查看原文
其他

【纽伦港新动态•第243期】Stanley Fischer:论美国银行和银行控股公司关系解决方案框架

2016-07-02 金融读书会
编者语:

本文是Stanley Fischer于2016年6月22日在解决银行宏观审慎的会议中所做的关于美国银行和银行控制公司之间关系解决方案为主题的演讲。首先,文章以联邦存款保险法案创建的决议框架为切入点,简要地论述了关于在大而不倒问题上,银行持股公司法律框架并不具有使全球系统重要性银行机构(GSIBs)避免倒闭的能力。随后,文章在此基础上解析了美联储和其他美国监管机构在全球系统重要性银行中的重要监管作用,并通过对此方案的详细说明,指出其有利于降低全球系统重要性银行对金融市场的影响,从而提高金融市场的稳定性。最后,文章就总亏损吸收能力(TLAC计划)中对GSIBs加强长期负债的要求提出了批判性的意见。敬请阅读。

 

 

/Stanley Fischer(美联储副主席)

 

Comments on the Resolution Framework for Banks and Bank Holding Companies in the United States


I'm grateful to the organizers for inviting me to participate in this conference. I would like briefly to describe the legal frameworks that exist for resolving banking organizations in the United States, the steps that the Federal Reserve and other U.S. regulators have taken to make global systemically important banking organizations (GSIBs) in the United States more resolvable, and a few of the criticisms of U.S. regulatory actions in this area, together with my responses to them.

 

U.S. law provides several legal frameworks for resolving failed financial firms. In the United States, a failed depository institution is resolved by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) using a framework created by the Federal Deposit Insurance Act. The FDIC has acted as receiver for several thousand failed banks since 1934, including 465 from 2008 through 2012. Most of these failed banks were relatively small community banks, and all were considerably smaller than the most systemically important firms active today.

 

While the Federal Deposit Insurance Act creates a special resolution framework for failedbanks, a failed U.S. bank holding company--that is, a corporate entity that controls one or more banks--would generally be resolved under the same provisions of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code as would apply to other corporate debtors, such as industrial firms, in a proceeding overseen by a federal judge. During the recent crisis, fears about the systemic consequences that would follow from the bankruptcies of systemically important financial firms motivated extraordinary government actions to prevent such firms from failing. Unfortunately, the fears proved well founded: The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers oldings--the largest bankruptcy filing in American history--significantly exacerbated the crisis.

 

To increase the viability of the Bankruptcy Code as a framework for resolving failed financial firms without major systemic consequences, section 165(d) of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank Act) requires large banking organizations to produce resolution plans, also known as living wills, demonstrating how they could be resolved under the Bankruptcy Code in an orderly fashion in the event of failure.

 

Although the Bankruptcy Code provides the default legal framework for the resolution of a failed bank holding company, Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act creates a backup resolution framework, called the orderly liquidation authority, to be used if the resolution of a failed financial company under the Bankruptcy Code would have serious adverse effects on U.S. financial stability. If that criterion and several others are met, Title II allows the Secretary of the Treasury to appoint the FDIC as receiver for the failed financial company as an alternative to a bankruptcy resolution overseen by a judge. The orderly liquidation authority has several features that could reduce the systemic effect of a financial company's failure relative to a bankruptcy resolution, including an orderly liquidation fund to provide government liquidity support for the failed firm and provisions to prevent the unwinding of the failed firm's derivatives and other qualified financial contracts while they are transferred to a solvent firm.

 

The Federal Reserve Board has recently proposed important new rules to increase the prospects for the orderly resolution of a GSIB with minimal effect on financial stability. Last October, the Board proposed a rule to subject the eight U.S. GSIBs to total loss-absorbing capacity (TLAC) and long-term debt requirements, building on the international TLAC standard established by the Financial Stability Board.The proposal would require these systemically important firms to maintain outstanding a large quantity of long-term debt that could be used to absorb losses and recapitalize the firm in an orderly resolution under either the Bankruptcy Code or the orderly liquidation authority.

 

The proposal would also apply internal TLAC and long-term debt requirements to the U.S. intermediate holding companies of foreign GSIBs in order to facilitate the recapitalization of a failed foreign GSIB's U.S. operations. Finally, the proposal would restrict the operations of GSIB holding companies (as distinct from their operating subsidiaries) so that those legal entities could go through a resolution proceeding without setting off short-term wholesale funding runs or otherwise jeopardizing financial stability.

 

In May of this year, the Board issued another proposal to make GSIBs more resolvable. This second proposed rule would impose restrictions on GSIBs' qualified financial contracts--including derivatives and repo agreements--to guard against the mass unwinding of those contracts during the resolution of a GSIB.The proposed restrictions are a key step toward GSIB resolvability because the rapid unwinding of a GSIB's qualified financial contracts could destabilize the financial system by causing asset fire sales and toppling other firms.

 

Acting in conjunction with the FDIC, the Federal Reserve Board has also sought to increase GSIB resolvability through its review of the firms' living wills. In April this year, the Board and the FDIC announced the results of their review of the eight U.S. GSIBs' 2015 resolution plans, which evaluated the plans based on the firms' capital, liquidity, governance mechanisms, operational capabilities, legal entity rationalization, derivatives and trading activities, and responsiveness to prior agency feedback.

