New research confirms the role of regulation and housing in modern business cycles

I think readers will find it hard to imagine how excited I was yesterday when I discovered (through an Amir Sufi piece in the FT) a brand new piece of research called: The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles

(The authors, Jordà, Schularick and Taylor (JST), also published a free version here, and a summary on VOX)

I wish the authors had read my blog before writing their paper as it confirms many of my theses (unless they had?). It’s so interesting that I could almost quote two thirds of the paper here. I obviously encourage you to read it all and I will selectively copy and paste a few pieces below.

In my recent piece on updating the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT), I pointed out that the nature of lending (and banks’ balance sheets) had changed over time since the 19^th century (and particularly post-WW2), mainly due to banking regulation and government schemes. I had already provided a revealing post-WW2 chart for the US to demonstrate the effects of Basel 1 on business and real estate lending volumes.

JST went further. They went further back in time and gathered a dataset of disaggregated lending figures covering 17 developed countries over close to 140 years. Their conclusions confirm my views. Regulations – and in particular Basel – changed everything.

Here is their aggregate credit to GDP chart across all covered countries, to which I added the introduction of Basel 1 as well as pre-Basel trends:

I don’t think there is anything clearer than this chart (I’m not sure that securitized mortgages are included, in which case those figures are understated). Since the 1870s, non-mortgage lending had been the main vector of credit and money supply growth, and mortgage lending represented a relatively modest share of banks’ balance sheet. Basel turned this logic upside-down. How? I have already described the process countless times (risk-weights and capital regulation), so let see what JST say about it:

Over a period of 140 years the level of non-mortgage lending to GDP has risen by a factor of about 3, while mortgage lending to GDP has risen by a factor of 8, with a big surge in the last 40 years. Virtually the entire increase in the bank lending to GDP ratios in our sample of 17 advanced economies has been driven by the rapid rise in mortgage lending relative to output since the 1970s. […]

In addition to country-specific housing policies, international banking regulation also contributed to the growing attractiveness of mortgage lending from the perspective of the banks. The Basel Committee on Bank Supervision (BCBS) was founded in 1974 in reaction to the collapse of Herstatt Bank in Germany. The Committee served as a forum to discuss international harmonization of international banking regulation. Its work led to the 1988 Basle Accord (Basel I) that introduced minimum capital requirements and, importantly, different risk weights for assets on banks’ balance sheets. Loans secured by mortgages on residential properties only carried half the risk weight of loans to companies. This provided another incentive for banks to expand their mortgage business which could be run with higher leverage. As Figure 1 shows, a significant share of the global growth of mortgage lending occurred in recent years following the first Basel Accord.

I wish they had expanded on this topic and made the logical next step: Basel helped set up the largest financial crisis in our lifetime through regulatory arbitrage. Nevertheless, the implications are crystal clear.

To JST, this growth in real estate lending is the reason underlying our most recent financial crises:

We document the rising share of real estate lending (i.e., bank loans secured against real estate) in total bank credit and the declining share of unsecured credit to businesses and households. We also document long-run sectoral trends in lending to companies and households (albeit for a somewhat shorter time span), which suggest that the growth of finance has been closely linked to an explosion of mortgage lending to households in the last quarter of the 20th century. […]

Since WWII, it is only the aftermaths of mortgage booms that are marked by deeper recessions and slower recoveries. This is true both in normal cycles and those associated with financial crises. […]

The type of credit does seem to matter, and we find evidence that the changing nature of financial intermediation has shifted the locus of crisis risks increasingly toward real estate lending cycles. Whereas in the pre-WWII period mortgage lending is not statistically significant, either individually or when used jointly with unsecured credit, it becomes highly significant as a crisis predictor in the post-WWII period.

JST confirm what I was describing in my post on updating the ABCT: that is, that banks don’t play the same role as in early 20^th century, when the theory was first outlined:

The intermediation of household savings for productive investment in the business sector—the standard textbook role of the financial sector—constitutes only a minor share of the business of banking today, even though it was a central part of that business in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

JST describe the post-WW2 changes in mortgage lending originally as a result of government schemes to favour home building and ownership, followed by international regulatory arrangements (Basel) from the 1980s onward. Those measures and rules led to a massive restructuring of banks’ balance sheet, as demonstrated by this chart:

While the empirical findings of this paper will be of no surprise to readers of this blog, this research paper deserves praise: its data gathering and empirical analysis are simply brilliant, and it at last offers us the opportunity to make other mainstream academics and regulators aware of the damages their ideas and policies have made to our economy over the past decades. It also puts the idea of ‘secular stagnation’ into perspective: our societies are condemned to stagnate if regulatory arbitrage starve our productive businesses of funds and the only way to generate wealth is through housing bubbles.