#119 That 2008-like Feeling

This newsletter is really a public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?

PS: If you enjoy listening instead of reading, we have this edition available as an audio narration on all podcasting platforms courtesy the good folks at Ad-Auris. If you have any feedback, please send it to us.

- RSJ

We have been trying to make sense of the three key trends dominating the global financial markets over the past 12 months - the excess liquidity in the system driven by loose monetary policies and stimulus announced by central banks the world over, the persistence of the central banks to keep interest rates at historic lows without worrying about potential inflation, and the booming equity markets that seem to be completely divorced from the ground economic realities during the pandemic.

You can read some of our previous posts on these here and here.

How long can these trends sustain? Who knows?

The perpetual optimism on which the wheels of finance move shows no signs of abating. Now, history has shown these are trends that are neither sustainable nor safe for ordinary investors. But optimism is the opium of the masses. “This time it is different” is what you usually hear as a record new stimulus is passed or markets touch new highs. But like Scott Sagan wrote in his book, The Limits of Safety:

“Things that have never happened before happen all the time.”

Three Strikes And…

The world is full of surprises and three events in the past quarter should give regulators and investors a pause.

First, Melvin Capital lost half of its $13bn fund during the GameStop saga in January this year. Melvin had taken massive leveraged short positions against the GameStop stock convinced its business model has no future. Well, the Redditors on WallStreetBets organised themselves to do the world’s first RNS (radically networked society) driven short squeeze. Melvin couldn’t reverse out of the trade soon enough. Only an emergency line of $2.75bn from other hedge funds kept it afloat. We have covered the GameStop shenanigans here.

Second, the collapse of Greensill Capital, a ‘supply chain finance’ company doing Enron-like things in a decidedly dull corner of finance. The full impact of its fallout is yet to be ascertained. The collateral damage so far has been impressive: London-based steelmaker GFG alliance (run by India-born Sanjeev Gupta) is facing an existential crisis; a German retail bank that Greensill had bought has gone down; Credit Suisse that funded Greensill through securitisation of its invoice finance arrangement had to write down huge losses; Bluestone Resources, a US-based coal mining company that’s left high and dry without Greensill’s funding pipeline; and Tokio Marine Insurance that underwrote the risks Greensill’s clients and investors in Credit Suisse funds were taking is still counting its losses.

The Greensill story is a good example of how it is not different this time. Supply chain financing has been around for a long time. Company A buys goods from a smaller Supplier B and promises to pay it (say) in 90 days. Ideally, B would like to be paid immediately but it usually lacks the bargaining power. Company A would prefer to pay as late as possible since it improves its cash flow and use it to further its business. Enter C, the Supply Chain Financier. C promises to pay B faster but at a small discount as the cost of getting its money quickly. It then collects the full amount from A. In a way, C pays on behalf of A and then collects the money from A over a period of time. It is like a traditional short-term loan that’s backed by the security of the invoice. And how does C get the money to pay to the suppliers faster? Usually, C would issue commercial papers (unsecured promissory notes) to obtain funds from market participants looking to park their excess funds for a short-term to back their invoice arrangements. The spread it makes between the two is C’s business.

But in a world where the liquidity is high, interest rates low and stock markets at their peaks, there’s always money looking for avenues to make some ‘extra’ return. Greensill had a perfect plan for them. Instead of issuing commercial papers, it securitised the supplier invoices into short-term assets and offered them to the likes of Credit Suisse and other asset management firms. In other words, these invoices were turned into a different financial instrument which could now be positioned differently to investors. With this, the stage was set to get into riskier bets and shuffle the risk around in a way that made investors believe they were still investing in a safe supply chain financing instrument than something more complex.

These investment firms launched Greensill-linked funds and raised money from investors who were drawn to the promise of almost risk-free returns that were higher than money market funds. Greensill also got insurance companies to back the risks underlying these funds to make them appear safer and more attractive. This was mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that brought down Lehman Brothers in 2008 all over again. Not content with this, Greensill went a step further. It started advancing funds to its clients based on anticipated future invoices. That is, there was no supplier and no goods purchased. But it was giving money in anticipation of business being done with a supplier in future. In effect, it started offering long-term loans to its clients in the guise of short-term, low-risk loans with neither the insurer nor the funds like Credit Suisse being wiser to their tricks. It was only a matter of time before the house of cards would collapse.

Third, the implosion of hedge fund Archegos Capital late last week caused by extreme leverage. With GameStop and Melvin Capital, the leverage was on the short. With Archegos, it was on the long side. It borrowed money from the usual Wall Street names - Nomura, Credit Suisse (again!), Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. But it used a derivative known as Total Return Swaps (TRS). The mechanics of this were simple. The hedge fund borrows money from the Bank to invest in stocks through a swap agreement. The hedge fund pays a small interest to the Bank, say, 2.5 per cent. The bank pays out any upside of investment made by the fund back to it. If there are losses, the hedge fund makes it up for the bank. This means the hedge fund makes investments without owning the asset. The bank has no real downside. The bank loves TRS because they make large fees from such arrangement without setting aside a lot of capital when compared to actual trading in securities. Being flush with liquidity in a low-interest environment makes such arrangements appear too good to resist for the banks.

Things were going well for Archegos as it went about building massive levered long positions in media stocks like ViacomCBS and Discovery and various Chinese internet stocks. Some of these were quite illiquid stocks where Archegos almost owned half of the total stocks available for trade. Till ViacomCBS, whose stock had gone up 3X over the past year, decided to do a $3bn share sale wanting to capitalise on its good fortune. This backfired and the stock nosedived. This triggered a margin call and we were back to 2008 again. Archegos couldn’t cough up funds to cover the losses and the brokers dumped the shares on their behalf. The forced liquidation led to a massive selloff late last week across markets. Nomura and Credit Suisse couldn’t get out fast enough and warned of significant impact to their earnings. The worries of a contagion started going around. No one is sure if the collateral damage has been contained.

Safety Valves Or Canaries?

One way to look at these three events is to consider them as the safety valves of capitalism. There are excesses that happen in each cycle and the market mechanism is subverted by a few players. But there is a reckoning soon enough and the markets are better off for it.

The other way is to view them as early signs of a looming crisis - the canaries in a coal mine. It is often said bubbles aren’t merely about skyrocketing valuations. The underlying truth to any bubble is the shortening of time horizons in the market. Everyone is out there to get rich and get out as quickly as possible. This snowballs very quickly attracting more short-term traders to make massive bets with levered money with ever-shrinking time horizons.

The markets might well take these events into their stride (as they seem to have done). The three firms collapse and everyone moves on.

That’s the end of it.

Or maybe not. This might just be a beginning.

HomeWork

* [Article] Apropos of nothing related to this post: Robin Hanson on “how best to explain UFOs if they are in fact aliens!”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com