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What is Tony talking about?

I first experimented with word clouds several years ago and used them to visualise the speeches of Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. I have now learned from the Fell Stats blog (via R-Bloggers) that there is an R package for generating word clouds. The package makes use of tm, a text mining package for R, which I have been meaning to look into for some time. So, it seemed only appropriate to explore the speeches of Tony Abbott.

This word cloud shows the 150 most-used words in Tony’s speeches over the last 18 years. Perhaps disappointingly, since my efforts to strip punctuation also stripped apostrophes, “cant” actually only shows the frequency of the word “can’t”.

Pretty though the word cloud is, a little more can be gleaned from the word usage patterns through time. The correlation in recent years between “carbon” and “tax”, is clearly due to Abbott’s attacks on Labor’s imposition of a price on carbon. His stint as health minister is also evident. I did expect to see more of an impact from his “stop the boats” campaign (here the count for “boat” includes “boats”).

Abbott word count through time

Admittedly, there are no particularly deep insights here, but it was a fun way to learn about the tm and wordcloud packages.

UPDATE: In response to the comment from Dan, I have added a chart showing word frequency rather than count. This accounts for distortions arising from the larger number of Abbott speeches in recent years.

Abbott word frequency through time

For those who are interested, I have uploaded the (python) code for downloading the speeches and the (R) code for generating the charts to github.

Trust

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During the week I attended a farewell function for a retiring colleague. The turnout was impressive, a sign of deep respect earned over a career at the bank spanning more than forty years. In the speeches, a recurring theme was trust.

The primary business of a bank is lending money, which exposes the bank to credit risk, the risk that a borrower will be unable to repay the loan. On more than one occasion, our retiring colleague had turned down a loan based on prior bad experiences with the prospective borrower. Why would you lend money to someone who has lied in the past? Learning from past betrayals of trust proved time and again to be a wise risk management strategy.

In Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity, Francis Fukuyama argues that trust has played a crucial role in the development of capitalism. While some point to the role of the rule of law for enforcing contracts in enabling business, Fukuyama emphasises that legal recourse only serves as a last resort. More important is the simple confidence of a handshake: the confidence that those you do business with will live up to their end of the bargain. Those societies which developed mechanisms for extending trust beyond small networks of families and friends were rewarded with greater economic success.

If trust is important for business, it is particularly so for banking. But, scanning the financial headlines over the last few months shows a banking system apparently intent on destroying society’s trust in banks and bankers.

Serious Fraud Office investigating the rigging of LIBOR rates

Barclays is just the first bank to be fined for allowing traders to manipulate the LIBOR interest rate benchmark. The scandal cost chief executive Bob Diamond his job and this story will be back in the headlines as the findings extend to other banks and civil cases unfold.

HSBC accused of providing a conduit for “drug kingpins and rogue nations”

Before a US Senate hearing, HSBC’s head of compliance faced charges that the bank had acted as knowing banker to Mexican drug cartels. He acknowledged that “there have been some significant areas of failure” and resigned his position there and then.

Standard Chartered alleged to have “schemed” with Iran to launder money

The BBC article in the link above is coy in its language. The New York Department of Financial Services is a little less so. Page 5 of their report quotes a Standard Chartered executive as saying, “You f—ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we‟re not going to deal with Iranians?”

The front page of the Economist epitomises where this has led.

The worldwide reputation of bankers is at its lowest point, in my lifetime at least. The result will be new and more stringent regulation and more intrusive oversight of banks by regulators. This outcome will be well-deserved as banks have proved themselves unworthy of the trust of their communities. However, it is also likely to keep borrowing costs and transaction fees high as banks struggle to deliver shareholder returns while covering the costs of new regulatory requirements. So, it will not just be banks bearing the cost of their misdeeds.

Trust is hard to earn and, once lost, harder to recover. Every bank around the world should be thinking very hard right now about how to restore trust in banks.

Image searches

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This week’s edition of Media Watch, “Pixelating protects identity? Think again“, examines the threat image search engines pose to anonymity. Drop a disguised photo into Google images and the chances are you will find the original in the search results.

Intrigued, I thought I would try it out. The pixellated the photo of Tom Waits was my second test. The first image I found to try was a golden pyramid. (It is from a presentation I recently pulled together on cognitive dissonance, but that is unlikely to be a helpful explanation).

In this case the search results came close to being artistic: an impressive array of alternative golden pyramids.

I can see that Google images could be rather fun.

Shadow Banking

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The Financial Services Authority (FSA) is the banking and financial services regulator in the UK. For now at least.

