Banking: Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards

Lord Eatwell Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Eatwell (Lab)]

My Lords, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards’s reports form a landmark, dissecting the structure of banking in this country and hence exposing the serious systemic weaknesses both within the banking industry itself and in government policies toward banking. The reports display a constructive blend of financial and institutional analysis. They also display a healthy disdain for the common fallacies which have been propagated by the banking industry in an attempt to limit change, such as the fallacy that higher capital requirements will reduce lending, as if greater capital were simply hidden away in the cellar rather than lent out for profitable return. The Government’s response has been generally welcoming, though a little timid.

The commission was established following the revelations of LIBOR manipulation. Its primary goal was to examine the culture of the banking industry, but its work soon broadened to included systemic risk. This was not simply because banking culture is itself a source of systemic risk to the UK, but also because the work of the Independent Commission on Banking, bold when published, was revealed by longer-term examination to be less powerful than originally thought—hence the PCBS proposals to electrify the ring-fence, and the commission’s numerous dark hints that ring-fencing is not going to work at all.

This is not, however, the occasion to stage a re-run of banking Bill debates. Instead I hope the House will forgive me for recalling that at the time of the establishment of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, I argued that it would not have the time or the resources to do the job needed—namely, a wide-ranging inquiry into UK financial services and their role, or lack of it, in rebalancing the real economy. I was right. While the commission has exceeded expectations, there is an enormous amount still to do if we are to have a financial system that does not just provide stable finance, but provides the high-quality, long-term financial support that modern industry needs.

My agenda of future work for a reincarnated commission covers three areas: the size and composition of the financial services industry, the changing nature of systemic risk, and the development of high-quality finance to support innovative, competitive industry. I shall discuss size and composition first. In a speech in mid-October, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, suggested that UK banking assets would rise from about four times UK GDP today to nine times UK GDP by 2050. In other words, he predicted Britain would become Iceland circa 2007. In defence of his relaxed anticipation of this ominous prospect he argued that,

“a vibrant financial sector brings substantial benefits”,

not only to the UK, but to the world, saying:

“The UK’s financial sector can be both a global good and a national asset—if it is resilient”.

The governor is calling for greater international financial integration, and it is easy to understand why. The City of London is absolutely brilliant at taking funds from around the world, repackaging them into new risk-return structures and selling them back to the rest of the world. It is the world’s finest offshore financial centre. But is a financial sector nine times bigger than GDP such a good idea, even with all the measures of the recent Financial Services Act and the new banking Bill in place? Is the ring-fence sufficient to limit national risk exposure to those inside the ring-fence, while all the risks outside fall on private sector shoulders? We should remember that Lehman Brothers would have been outside the ring-fence. Perhaps it is in the wrong place and should be between, on the one hand, domestic operations and, on the other hand, international operations, thus at least in part insulating the British economy from international financial instability. These issues should be the first items on the agenda of the new incarnation of the commission—whether the governor has got it right.

The second item on the agenda of the new commission should be the changing nature of systemic risk. The key warning of this came last May, when Ben Bernanke hinted at a tapering of US quantitative easing. The result was a massive slump—even chaos—in international bond markets around the world, particularly in emerging markets, and severe difficulties in some foreign exchange markets. In the press, this was attributed to the reversal of flows of what was called a “wall of money” that had originally migrated to emerging markets in the search for yield, given the near-zero interest rates in advanced countries. That portrayal of the problem was wrong, because flows of funds to emerging markets have fallen year on year since 2008—there is no wall of money. What is important is that their form has changed. The capital flow from global banks to emerging markets has slowed to a trickle. In its place, emerging market banks have increased their issuance of bonds. Even more dramatically, non-bank investment in emerging market bonds has soared. Today, in emerging market funding, the global banks have given way to asset managers and other buy-side investors who have global reach. Most of this new bond issuance has been in US dollars, so that emerging market corporates have become much more sensitive to US interest rates and to fluctuations in exchange rates vis-à-vis the US dollar. This increased sensitivity in the changed structure of the market is clear in emerging markets.

Exactly the same transformation of funding flows is taking place here at home. Industrial and commercial firms starved of funding by the banks are turning to the bond market. Asset management firms and insurance companies are responding by increasing their flow of funds into corporate bond markets—which are far more sensitive to prospective interest rate changes than traditional bank lending. A new vicious cycle is being created in which the prospect of interest rate rises leads to falling bond prices, which leads to a flow of managed funds out of the corporate bond market, which leads to declining investment and growth, which in turn undermines future bond yields so that asset managers cut back the flow of funds. That is the vicious cycle.

These distress dynamics have some unfamiliar elements. We normally invoke either leverage or maturity mismatch when explaining crises, and the usual protagonists in the crisis narrative are banks or other financial intermediaries. By contrast, in the newly emerging scenario, asset managers are at the heart. Those are usually the people we characterise as benign, long-term investors, routinely excluded from the list of “systemic” market participants. However, the distinction between leveraged institutions and long-only investors matters less if they share the same tendency to procyclicality. Today, asset managers increasingly base their trading on the same measures of risk used by the banks, so the behaviour of asset management firms will tend to exhibit the same type of procyclical risk-taking that the banks are known for. None of those issues is dealt with in current legislation; they must be dealt with by the new commission.

The third item on my extensive agenda for the reincarnated commission is how the financial services industry serves the need to rebalance the real economy. For the harsh truth is that despite the fact that banking balance sheets around the world are today 15 times greater, relative to GDP, than they were 30 years ago, trend world growth in the real economy is certainly no faster than it was then; and in the West it is significantly slower. No wonder the noble Lord, Lord Turner, labelled much of financial services as “socially useless”.

Most notably, private sector investment in research and development is slowing down. Indeed, if there were not substantial public sector R&D spending, investment in crucial drivers of future growth would be falling. Here, the public sector is really sustaining the R&D agenda. In 2012 alone, state development banks financed $109 billion-worth of investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electrical transmission and distribution, while private sector investment was less than a third of that. In the US, it is government funding in high-growth areas such as the life sciences that is absolutely essential. Where would British life sciences be without the long-term funding provided by the Wellcome Trust?

The private sector problem is lack of the right sort of funding. Even venture capital, designed in theory to provide high-risk finance for innovative companies, snubbed by risk-averse banks, has become itself increasingly risk-averse. The sector is focused on early exit, usually through IPOs in three to five years—while innovation takes 15 to 20 years.

If we are to steer the economy from the consumer-driven mini-recovery that we have at the moment to a productive investment-driven economy, where is the long-term finance to come from? We need the reincarnated commission to refocus reform of the financial sector on quality of financing, not solely on stability or quantity. Reform of the financial sector should be joined up with innovation policy so that productive, not speculative, investment is nurtured in companies of all sizes.

My report card for the commission therefore reads as follows: “Has done an unexpectedly good job; indeed, a brilliant job, and should be congratulated; but has the potential to contribute even more, if only there were a Government that would give it the mandate to fulfil its potential”.