PrefBlog

I ran across an interesting story today on the Cleveland Fed website: Credit Spreads and Subordinated Debt by by Joseph G. Haubrich and James B. Thomson.

Subordinated debt may be counted as part of Tier 2 capital by the banks, where it is senior to preferred shares (and everything else that’s in Tier 1) but junior to deposits.

One proposed means of injecting more market discipline into the banking sector is a subordinated debt requirement. It would compel banks to issue some debt that the government does not guarantee and that is paid off only after all depositors have been satisfied. A mandatory subordinated debt requirement was one of the reforms recommended in a 1986 study commissioned by the American Bankers Association. In addition, the Financial Modernization Act of 1999 requires that large banking companies have outstanding, at all times, at least one (though not necessarily a subordinated) debt issue rated by a commercial credit-rating agency.

Some experts argue that subordinated debt is unnecessary because equity capital already gives depositors and other bank creditors a layer of protection. But banks’ equity—that is, their stock—rises when their profits increase, so the prospect of higher equity can encourage them to take greater risks. Debt is more sensitive than equity to the loss aspect of risk because it lacks the upside inducement of higher profits. Subordinated debt thus gives a bank’s depositors and general creditors the same protection from losses as equity does, without creating the incentive to assume more risk.
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Evidence on credit spreads and credit spread curves suggests that these sources of information could one day become useful to bank regulatory agencies. At this time, however, the evidence is too weak to justify imposing a mandatory subordinated debt requirement, especially if its purpose is to increase market discipline on banking companies and give bank supervisors better information about banks’ changing conditions. Before supervisors add credit spreads from subordinated debt to their dashboard of early warning signals of deteriorating bank conditions, much more work must be done on extracting useful, reliable risk indicators. So, despite some encouraging results, we need considerably more evidence on the value of credit spread information to regulators and markets before deciding to impose any new rule on how banks fund themselves.

By way of example, Royal Bank’s 2006 Annual Report shows $21.5-billion in Tier 1 Capital and $8.6-billion in Tier 2 Capital; the latter figure includes $7.1-billion in sub-debt.

Update, 2007-11-22: OFHEO is attempting to use sub-debt as a control feature on the GSEs, but it isn’t working out very well:

Those tests show that the market behavior of sub debt yields has changed as negative information has emerged about the Enterprises’ management and risks. However, the nature of the change has been to link sub debt yields more closely to Treasuries. That paradoxical development is consistent with investors having greater confidence that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or their federal regulator would reduce the Enterprises’ default risks, with greater liquidity in the Enterprise sub debt market in recent years, or with greater confidence in the value of the implicit federal guarantee associated with Enterprise debt.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Interesting External Papers, Primers, Regulatory Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.