Back in 2010, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the equivalent of the Treasury in Australian terms) announced plans to scrap the FSA in response to a failure during the financial crisis of the 10 year old “tri-partite system”. This tri-partite system split responsibility for national financial stability management between the Treasury, the Bank of England and the FSA. The government is now working on shifting responsibility back from the FSA to the Bank of England, a process which will establish three new regulatory bodies: the Financial Policy Committee (FPC), the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). More three-letter initialisations and, dare I say it, a new tri-partite system?

Until this process is complete, the FSA continues about its business. The chairman of the FSA is Lord Adair Turner, Baron of Ecchinswell. Turner is also a member of the steering committee of the G20 Financial Stability Board (FSB). In March this year, he spoke at the London CASS business school on the topic of “shadow banking” and its role in the financial crisis.

Shadow banking, a term coined by Paul McCulley in the early days of the crisis, refers to a diverse range of entities such as “structured investment vehicles” (SIVs), hedge funds and money-market funds which have evolved to provide some very similar functions to banks, while not being subject to the same regulatory controls. A nightmare scenario for any bank is a “run”, when too many people try to withdraw their deposits at the same time. Shadow banks can also fall victim to runs. These runs may not be very obvious outside the financial markets, there are no queues of angry depositors on the streets, but they can be just as dangerous and runs on shadow banks were in fact a major factor underlying the global financial crisis. For this reason, regulators like Turner and the FSB are not only focused on strengthening controls on banks, but on better understanding shadow banks and, if possible, subjecting them to regulation to reduce the chances of future financial crises.

So what is it that shadow banks do? To answer that, I’ll first go back to the basics of banking. Although banks have evolved to provide many other products and services, the essence of banking is taking deposits and providing loans. The diagram below illustrates the flow of capital from an investor to a bank and from a bank to a borrower. Having given the bank some money, the investor now has a financial asset in the form of a deposit (and the deposit is a liability from the bank’s point of view). Likewise, the loan now represents a financial asset for the bank (and a liability from the borrower’s point of view). So the bank acts as intermediary between savers and borrowers. In doing so, however, banks act as more than a simple broker matching borrowers and lenders. Most bank lending also involves maturity transformation. More colloquially, this is known as lending long and borrowing short.

The typical depositor wants their money to be readily available in an at call transaction account. Some may be tempted by higher interest rates to put money in term deposits, usually no longer than 6 months to maturity. On the other hand, most borrowers do not want their loans due and payable too quickly. Home buyers borrow in the expectation that their earnings over coming years will allow them to pay interest and principal on their loans. Likewise, companies making capital expenditure, building factories, buying equipment or acquiring other businesses borrow in the expectation that the revenue generated by their expanded business capability will allow them to repay their loans. In both cases, the term of the loans must match the timeframes over which earnings are generated.

Some lenders will be prepared to make longer term investments, some borrowers may be able to repay more quickly, but overall there is a mismatch in maturity preferences of lenders and borrowers. Banks are in the business of bridging this gap in preferences. In the ordinary course of events, they can allow depositors to withdraw funds before loans are due to be repaid, making use of funds from other depositors, borrowing from other banks or, in need, borrowing from the central bank. But if too many borrowers withdraw at the same time and the bank is unable to meet those demands, then the bank can fail. This is known as liquidity risk, and has become an enormous focus of regulators, risk managers and rating agencies around the world in the wake of the global financial crisis.

While the financial crisis certainly highlighted the dangers of liquidity risk for commercial and investment banks such as Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers, it was outside the traditional banking sector that the greatest liquidity problems arose, particularly as a result of securitisation.

Securitisation is a form of structured finance that predates the financial crisis by many years. Essentially it involves setting up a trust (or similar legal entity) which provides loans that become the assets of the trust (often referred to as a “pool” of loans). The funds to provide these loans are obtained by selling a special kind of bond to investors, known as asset-backed securities (ABS). Principal and interest flowing from the loan pool is collected by the trust and periodically passed through to investors.

The most common form of securities bundles up pools of home loans, in which case they are referred to as residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS).

Unlike bank-lending, there is essentially no maturity transformation involved in financing by means of ABS. Investors cannot withdraw their money early from the trust, they have to wait until it is repaid by borrowers. The only other option for an investor wanting to “liquidate” their investment (i.e. turn it back into cash) is to find another investor to sell their securities to.

