Marty Gruenberg’s moment

From: POLITICO's Morning Money - Monday Aug 14,2023 12:02 pm
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By Victoria Guida and Zachary Warmbrodt

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QUICK FIX

This year’s bank failures are giving FDIC Chair Marty Gruenberg a chance to say, “I told you so.”

Nearly four years ago, in between stints as Obama and Biden’s FDIC chair, Gruenberg said in a Brookings Institution speech that the wind-down of large regional lenders posed an “underappreciated risk,” in part because of the banks’ reliance on uninsured deposits. He suggested that a way to protect the economy from a messy regional bank collapse would be to require the lenders to hold debt that could absorb losses when they fail.

Now, with the economy rattled by three regional bank failures this year, Gruenberg is set to double down in a follow-up Brookings speech this afternoon. It carries new weight post-SVB, with regulators close to proposing regulations reflecting his 2019 call to action. (Brookings is touting his earlier warning as “prophetic.”)

So why do Gruenberg and his allies want to force regional banks to hold more debt? 

Bank capital buffers — funds derived from shares issued to stockholders and money that lenders retain in earnings — generally get wiped out when the companies collapse. But debt issued by banks can last longer, providing an extra cushion when a failed bank is being sold or dismantled. It could also make uninsured depositors less likely to flee — as they did en masse at Silicon Valley Bank — if they know creditors will bear losses ahead of them.

Gruenberg in the 2019 speech talked about how he saw this in action when Washington Mutual failed during the 2008 financial crisis. WaMu had $13.8 billion of unsecured debt available to absorb losses.

If not for that pot of money, plus a ready and able buyer (JPMorgan Chase), the failure would have wiped out the Deposit Insurance Fund, and uninsured depositors would likely have had to take a loss, he said.

The debt requirements already apply to the eight U.S. megabanks, and Gruenberg and his fellow regulators have been looking to cast a wider net. Since SVB’s failure, Gruenberg and Federal Reserve regulatory chief Michael Barr have publicly floated the idea of applying it to banks with more than $100 billion in assets.

This idea isn’t without opposition, though, and the criticism doesn’t fall neatly along ideological lines.

Former FDIC Vice Chair Tom Hoenig, who generally favored more stringent rules, never liked the idea for the megabanks. In 2016 he said it was “paradoxical” to suggest that layering on leverage would be the best way to manage the effects of excess leverage and financial vulnerability.

“The goal is laudable,” he said. “But … it is fraught with problems.”

Happy Monday — Anyone else already checking out what’s new at Spirit Halloween? Send tips and gossip: Zach Warmbrodt, Sam Sutton.

 

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Driving the Week

Monday … Gruenberg speaks at Brookings at 2 p.m. … Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appears in Las Vegas to mark the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act at 4:40 p.m. … Tuesday … U.S. retail sales for July are out at 8:30 a.m. … Wednesday … July FOMC minutes are out at 2 p.m. …

Driving the day

What Musk can learn from Zuck In between cage match planning texts, it might behoove Elon Musk to pick Mark Zuckerberg’s brain about how to navigate Washington.

Our Jasper Goodman reports that lawmakers are starting to warn that Musk could face scrutiny if he turns the social media network formerly known as Twitter into a financial services platform. Zuckerberg learned about that the hard way, when officials here and in Europe crushed his dreams of launching a cryptocurrency tied to Facebook.

“My guess: He’d run into the same situation that Zuckerberg ran into,” Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) told Jasper.

SBF sent to jail — A federal judge on Friday revoked FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail, saying he tried to tamper with witnesses in his fraud case.

Economy

Top executives are confused, too — The WSJ has a look at what corporate leaders are saying about a potential recession. They’re all over the place.

Restaurant companies and video-game makers are among those at odds over the prospects of a soft-landing. Even direct competitors are sending different signals.

Wendy’s chief financial officer Gunther Plosch expects “at best a mild recession, maybe no recession at all.” He’s seeing improvement in how much disposable income people have. But McDonald’s executives say consumer sentiment still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels, with lower-income consumers downsizing their orders.

Bonds ‘whipsawed’ — Bloomberg reports that bond market volatility is likely to continue, as economic uncertainty pushes Fed officials to consider keeping interest rates higher than expected.

Wednesday’s release of the July FOMC minutes will be a big moment for the market. Traders will be looking for clues on where Fed officials see rates heading and whether there’s any daylight between them.

 

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Antitrust

ICE looms over mortgage market — The FT has a deep dive into how Intercontinental Exchange is set to shake up the U.S. mortgage industry, after the FTC dropped opposition to the NYSE owner's takeover of data firm Black Knight.

ICE founder and chief executive Jeffrey Sprecher wants to speed up mortgage underwriting, but the deal faces reservations in the industry. Small lenders are concerned that ICE’s dominance could drive up their costs.

Former FHA commissioner Dave Stevens said it could “theoretically begin to crowd out newcomers” in the mortgage technology space. The pending sale is already raising questions about whether ICE should be subject to stricter federal oversight reserved for systemically important financial firms.

 

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