How auction design can make a difference: the case of the Bank’s Indexed Long-Term Repo Facility

Julia Giese and Charlotte Grace

In response to the global financial crisis, the Bank of England (BoE) began using Product-Mix Auctions (PMA) to provide liquidity insurance to financial institutions. The PMA, designed by Paul Klemperer, allows the quantity of funds lent against different types of collateral to react flexibly to the economic environment and market stress. It maximises overall surplus, or ‘welfare’, assuming bidders bid their true values for loans. Mervyn King, the then BoE Governor, described the BoE’s use of PMAs as ‘a marvellous application of theoretical economics to a practical problem of vital importance‘. In this post, we describe a staff working paper that shows that the PMA generates welfare gains relative to simpler alternative auction designs, which cannot achieve such fine-tuned responses.

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Do banks need belts and braces?

Marcus Buckmann, Paula Gallego Marquez, Mariana Gimpelewicz and Sujit Kapadia

Bank failures are very costly for society. Following the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, international regulators introduced a package of new banking regulations, known as Basel III. This includes a wider range of capital and liquidity requirements to protect banks from different risks. But could the additional complexity be unnecessary or even increase risks, as some have argued? In a recent staff working paper, we assess the value of multiple regulatory requirements by examining how different combinations of metrics might have helped prior to the 2007/2008 crisis in gauging banks that subsequently failed. Our results generally support the case for a small portfolio of different regulatory metrics: having belts and braces (or suspenders) can strengthen the resilience of the banking system.

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Choosing from a varied toolkit: assessing China’s overall policy stance

Julian Reynolds, James Owen and Bob Gilhooly

This post examines how policy in China supported the Chinese economy prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, drawing on a newly developed toolkit. This topic is particularly important for China, where economic developments have a significant impact on the rest of the global economy, but where assessing the full spectrum of policy – monetary, regulatory and fiscal – is difficult. Policy levers in China have evolved alongside a rapidly changing economy, and there is still some uncertainty surrounding which levers are being pulled – and how hard – at any given point in time. This post attempts to paint a clearer picture of Chinese policy by assessing key policy levers and their effects on growth.

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Does liquidity spill over in the credit market? The case of CDS and corporate bonds

Robert Czech

Credit default swaps (CDS) have a notoriously bad reputation. Critics refer to CDS as a “global joke” that should be “outlawed”, not at least due to the opaque market structure. Even the Vatican labelled CDS trading as “extremely immoral”. But could there be a brighter side to these swaps? In theory, CDS contracts can reduce risks in financial markets by providing valuable insurance. In a recent paper, I show that CDS also offer another, more subtle benefit: an increase in the liquidity of the underlying bonds.

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Liquidity resilience in the long gilt futures market

Jonathan Fullwood and Daniele Massacci

Episodes of vanishing market liquidity haunt dealers. This was true in the great stock market crash of 1929 and remains so today: in August 2018, professional corporate bond traders cited vanishing liquidity as their primary source of worry. Dealers in more-liquid long gilt futures – contracts on 10 year UK government bonds – might be less concerned. But have structural changes in the market led to less resilience over time? We address this question in a recent Staff Working Paper. We find that liquidity in the long gilt futures market has increased slightly over recent years, while remaining resilient to periods of market stress.

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What happens when ‘angels fall’?

Yuliya Baranova, Harry Goodacre and Jamie Semark.

Over the past 20 years, the share of outstanding corporate bonds rated BBB, the lowest investment-grade rating, has more than doubled. This has left a large volume of securities on the edge of a cliff, from which they could drop to a high-yield rating and become so-called ‘fallen angels’. Some investors may be forced to sell ‘fallen angels’, for example if their mandate prevents them from holding high-yield bonds. And this selling pressure could push bond prices down, beyond levels consistent with the downgrade news. In this post we explore the impact that sales of ‘fallen angels’ could have on market functioning, finding that they could test the liquidity of the sterling high-yield corporate bond market.

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Algos all go?

Francis Breedon, Louisa Chen, Angelo Ranaldo and Nicholas Vause

Most academic studies find that algorithmic trading improves the quality of financial markets in normal times by boosting market liquidity (so larger trades can be executed more quickly at lower cost) and enhancing price efficiency (so market prices better reflect all value-relevant information). But what about in times of market stress? In a recent paper looking at the removal of the Swiss franc cap, we find that algorithmic trading provided less liquidity than usual, at worse prices, and that its contribution to efficient pricing dropped to near zero. Market quality benefits from a diversity of participants pursuing different trading strategies, but it seems this was undermined in this episode by commonalities in the way algorithms responded.

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The 2016 Sterling Flash Episode

Joseph Noss, Liam Crowley-Reidy and Lucas Pedace

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Insurance companies: amplifiers or the white knights of financial markets?

Graeme Douglas, Nicholas Vause and Joseph Noss

Risky asset prices plummeted following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Whilst driven partly by deteriorations in fundamental news, these falls were amplified by ‘flighty’ investors that sold at the first signs of trouble. Conventional wisdom dictates that life insurers, with their long-term investment horizons, are better placed than most to ‘lean against the wind’ by looking through short-term fluctuations in asset prices. They could thereby stabilise prices when others are selling. But the structure of regulations can greatly influence insurers’ investment incentives. Using our model of insurers’ asset allocations, we find that new ‘Solvency II’ regulations reduce UK life insurers’ willingness to act as the white knights of financial markets, particularly in the face of falling interest rates.

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Collateral and market stress: what are the risks?

Yuliya Baranova, Zijun Liu and Joseph Noss.

Introduction

Collateral – that is, securities pledged to secure loans and other counterparty exposures – plays an important role in supporting the efficient functioning of the financial system. It supports a vast range of collateralised transactions, including repo and derivatives, which are important for both market liquidity and funding liquidity. But can collateral market dynamics play a role in exacerbating financial stability risks? In this post we explore two risks arising from the behaviour of market participants in stressed conditions:The first risk is that in response to market stress demand for collateral temporarily exceeds supply, until prices adjust. The second is that, during market stress, constraints on dealers’ balance sheets mean they have insufficient capacity to move collateral across the financial system.

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