The problem with ABS is the overall mismatch of maturity preferences between borrowers and lenders. Without getting into the business of maturity transformation, there was always going to be a limit on how large the market for ABS could become. Faced with a problem like this, it was only a matter of time before innovative financiers came up with a solution. One such solution was asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP). This involves adding another step in the chain, often referred to as a “conduit”. The conduit was simply another legal entity which would buy ABS, funding the purchase by issuing short-dated securities known as asset-backed commercial paper.

Just like a bank, the conduit is exposed to liquidity risk. Before the crisis, this risk was considered fairly low. After all, the assets of the conduit were readily trade-able securities. Most of the time the conduit could repay investors simply by issuing new ABCP to other investors but, in the unlikely event that no such investors could be found, it could simply sell the ABS. In some cases, investors were provided with additional assurance of repayment in the form of “liquidity backstops” provided by banks, essentially a guarantee that the bank would step in to repay investors in need (although these commitments were not always very clearly disclosed to bank shareholders). This whole arrangement was considered highly satisfactory and conduits typically received the highest possible rating from credit rating agencies.

Unfortunately, liquidity risk is a real risk as the world eventually discovered. Once the US mortgage market started to get into trouble in 2007, investors around the world began, quite reasonably, to be rather reluctant to invest in RMBS and other ABS. Prices on these securities began to fall. Managers of large-scale cash investment funds, until then enthusiastic buyers of ABCP, decided that more traditional cash investments were more attractive. The conduits were forced to sell ABS at precisely the time when prices were falling. Their selling pushed prices down further in a vicious cycle, a perfect illustration of the close relationship between funding liquidity risk (the risk of not being able to repay obligations) and market liquidity risk (the risk of being unable to sell financial assets at anything other than a painfully low price). As a result, some conduits were rescued by the banks backing them (“taking them back on balance sheet”), while others collapsed.

The problems of ABCP were just one example of non-bank liquidity failures during the financial crisis. Others include the venerable US money market fund, the Reserve Fund “breaking the buck” or Australian non-bank lender RAMS finding itself unable to continue funding itself by means of “extendible commercial paper” (ECP).

ABCP conduits, money-market funds, non-bank mortgage lenders along with many other non-bank financiers that make up the shadow banking sector had well and truly entered the business of maturity transformation and are all exposed to significant liquidity risk as a result. There are many linkages between banks and these shadow banks, whether through commitments such as liquidity backstops, direct lending or even partial or complete ownership. Regulators are concerned that too much risk in the shadow banking sector means too much risk for banks and too much risk for the financial system as a whole.

One strategy for regulators is to enforce a cordon sanitaire around banks, protecting them from shadow banks. But many, including Lord Turner, worry that is not enough to protect our global financial system with its complex interconnections from damage when shadow banks fail. Ideally they would like to regulate shadow banks as well, preventing them from running too much liquidity risk. But this is not an easy task. As the name suggests, it is not easy to see what is going on in the world of shadow banks, even for well-informed financial regulators.

Goodhart’s Law

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Another post and another Law, but this time no mathematics is involved.

Imagine you are running a team of salespeople and, as a highly motivated manager, you are working on strategies to improve the performance of your team. After a close study of your team’s client call reports you realise that the high performers in the team consistently meet with their clients more frequently than the poor performers. Eureka! You now have a plan: you set targets for the number of times your team should meet with clients each week. Bonuses will depend upon performance against these targets. Confident that your new client call metric is highly correlated with sales performance, is objective and easily measurable, you sit back and wait.

Six months later, it is time to review the results. Initially you are pleased to discover that a number of your poor performers have achieved very good scores relative to your new targets. Most of the high performers have done well also, although you are a little disappointed that your best salesperson came nowhere near the “stretch target” you set. You then begin to review the sales results and find them very puzzling: despite the high number of client meetings, the results for most of your poor performers are worse than ever. Not only that, your top salesperson has had a record quarter. After you have worked out whether you can wriggle out of the commitment you made to link bonuses to your new metric, you would do well to reflect on the fact that you have fallen victim to Goodhart’s Law.

According to Goodhart’s Law, the very act of targeting a proxy (client meetings) to drive a desired outcome (sales performance) undermines the relationship between the proxy and the target. In the client meeting example, the relationship clearly broke down because your team immediately realised it was straightforward to “game” the metric, recording many meetings without actually doing a better job of selling. Your highest performer was probably too busy doing a good job to waste their clients’ time with unnecessary meetings.

The Law was first described in 1975 by Charles Goodhart in a paper delivered to the Reserve Bank of Australia. It had been observed that there was a close relationship between money supply and interest rates and, on this basis, the Bank of England began to target money supply levels by setting short-term interest rates. Almost immediately, the relationship between interest rates and money supply broke down. While the reason for the breakdown was loosening of controls on bank lending rather than salespeople gaming targets, the label “Goodhart’s Law” caught on.

