Brian Romanchuk — Banks Borrowing Short And Lending Long

Now that there appears to be a chance that the Fed could possibly hike rates by at least a little bit within a few months (maybe), there is increasing interest on what the effects would be on the economy. One area of contention is the effect on the banking system. In my view, you will need a microscope to find the direct effects on banking system profitability (I ignore any macroeconomic feedback from rate hikes, which are an entirely more awkward question). That is not to say that enterprising bank CEO's would not seize upon blaming the Fed for their own failures of leadership. It appears that the belief that the level of interest rates affect bank profitability are based upon inapplicable historical analogies, as well as blurring the distinction between liquidity risk and interest rate risk. 

The academic J.W. Mason did an interesting piece of analysis in "Interest Rates and Bank Spreads." He was responding to an internet debate, which I am not directly addressing. In Mason's article, he crunches the published average bank interest rate charges (both lending and borrowing), and shows that they are consistent with a relatively steady spread regardless of the level of interest rates. Luckily, I do not have to download the data and analyse it myself; he did the work for me. Instead, I want to explain why we should expect this spread behaviour to occur, and an interested reader can then consult his analysis to see that the theory matches observed behaviour.

How banking works.

Bond Economics
Banks Borrowing Short And Lending Long
Brian Romanchuk

Yves Smith — The Hidden Bank Time Bomb: Interest Rate Risk

At the Atlantic Economy Summit in Washington last month, Sheila Bair fielded a question about the just-released results of the latest bankstress tests. The former FDIC chief took pains to point out that they were an improvement over earlier iterations by virtue of keying off a truly dire economic scenario, but then ticked off a number of ways in which they fell short. One was in that they focused solely on credit risk, when historically, adverse interest rate moves have proven very effective in decimating the banking sector. Witness phase one of the savings and loan crisis, in which hasty deregulation and gimmickry in the early 1980s set up the crisis later in the decade, or the derivatives wipeout of 1994, in which an unexpected 25 basis point Fed funds increase created bigger losses than the 1987 crash, or the losses on US bond portfolios in 1997 and 1998, which among other things nearly wiped out Lehman.

The perils of interest rate risk have largely receded from memory since the US has been in a long-term disinflationary trend since 1983. But with rates at zero, we have nowhere to go but up from here.

Chris Whalen, in his latest newsletter, argues that this risk is even nastier than it might appear. One way of mitigating interest rate risk is by holding shorter-dated instruments. The reason is that the more back-weighted your payments are, the more exposure you have to changes in interest rates.

Read the rest at Naked Capitalism
The Hidden Bank Time Bomb: Interest Rate Risk

by Yves Smith