Kupiec on central banking/planning

In the WSJ a couple of days ago, Paul Kupiec wrote an article that looks so similar to my blog that I had to quote it here.

Macroprudential regulation, macro-pru for short, is the newest regulatory fad. It refers to policies that raise and lower regulatory requirements for financial institutions in an attempt to control their lending to prevent financial bubbles. […]

There is also the very real risk that macroprudential regulators will misjudge the market. Banks must cover their costs to stay in business, and in the end bank customers will pay the cost banks incur to comply with regulatory adjustments, regardless of their merit. By the way, when was the last time regulators correctly saw a coming crisis?

He concludes with:

With Mr. Fischer now heading the Fed’s new financial stability committee, might we soon see regulations requiring product-specific minimum interest rates? Or maybe rules that single out new loan products and set maximum loan maturities and debt-to-income limits to stop banks from lending on activities the Fed decides are too “risky”? None of these worries is an unimaginable stretch.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. bank regulators have put in place new supervisory rules that limit banks’ ability to make specific types of loans in the so-called leverage-lending market—loans to lower-rated corporations—and for home mortgages. Since there is no scientific means to definitively identify bubbles before they break, the list of specific lending activities that could be construed as “potentially systemic” is only limited by the imagination of financial regulators.

Few if any centrally planned economies have provided their citizens with a standard of living equal to the standard achieved in market economies. Unfortunately the financial crisis has shaken belief in the benefits of allowing markets to work. Instead we seem to have adopted a blind faith in the risk-management and credit-allocation skills of a few central bank officials.

Government regulators are no better than private investors at predicting which individual investments are justified and which are folly. The cost of macroprudential regulation in the name of financial stability is almost certainly even slower economic growth than the anemic recovery has so far yielded.

This is very good, and I can’t agree more.

He points to his own research on macro-prudential policies. In a paper published in June 2014, Kupiec, Lee and Rosenfeld declare that

Compared to the magnitude of loan growth effects attributable to [increase in supervisory scrutiny or losses on loan/securities], the strength of macroprudential capital and liquidity effects are weak. This data suggest that traditional monetary policy (lowering banks’ cost of funding) is likely to be a much more potent tool for stimulating bank loan growth following widespread bank losses than modifying regulatory capital or liquidity requirements.

(note: they also say that the opposite logic applies)

While it doesn’t mean that they are wrong, I am not fully convinced by their arguments, especially given the dataset they base their analysis on (an economic and credit boom period, with less than tight monetary policy and many variables that could have been distorted as a result). In another paper, Aiyar, Calomiris and Wieladek point to the fact that macro-prudential policy can be effective at reducing banks’ lending, but that alternative sources of credit (i.e. shadow banking) grow as a result (they say that macro-prudential policies ‘leak’).

What is clear is that the effects of macro-prudential policies are unclear. What is also clear is that, whatever the effects of those policies, none are necessarily desirable. If macropru is indeed effective, then the resulting distorted capital allocation may be harmful. If macropru isn’t effective, then it may lead central bankers to (wrongly) believe they can maintain interest rates below/above their natural level while controlling the collateral damages this creates. In both cases the economy ends up suffering.