Along with its close relatives Campbell’s Law and the Lucas Critique, Goodhart’s Law has been used to explain a broad range of phenomena, far removed from its origins in monetary policy. In 18th century Britain, a crude form of poll tax was levied based on the number of windows on every house. The idea was that the number of windows would be correlated with the number of people living in the house. It did not take long for householders to begin bricking up their windows. A more apocryphal example is the tale of the Soviet-era nail factory. Once central planners set targets for the weight of nail output, artful factory managers met their target by making just one nail, but an enormous and very heavy nail.

Much like the Law of Unintended Consequences, of which it is a special case, Goodhart’s Law is one of those phenomena that, once you learn about it, you cannot help seeing it at work everywhere.

Bitcoin revisited

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Just over a year ago, I wrote about the digital “crypto-currency” Bitcoin. It has been an eventful year for Bitcoin.

Designed to provide a secure yet anonymous, decentralised means for making payments online, the first Bitcoins were virtually minted in 2009. By early 2011, Bitcoin had begun to attract attention. Various sites, including the not-for-profit champion of rights online, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), began accepting Bitcoins as payment. But when Gawker reported that Bitcoins could be used to buy drugs on “underground” website Silk Road, interest in the currency exploded and within a few days, the price of Bitcoins soared to almost $30.

This kind of attention was unwelcome for some, and shortly afterwards EFF announced that they would no longer be accepting Bitcoins, fearing that this would be construed as an endorsement of the now controversial currency. Around the same time, the first major theft of Bitcoins was reported and the Bitcoin exchange rate fell sharply.

Bitcoin Exchange Rate

More recently, another high-profile theft has caused ructions in the Bitcoin economy, prompting e-payments provider and PayPal competitor, Paxum, to abandon the Bitcoin experiment, which in turn forced one of the larger Bitcoin “exchanges” to shut down. The anonymity of Bitcoin is a design feature, but it also makes it almost impossible to trace thieves once they have their virtual hands on Bitcoins.

How much damage this does to the fledgling currency remains to be seen, but it certainly makes for a volatile currency. The free-floating Australian dollar is a reasonably volatile real-world currency but, as is evident in the chart below, Bitcoin volatility is an order of magnitude higher. That in itself is reason enough for any online business to think twice about accepting Bitcoins.

Rolling 30 day volatility (annualised)

Whatever its future, Bitcoin is a fascinating experiment and, even if it does not survive, digital currencies of one form or another are surely here to stay.

Data sources: Bitcoin charts, Bloomberg.

More spreads

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To provide a bit more context for the French government bond spreads discussed in the last post, the chart below shows the 5-year spreads to German bonds for a few more European countries.

With spreads over 4300 basis points (43%), the chart is dominated by Greece, so here is the chart again with Greece removed.

As you can see in both charts, while French spreads are certainly heading north, they have a long way to go.

For those who have spotted the break in the line for Ireland, my data source seems to be missing 2010 data. I am looking into that and will update the casts if I plug the gaps.

Data source: Bloomberg.

French spreads

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Changes of leadership in both Greece and Italy were initially well-received by markets, but investors are getting nervous again. Attention is shifting to France, and French government bonds seem to be on the nose. The chart below shows the “spread” between French and German 5-year government bonds. Measured in basis points (1/100th of 1%), the spread is the difference between the yields on the respective bonds and it has now reached 183 basis points.

Given that yields on 5-year government bonds are only 0.95%, that is a big difference. Investors are demanding almost double the rate of interest on a French bond offered by a German bond if they are to take on the risk that France is not able to repay its debt in 5 years’ time.

Unlike France, the United Kingdom is lucky enough to have its own currency and the spread between UK and German government bonds is only 10 basis points. More on that in a future post.

Data source: Bloomberg.

The oldest bank in the world

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Yes I am back. I know it has been a while. What can I say? I have been quite busy!

One of the things taking up my time during the week was preparing for and then giving a talk for the Q-Group on operational risk capital modelling. It sounds arcane, I know, but there was one exciting part: I had the opportunity to try out the simulated laser pointer that you can create by pressing your finger on the screen of the iPad during a Keynote presentation.

Since regulators expect banks to use their capital models to quantify 1 in 1,000 year losses, I slipped a reference in my presentation to the Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena which, having been founded in 1472, is a mere 539 years old. The somewhat oblique point was that no-one should take these models too seriously.

