ABCP Post-Mortem
The Globe did an analysis of the ABCP problem last weekend (second of two parts today). The first examined the decisions of some retail investors to get into the stuff, and the second examined the role of regulatory (and self-regulatory) agencies for not protecting those investors from themselves. What the Globe presents is, in itself, fair. It’s omissions are far more interesting.
The articles note that several bodies might or might not have jurisdiction to regulated bank debt products: those implementing the Bank Act (OSFI), the Central Bank, the OSC, and several self-regulatory organizations (SROs) such as associations of mutual fund dealers or securities professionals. OSFI and the OSC have both, previously, stated that this stuff was not their bailiwick. SROs are more sanguine — they are meant to enforce, in part, the “know your client” type rules, but point to the broadly systemic failure in the market, and the role of (unregulated) ratings agencies in blessing the stuff with good investment grade ratings. The proposed reforms: ensure retail investors are not allowed to enter these markets.
What would have happened if retail investors were not permitted to enter the market (due to a technical rule change in 2005)? Well, for sure retail investors would not have been burned by this stuff. But, the market event would still have happened, and the real problems it represents would still — and will still — exist if this is the only lesson we learn.
So it is what the Globe article doesn’t address that is likely to be the most significant aspects of the ABCP fiasco (which is a pretty big journalistic miss given the four reporters and five or six full pages over two days devoted to the investigation). Some of the major aspects that went relatively unexamined (to be fair, mentioned, but not investigated) were: the role of DBRS, now being sued, in rating this stuff as “OK”, when no other rating agency in the world would do so. Why would they do that? We find that these agencies are riddled with conflicts of interest. We also find that, despite their central role in decision-making by investors, and therefore, the public policy of securities markets, they are unregulated private businesses.
Or, we could note the serious problems in the development of securities that separate risk management and monitoring from the owner of the security: this is essentially what happens in asset-backed securities and many types of derivative securitiers. The risk-assessment associated with the asset, say, ownership of a credit card loan, is best done and managed by a credit-card loan business, that is, a bank. But if the bank then re-sells that loan in an asset-backed security, it no longer has the incentive to manage the risk involved in providing credit (because it no longer owns the “loss” if it goes sour). This is a classic agency problem in corporate and securities law. If banks were forced to guarantee the assets, they could not issue nearly as much of this stuff, or they would be forced to incorporate the value of these things into their own financial statements, which would force them to be more responsible in the packaging of them. Probably, a lot less of it would exist. Some say this is good because it means less complexity and less risk mis-match; some, like former Chairman Greenspan, think it is bad, because it may mean less liquidity and less opportunity for price clearing in some securities markets.
These are two fundamental lessons in market dynamics and they have several sides to them as business and financial market issues, as well as core questions about the role of the financial sector in the economy as a whole. Most of that is entirely missed by the Globe investigative articles.
You would, however, find a pithy summary of these issues in Monday’s paper, buried somewhere on B5 or B6, in an opinion piece by Ed Waitzer, former Chair of the OSC.