 

The agencies found that five of the GSIBs' plans fell short of the Dodd-Frank Act's standard and required those firms to fix the deficiencies in their plans by October of this year or potentially face more stringent prudential requirements. The agencies also identified less-severe shortcomings in the plans of all eight GSIBs, which the GSIBs are expected to address in their next round of resolution plan submissions, due in July 2017. The deficiencies and shortcomings identified by the agencies touched on most of the categories I have just listed, especially liquidity, governance mechanisms, operational capabilities, and legal entity rationalization.

 

I want to end by briefly addressing several criticisms that have been made of the Dodd-Frank Act's orderly liquidation authority and the Board's TLAC proposal. One criticism is that there is no need for the backup orderly liquidation authority because the Bankruptcy Code provides an adequate framework for the resolution of any financial company. As Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act recognizes, however, the Bankruptcy Code may not be adequate to minimize the systemic impact of the resolution of a systemically important financial firm. The Bankruptcy Code does not direct the judge to take financial stability into account in making decisions, and it does not provide other important stabilizing features of the orderly liquidation authority, such as government liquidity support and stay-and-transfer treatment for qualified financial contracts.

 

A related line of criticism holds that the orderly liquidation authority enshrines "too big to fail" and provides for taxpayer bailouts of systemically important firms through the orderly liquidation fund. However, under the Board's proposed TLAC rule, a failed GSIB would be recapitalized by its private-sector long-term creditors (whose debt claims would be converted into equity), not by the government. The orderly liquidation fund would be used only to provide liquidity support, not to inject capital, and in the unlikely event that the fund does incur losses, the Dodd-Frank Act provides that these losses would be covered by assessments on major financial companies and would not be passed on to taxpayers. I also note that credit rating agencies have recognized public-sector efforts to end the too-big-to-fail phenomenon. The rating agencies no longer assume that the U.S. government will take extraordinary actions to prevent the failure of systemically important U.S. financial firms.

 

Finally, one criticism that has been leveled at our TLAC proposal is that imposing long-term debt requirements on GSIBs will lead those firms to increase their leverage and thereby raise their probability of failure, and that they should instead be required to hold higher levels of equity capital. I agree that equity capital plays a key role in preventing financial firm failures, and we have raised equity capital requirements for banking organizations--especially GSIBs--substantially since the crisis. But to protect financial stability, we must reduce not only the probability that a GSIB will fail, but also the damage that its failure could do if it were to occur. At the point of failure, a banking firm's equity capital is likely to be zero or negative, so to improve GSIB resolvability, our proposal requires GSIBs to have a thick tranche of gone-concern loss-absorbing capacity to ensure that resolution authorities will have the necessary raw material to manufacture fresh equity and recapitalize and stabilize the firm.That is the role played by the proposal's long-term debt requirements. And we expect that firms would generally come into compliance with the proposed requirements by replacing existing ineligible liabilities with eligible long-term debt rather than by increasing their leverage. At any rate, even if a firm were to come into compliance in part by increasing the size of its balance sheet, it would remain subject to our robust equity capital requirements and leverage limits, which are designed to ensure a very low probability of failure. Finally, the existence of a thick tranche of loss-absorbing longterm debt should reduce a GSIB's probability of failure by reducing its short-term creditors' incentives to run at the first sign of distress.

 

In short, we and other U.S. regulators are working hard to address the too-big-to-fail problem by improving the prospects for the orderly resolution of a GSIB in the United States. The Dodd-Frank Act gave us tools to reduce the probability of failure of our largest and most complex banking firms and to significantly reduce the damage that the failure of such a firm would do to the U.S. financial system and the broader economy. We have made a lot of progress toward accomplishing these goals, leaving the U.S. banking system fundamentally safer and stronger, and our work in this area will continue.

 

Thank you.(完)

 

文章来源:美联储官网2016年6月22日(本文仅代表作者观点)
本篇编辑:张雅欣

【纽伦港新动态】专栏往期回顾:

第228期:第35届美国证券交易委员会及财务报告所会议前瞻

第229期:林涌:透明可预测是香港市场的精髓

第230期:对投资基金的流动性风险管理

第231期:欧洲央行:针对中央对手方的宏观审慎框架

第232期:香港应该把握住中国“金融+”的大趋势

第233期:银行业视角下的Fin Tech:变革、修复或改造

第234期:欧洲货币联盟和欧元区经济的结构改革

第235期:原油:从期货期权透视价格走势

第236期:低油价与美国经济活动

第237期:穆迪:英国脱欧不利于其信用评级,不确定性或长期存在

第238期:欧元区货币政策的范围、原则和限制

第239期:从最坏预期到真实结果——脱欧将带给英国及欧盟六大变化

第240期:高风险业务:政府抵押贷款保险计划

第241期:Brexit启示录:英镑、利率、期权、商品与黄金市场

第242期:金融科技的到来


查找公众号bashusongonfinance或扫描下方二维码关注本平台,查看往期文章。

温馨提示:现微信最新版本“订阅号”已实现公众号置顶功能,广大读者可点开“金融读书会”公众号,点“置顶公众号”键,即可将“金融读书会”置顶,方便查阅。

关注巴曙松教授“百度百家”专栏(网址:http://bashusong.baijia.baidu.com),请点击底部“阅读原文”链接。

您可能也对以下帖子感兴趣

文章有问题?点此查看未经处理的缓存