Monte dei Paschi di Siena

It was an ironic twist that evening that this was headline on the front page of the Wall Street Journal website:

It seems that Monte dei Paschi di Siena was one of a number of banks suffering as a result of the European sovereign debt crisis and it makes an interesting case study of the challenges of the business of banking.

Back in the original days of the global financial crisis, the banks that got into the most trouble were the ones with significant exposure to “toxic assets” (US mortgages, mortgage-backed securities and their ilk). Once people started to worry about these toxic assets, the problem was that no-one really knew how much exposure any given bank had to these assets and so no-one wanted to lend to anyone else. Since many banks (including Australian banks) rely on wholesale debt markets (i.e. they borrow money from big institutional investors around the world like pension funds), this became a problem for everyone.

Back then you might have thought that a regional bank like Monte dei Paschi di Siena would be fairly immune to what was going on, but it got off to a bad start in the crisis by acquiring another bank, Banca Antonveneta in 2007. In retrospect (and even at the time in the eyes of some analysts), it paid too much and over-extended itself at the wrong time. Within a couple of years, its capital buffers had become so thin that it was forced to turn to the Italian government for a capital injection and also cut its dividend payments right back in an attempt to rebuild. This was painful for Siena because, in a peculiarity of Italian banking, the majority shareholder of Monte dei Paschi di Siena is a charitable foundation, originally established in the 1990s for the express purpose of acquiring the bank when banks across the country were being privatised. This foundation makes donations to all sorts of public groups across the city of Siena and, with the dividend cut, the donations stopped too.

To make matters worse, the bank is a large holder of Italian government bonds, which have not been performing particularly well of late. With a capital base of €7.1 billion (figure as at April 2011), it held €32.5 billion (figure as at December 2010) in Italian government bonds and so any decline in value of Italian government bonds put pressure on the bank’s capital. In mid-2011, in the face of the European debt crisis, the bank decided it needed to further bolster its capital position. But the foundation did not want to lose its majority share-holding, so the foundation turned to JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs (aka the vampire squid) to borrow money to buy new shares issued by the bank. Unfortunately the loans were secured by shares and as the share price continued to fall, the foundation had to hand over more shares to its lenders. If things do not improve, the foundation is likely to be forced to sell more shares, ultimately losing its majority stake in the bank. The foundation, which once made around €250 million a year in donations to the city, is not looking likely to be able to contribute nearly as much to the public good in the future.

Will this venerable bank be the first to survive for 1,000 years? It has not failed yet, but the immediate future still looks rather shaky.

Ring-fencing rogue traders

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Kweku Adoboli managed to cost UBS over $2 billion with his rogue trading, and has now cost chief executive Oswald Grübel his job. While this time the buck stopped at the top, it is more than can be said for many previous rogue trading cases. Grübel was called out of retirement to take the helm of UBS as it faced the global financial crisis, so perhaps a return to retirement was an easier choice than it would have been for the chief executives of Société Générale, NAB*, Allied Irish and other past victims of rogue traders.

But what has surprised me about this latest rogue trading incident is reactions like this one from the Economist:

For UBS and its shareholders, the immediate questions should be why it was still vulnerable to this sort of alleged manipulation more than three years after Mr Kerviel’s [the Société Générale rogue trader] loss.

Of course banks are aware of the risk of rogue trading, but it does not mean that protecting themselves against this risk is a simple matter. Trading businesses are complex, with many interconnected computer systems, some old, some new, most dealing with transactions in real time. It is a case of asymmetric warfare: the bank has to defend itself against every possible attack, but the rogue trader only has to find a single point of weakness. The UBS loss may be another reminder for banks of just how much an insider can cost them, but I am confident that there will be another spectacular rogue trading case within the next five years.

Little wonder then that Sir John Vickers, in his report on UK banking, has recommended that banks should “ring-fence” their investment banking operations (including financial markets trading businesses) from their retail and commercial banking arms. The idea is that, while governments will always want to protect the financial system that is so central to their economy, tax-payers should not end up on the hook for losses arising from risky investment banking activity.

Banking regulators around the world have been intently pursuing ideas like this over the last couple of years and the Adoboli case will only add to their determination to impose some form of “recovery and resolution” framework on banks. Before this work is complete, I would not be too surprised if UBS have spun off their investment banking arm. It is becoming all a bit much for Swiss shareholders to cope with.

* UPDATE: My memory served me poorly: the CEO of NAB, Frank Cicutto, did in fact resign after their FX trading fraud.

Stubborn Mule

Obstinately objective