Alea

“Our view is, that is technical. It’s a reaction to the general economy and it really is not representative of the fundamentals.”
Susan Merrick, head of the CMBS group at Fitch Ratings

Investors had become so pessimistic that credit default swaps were pricing in a cumulative 14 percent default rate for investment-grade bonds over the next five years, since 1980, the worst five-year period for investment-grade defaults was 1987-1992, when the cumulative five-year rate was 2.5 percent.
The high-yield credit default swap index is reflecting a 55 percent five-year cumulative default rate.

Over the last two decades, bank credit has evolved from the traditional relationship banking model to an originate-to-distribute model where banks can originate loans, earn their fee, and then sell them off to investors who desire such exposures. We show that the borrowers whose loans are sold in the secondary market under perform other bank borrowers by between 8% and 14% per year on a risk-adjusted basis over the three-year period following the sale of their loan. Furthermore, they suffer a value destruction of about 15% compared to their peers over the same period. This effect is more severe for small, high leverage, speculative grade borrowers. There are two alternative explanations for this underperformance - either banks are originating and selling bad loans based on unobservable private information, similar to the events in the current subprime mortgage crisis, and/or the severance of the bank-borrower relationship allows the borrowers to undertake suboptimal investment and operating decisions, in the absence of the discipline of bank monitoring. Our results also show that borrowers whose loans are not sold in the secondary market do not underperform their peers, reinforcing the inference that bank loan financing is indeed “specialâ€, except for borrowers whose loans are sold. In light of these moral hazard and adverse selection problems, the originate-to-distribute model of bank credit may not entirely be “socially desirableâ€. We propose regulatory restrictions on loan sales, increased disclosure, and a loan trading exchange with a clearinghouse as mechanisms to alleviate these problems.

Where supported banks seem to differ substantially from their peers is the attitude towards risk. Supported banks hold portfolios of loans that are on average lower priced than a market benchmark (although some of these lower spreads may be recouped in the form of higher fees, meaning that they may be substituting revenue for risk compensation). Moreover, as senior arrangers they tend to be involved in initiating loans that carry thinner spreads that the average loan with similar characteristics. Finally, they also seem to be less responsive to indicators of balance sheet risk in deciding whether to invest on a particular loan as compared to other banks.
This relatively relaxed attitude towards risk is more problematic from a policy perspective. It is an indication that support distorts the incentives of these banks and encourages risk taking that is not remunerated by market expected returns. Combined with a non-innovative attitude towards investment also suggests that these banks are likely to be using the funding benefits of their status to engage in price competition in the international loan market. This behaviour is not compatible with the typical motivation for support, and is akin to an abuse of their privileged status.
These results shed a sceptical light on the beneficial impact of state support. Clearly, the data used in this paper cannot examine the overall behaviour of the banks, but only a small component in their activities in the international arena. More research is needed to generate a more complete picture of the impact of support on the banks. Nevertheless, the results suggest that there are externalities from state support that go beyond the national markets. Hence, they warrant a more careful consideration of the conditions at which support is made available and the governance structures in these institutions.

This paper examines the role of multiple aggregate shocks in monetary models with imperfect information. Because agents can draw mistaken inferences about which shock has occurred, the existence of multiple aggregate shocks profoundly influences macroeconomic dynamics. In particular, after a contractionary monetary shock these models can generate an initial increase in inflation (the “price puzzle”) and a delayed disinflation (a “hump”). A conservative numerical illustration exhibits these patterns. In addition, the model shows that increased price flexibility is potentially destabilizing.