all sophisticatedly mistaken bank regulator talk

Sir, Kara Scannell and Brooke Masters quote some of the shameless exchanges that took place among traders with respect to the manipulation of Libor, Tibor and what have you. “Trail of casual trader talk comes back to haunt RBS”, February 7

I wish they would be equally willing to find and publish the certainly much more sophisticated sounding arguments which led bank regulators to allow banks for instance to hold securities with an AAA to AA rating, or lend to Greece, against only 1.6 percent in capital, meaning authorizing a 62.5 to 1 leverage on those exposures.

It would also be interesting reading how they defended a concept like that when a German bank lent to a German entrepreneur it needed to hold 8 percent in capital, but when lending to the German government it could do so against zero capital.

I ask all this because, without the slightest doubt, this most certainly totally unwitting interest rate manipulation carried out by the bank regulators, has de facto caused immensely more damages than all other scandalous interest rate manipulations we have been reading about lately, put together.

Let us then hope Mary Jo White really knows how to discriminate between what is right and what is wrong.

Sir, Kara Scannell and Shannon Bond quote David Keller saying about Mary Jo White, recently nominated by Obama to the Securities and Exchange Commission that “She is driven by her sense of what’s right”, "White nominated to lead Wall St watchdog” January 25.

I just hope then that Mary Jo White understands that regulatory discrimination in favor of “The Infallible” those already favored by markets and banks, and against “The Risky” those already discriminated against by markets and banks is, besides stupid, utterly wrong, I would even say truly odious.

I say this because on April 28, 2004, the SEC had no idea about what it was doing.

What would the consequences be for failed bank regulators if failed air-traffic controllers or cruise ship captains?

Sir, Kara Scannell, in the analysis on US housing, “After the gold rush”, October 30, with respect to the mortgage frauds writes: “Critics say that prosecutors have gone after easy targets – low level fraudsters - while going easy on Wall Street executives whose banks packaged billions of dollars worth of toxic mortgage securities.”

Indeed, and though it might be difficult to condemn any one of those executives for something illegal, by now we should at least have had on the web a list of the 20 most important toxic mortgage packagers, so as to be able to shame them.

But, that said, and since for me the subprime mortgage mess was a direct consequence of the regulators having created irresistible temptations for banks to holding any AAA rated securities, namely allowing them to hold these securities against only 1.6 percent in capital, the first thing that should have happened, is for these regulators to be sent home, in utter disgrace. But that has not happened.

Not only is the name of most regulators unknown to us, but some of them have even been put in charge of drawing up new regulations, Basel III, and others promoted, like for instance Mario Draghi, from being Chairman of the Financial Stability Forum, later the Financial Stability Board, to being the President of the European Central Bank. Amazing!

But let me be even clearer about what I mean:

In November 2004, in a letter published by the Financial Times I wrote: “Our bank supervisors in Basel are unwittingly controlling the capital flows in the world. How many Basel propositions will it take before they start realizing the damage they are doing by favoring so much bank lending to the public sector (sovereigns)?”

But yet, even if a little me, not a regulator nor a banker, could have been sufficiently preoccupied about the excessive lending to sovereigns to write that, the regulators allowed the banks in some cases to lend to sovereigns against zero capital, and for a sovereign rated like Greece was, required the bank to hold only 1.6 percent in capital. That signified allowing a bank to leverage its equity some mindboggling 62.5 times to 1 when lending to Greece.

And so let me just ask: what would have happened to airport controllers or cruise ship captains who had made mistakes of this exorbitant nature, and caused damages as huge as this financial crisis?

I have absolutely nothing personal against any of the regulators, and I do not know any one of them. But what I I do know is that if we are going to have bank regulations with a global reach, like those produced by the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, we absolutely need those regulators to be held much more accountable for what they are up to.

Yes the credit rating agencies let the regulators down... but it was they who gave the credit rating agencies such an excessive importance and they should have known; again as little me wrote in another published letter January 2003 in FT: “Everyone knows that, sooner or later, the ratings issued by the credit agencies are just a new breed of systemic errors, about to be propagated at modern speeds

Yes they can argue they trusted the financial models too much… but that is not an excuse. If little me, presumably not more a financial modeler than they were, in a written formal statement delivered as an Executive Director of the World Bank, in October 2004, could warn: “[I]believe that much of the world’s financial markets are currently being dangerously overstretched through an exaggerated reliance on intrinsically weak financial models that are based on very short series of statistical evidence and very doubtful volatility assumptions” they should also have been suspicious about the models.