Liquidity and collateral are two sides of the same coin

I recently wrote a piece listing all the current regulatory constraints that arise from banking regulation and which weigh on liquidity. Unfortunately, there is more. As Singh explained in this FT article (as well as in many of his research papers), monetary policy, and in particular quantitative easing, can have serious repercussions on market liquidity:

From a financial lubrication angle, markets need both good collateral and money for smooth market functioning and, ultimately, financial stability. Having a ready supply of good collateral like US Treasuries or German Bunds also helps in reallocating the not-so-good collateral.

QE that isolates good collateral from the wider market reduces financial lubrication. Its substitute, money that shows up as excess reserves, is basically contained in a closed circuit system built to avoid inflation by introducing “interest on excess reserves”.

Indeed, the combination of QE and Basel rules effectively drives so-called ‘high-quality assets’ out of the market by ‘siloing’ them in various places (central banks’ and banks’ balance sheets, clearinhouses’ margins…). This is what many have dubbed ‘scarcity of good collateral’. (I personally think that Singh is wrong to call all highly rated and liquid assets ‘collateral’. When the Fed buys Treasuries, it doesn’t purchase collateral. It purchases an asset that could potentially be used as collateral. Yet, Singh just uses the word ‘collateral’ in every single circumstance. Semantics I know, but the distinction is important I believe)

The potential solution? Governments could issue more debt, meaning more indebtedness. Not certain this is a good one, especially as increased indebtedness would at some point cause the quality of the asset to decline… (reducing the maturity of existing issues could potentially ease liquidity constraints, but the effect is going to be limited)

JP Koning once declared that he didn’t understand how such ‘collateral shortage’ could even happen. Any asset could serve as collateral, with bigger haircut applied to riskier asset to offset potential market value fluctuations. He is fundamentally right. In a free market, there is no real reason why such shortage should ever appear.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a fully free market, and financial regulations institutionalised the use of certain classes of assets as collateral for certain transactions and increased the required associated haircut (for example, see here for OTC derivatives, see here for shadow banking transactions). Many transactions are also pushed towards central clearing at clearinghouses, which often require posting more (standardised) collateral, hence reducing supply by placing high-quality assets in a silo.

Cash, which can also be used as collateral, is itself siloed at the central bank level because of interest on excess reserves*.

As a result of those new rules, the latest ISDA survey tells us that:

Estimated total collateral in circulation related to non-cleared OTC derivatives has decreased 14%, from $3.7 trillion at the end of 2012 to $3.2 trillion at the end of 2013 as a consequence of mandatory clearing.

Regulations have created a lot of ‘know unknowns’. How the entanglement of all those rules will unravel in a crisis will be ‘interesting’ to follow.

* I know that those reserves don’t usually leave the central bank (unless withdrawn by depositors). But when banks expand their loan book, reserves that were previously in excess suddenly become ‘required’ (unless there is no reserve requirement of course).