Finance professor
Duffie, the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at
Duffie reveals a host of potential outcomes from the agencies’ current regulatory interpretation, which would effectively reduce the quality and capacity of market-making services that banks now provide to U.S. investors by discouraging market makers from significantly increasing their risk levels in order to handle large imbalanced requests to buy and sell. This would limit an important source of liquidity for financial transactions and create less efficient markets and higher capital-raising and borrowing costs for homeowners and corporations. Duffie argues that it would also eventually lead to the migration of market making outside the banking sector, with potentially bad effects on financial stability.
“These consequences would potentially hurt economic growth at a time when we can least afford it,” observes Duffie. “However, we’re in a position now to make adjustments in the agencies’ interpretation of the Volcker Rule so as to allow effective market making while maintaining low systemic risk through high capital and liquidity requirements for banks engaged in these activities.”
Market makers provide immediacy by selling assets to investors that wish to buy them, and buying assets from investors that want to sell. The agencies’ proposed restrictions would substantially discourage market makers from doing so, except for trades with predictable risks and predictable profits from bid-ask spreads. The bigger or riskier trades requested by investors would often be shunned by market makers, leading to thinner markets and more price volatility.
Duffie warns that under the proposed rule interpretation, some banks may exit the market-making business altogether, while others may significantly reduce the amount of capital that they devote to market making. This would contribute to higher trade execution costs for investors; greater difficulty in obtaining liquidity; higher borrowing costs for corporations, homeowners, and governments; and higher costs of equity capital for firms issuing common shares.
Duffie suggests that non-bank providers of market-making services would fill some or all of the lost market-making capacity, with unpredictable impacts on financial stability. “These non-bank firms would be outside of the bank regulatory framework,” says Duffie. “Our experience with non-bank broker-dealers in the last crisis was not a happy one. Further, Dodd-Frank does not allow individual non-bank market makers to access lender-of-last resort financing from the Federal Reserve,” says Duffie. His report points to the relevance of lender-of-last-resort liquidity provided by the
As an alternative, Duffie recommends establishing rigorous capital and liquidity requirements for market makers, combined with effective supervisory monitoring, with the objective of ensuring that banks have abundant capital and liquidity to cover their market-making risks. These requirements should continue to be strengthened as deemed appropriate by regulators to robustly protect the
Duffie cites the work of
After being approached to prepare an analysis of the Volcker Rule for the
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Copyright: | Copyright Business Wire 2012 |
Source: | Business Wire, Inc. |
Wordcount: | 744 |
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