(The article featured
below is a selection from Subprime,
Mortgage and Securitization Law Update, which is available to subscribers
of that publication.)
Intertwining of Bank and
Securities Activities Strains Risk Management
In the wake of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley
Act, Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Donald Kohn has noted that large
commercial and investment banks have become indispensable to the efficiency and
stability of the securities markets. For example, the $2 trillion hedge fund
sector is critically dependent on a relatively small number of commercial and
investment banks that serve as secured creditors and derivatives counterparties.
And, as the financial market turmoil has revealed, banks provide liquidity
support to various short-term financial markets, including the commercial paper
market.
In remarks at a Fed credit symposium
in Charlotte, N.C., Kohn also emphasized that the creation of innovative and
complex securitized products has outstripped banks' risk-management
capabilities. While securitization can transform illiquid assets into
more-liquid securities, he noted, risk managers must be more aware of the ways
that securitization can become a drain on a bank's liquidity position in times
of stress.
Traditional Risks Take New Form
The Fed official also pointed out
that large banking organizations, freed from the constraints of the Glass-Steagall
Act, have significantly increased their capital markets businesses, including
underwriting securitizations, securities custody, prime brokerage and both
over-the-counter and exchange-traded derivatives. They also have made
significant inroads into both traditional asset management and the management of
hedge funds. Indeed, Kohn observed that the largest commercial banks are now
major competitors in many of the business lines historically viewed as the
province of investment banks.
For its part, the Fed is reexamining
a host of things ranging from Basel II to liquidity to transparency. The Fed
wants the Basel II capital requirements raised on specific exposures, such as
super senior collateralized debt obligations of asset-backed securities and
off-balance-sheet commitments. The central bank also wants to see better
disclosures of off-balance-sheet commitments and of valuations of complex
structured products.
According to Kohn, the entry of large
banks into securitization raises a new threat to financial stability. In part,
this threat stems from the complexity of banks' capital markets activity and
from the services that banks provide to the asset-management industry, including
hedge funds. Traditional risks, such as liquidity and concentration, have
appeared in new forms.
Due Diligence
Kohn also emphasized the need for
increased due diligence for both banks and investors who, according to Kohn,
must devote more effort to due diligence when investing in complex securitized
products and also avoid relying so heavily on credit rating agencies to do all
their homework for them. As institutional investors fueled securitization by
demanding fixed-income securities, said Kohn, they should have done better due
diligence on the subprime risks they were taking on, but they largely failed to
do so. The Fed official speculated that these investors relied on inadequate
credit rating agency analyses or simply misunderstood the risk of very complex
securities.
Another change affecting financial
stability is the growth of services that banks provide, including running their
own asset-management businesses and providing prime brokerage services to hedge
funds. He urged banks to manage the reputational risks of their asset-management
businesses.
Because institutional investors are
naturally sensitive to the reputation of their asset managers, he reasoned,
losses elsewhere in the bank can be compounded if they leave the bank's
asset-management business exposed to a flight of business and a sharp reduction
in fee income. Moreover, an increase in the business that banks do with hedge
funds leads to an increase in the attention that banks must pay to counterparty
risk management.
Reforming Securitization
A major cause of the market turmoil
is that a good part of the risk associated with the securitization of subprime
mortgages was not distributed into the market but instead was retained by banks.
The most glaring example is their exposures to super senior tranches of
collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that had invested in subprime
mortgage-backed securities. One reason for this was the decision of underwriters
to retain some of the super senior exposure, in some cases reportedly because
they met some resistance when they attempted to sell them at very slim spreads.
The underwriters evidently misjudged the risk of those positions, Kohn posited,
often because they relied too heavily on external triple-A ratings.
Further, while the
originate-to-distribute model aims to move exposures off of banks' balance
sheets, noted Kohn, there is the liquidity risk that a sudden closing of
securitization markets can force a bank to hold and fund exposures that it had
originated with the intent to distribute. And even when banks did distribute
exposures, they did so to various off-balance-sheet financing vehicles in which
they retained contractual and reputational liquidity exposures.
Kohn called on financial
institutions, as part of reforming securitization, to enhance risk management
comprehensively across business lines and fully integrate risk management into
the decisionmaking of senior management. Self-interest provides a strong
incentive to improve risk management, he said, but better risk management at the
largest banks would also benefit the broader financial system.
Banks must also improve their
management of counterparty risks. During the financial market disruptions
surrounding the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, counterparty risk was a
central concern. Subsequently, the Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group,
headed by former Fed official Gerald Corrigan, developed a set of best practices
for counterparty risk. While these efforts helped prevent serious losses from
defaults of hedge fund counterparties in the recent turmoil, banks do not appear
to have followed the best practices for their counterparty relationships with
financial guarantors, where counterparty risk has crystallized into large
losses.
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