Voice from the City asks if the end is nigh for the lender of last resort.
In his seasonal interview with the Financial Times on January
3rd, Alistair Darling appeared to propose the creation of an emergency
response system to be triggered if banks seek to make use of the Bank
of Englandâs lender of last resort function. As the BBC business
editor Robert Peston interprets him, âthreatening toneâ¦towards banks who might in the future follow the
example of Northern Rock and request emergency fundingâ. Indeed,
Peston claims that one of the thoughts we should draw from the
Chancellorâs interview is the following:
âOnce any bank asked for emergency funds from the
authorities, its board would no longer be in charge. The directors of
the bank would lose their ability to direct the organisation as a
condition of receiving help â and the rights of the bankâs shareholders
would also be reduced in the process. That would prevent a recurrence
of the extraordinary stand-off at the Rock, where the taxpayer is
exposed to the tune of £57bn but where the power of the Treasury to
direct the bank is highly circumscribed.â
There are many problems with Darling’s
proposals â not the least of which is that he only partially proposes
to address flaws in tripartite system (though he has, belatedly, noted
that not having a single ultimate decision-maker is a weakness, he is
still not proposing to have the supplier of liquidity â the Bank of
England â have supervision of solvency) and that he persists in
believing that more extensive deposit insurance is an important and
valuable part of the scheme.
However, I’ve noted these problems before,
and the interesting new difficulty is that Darlingâs proposals, at
least as Peston interprets them, appear to represent the end of a
proper lender of last resort function.
The old lender of last resort function was supposed to enable banks
to get through short-term liquidity problems so that business could
thereafter progress much as usual. But under Darling’s concept if a
bank requests such emergency funding, its board loses control and the
organization is thrust into ignominy under government control â broken
up into pieces, with presumably all goodwill value in the company gone
and with it all shareholder value. Since shareholders stand to lose
everything if they seek emergency funding under this scheme, that will
mean that banks won’t request emergency funding unless the shareholders
have given up all hope of getting any money out of the institution.
Indeed, in many situations it appears plausible that the shareholders
might prefer to liquidate the institution rather than to seek emergency
funding. Alternatively they might be driven to attempt desperate
gambles in order to obtain cash, thereby damaging their solvency. Is
that really what Darling wants to achieve? I presume not.
Darlingâs proposals are just kite-flying at this stage, and there is
to be a consultation. But it seems to me that (a) they donât get to
the heart of the issue, which is the lack of prudential supervision,
liquidity provision, and takeover facilitation being concentrated in
one institution; (b) they contain a number of misguided ideas such as
deposit insurance, which will entail considerable additional regulation
of UK banking; and (c) they wonât facilitate people in using
lender-of-last-resort facilities in the future (and hence make
liquidity-induced banking failure more likely, rather than less). We
should not tire of saying that anything other than an abandonment of
Gordon Brownâs misguided tripartite system, for which he was so keen to
take credit for so long, would not address the fundamental issue. Does
anyone really believe that it was a coincidence that, under the
lender-of-last-resort system we have no bank run for well over a
century, then once the system was introduced the first crisis led to a
bank run? Solution: You got it wrong, Mr Brown. The only good way out
is to reverse your previous error. All these other ideas are just
political face-saving at the expense of the UK financial sector.
Voice from the City asks if the end is nigh for the lender of last resort.
In his seasonal interview with the Financial Times on January
3rd, Alistair Darling appeared to propose the creation of an emergency
response system to be triggered if banks seek to make use of the Bank
of Englandâs lender of last resort function. As the BBC business
editor Robert Peston interprets him, âthreatening toneâ¦towards banks who might in the future follow the
example of Northern Rock and request emergency fundingâ. Indeed,
Peston claims that one of the thoughts we should draw from the
Chancellorâs interview is the following:
There are many problems with Darling’s
proposals â not the least of which is that he only partially proposes
to address flaws in tripartite system (though he has, belatedly, noted
that not having a single ultimate decision-maker is a weakness, he is
still not proposing to have the supplier of liquidity â the Bank of
England â have supervision of solvency) and that he persists in
believing that more extensive deposit insurance is an important and
valuable part of the scheme.
However, I’ve noted these problems before,
and the interesting new difficulty is that Darlingâs proposals, at
least as Peston interprets them, appear to represent the end of a
proper lender of last resort function.
The old lender of last resort function was supposed to enable banks
to get through short-term liquidity problems so that business could
thereafter progress much as usual. But under Darling’s concept if a
bank requests such emergency funding, its board loses control and the
organization is thrust into ignominy under government control â broken
up into pieces, with presumably all goodwill value in the company gone
and with it all shareholder value. Since shareholders stand to lose
everything if they seek emergency funding under this scheme, that will
mean that banks won’t request emergency funding unless the shareholders
have given up all hope of getting any money out of the institution.
Indeed, in many situations it appears plausible that the shareholders
might prefer to liquidate the institution rather than to seek emergency
funding. Alternatively they might be driven to attempt desperate
gambles in order to obtain cash, thereby damaging their solvency. Is
that really what Darling wants to achieve? I presume not.
Darlingâs proposals are just kite-flying at this stage, and there is
to be a consultation. But it seems to me that (a) they donât get to
the heart of the issue, which is the lack of prudential supervision,
liquidity provision, and takeover facilitation being concentrated in
one institution; (b) they contain a number of misguided ideas such as
deposit insurance, which will entail considerable additional regulation
of UK banking; and (c) they wonât facilitate people in using
lender-of-last-resort facilities in the future (and hence make
liquidity-induced banking failure more likely, rather than less). We
should not tire of saying that anything other than an abandonment of
Gordon Brownâs misguided tripartite system, for which he was so keen to
take credit for so long, would not address the fundamental issue. Does
anyone really believe that it was a coincidence that, under the
lender-of-last-resort system we have no bank run for well over a
century, then once the system was introduced the first crisis led to a
bank run? Solution: You got it wrong, Mr Brown. The only good way out
is to reverse your previous error. All these other ideas are just
political face-saving at the expense of the UK financial sector.