After the easy money: a giant stress test for the financial system

John Plender in The FT 

Five weeks after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, there is no consensus on whether the ensuing financial stress in North America and Europe has run its course or is a foretaste of worse to come. 

Equally pressing is the question of whether, against the backdrop of still high inflation, central banks in advanced economies will soon row back from monetary tightening and pivot towards easing. 

These questions, which are of overwhelming importance for investors, savers and mortgage borrowers, are closely related. For if banks and other financial institutions face liquidity crises when inflation is substantially above the central banks’ target, usually of about 2 per cent, acute tension arises between their twin objectives of price stability and financial stability. In the case of the US Federal Reserve, the price stability objective also conflicts with the goal of maximum employment. 

The choices made by central banks will have a far-reaching impact on our personal finances. If inflation stays higher for longer, there will be further pain for those who have invested in supposedly safe bonds for their retirement. If the central banks fail to engineer a soft landing for the economy, investors in risk assets such as equities will be on the rack. And for homeowners looking to refinance their loans over the coming months, any further tightening by the Bank of England will feed into mortgage costs. 

The bubble bursts 

SVB, the 16th largest bank in the US, perfectly illustrates how the central banks’ inflation and financial stability objectives are potentially in conflict. It had been deluged with mainly uninsured deposits — deposits above the official $250,000 insurance ceiling — that far exceeded lending opportunities in its tech industry stamping ground. So it invested the money in medium and long-dated Treasury and agency securities. It did so without hedging against interest rate risk in what was the greatest bond market bubble in history. 

The very sharp rise in policy rates over the past year pricked the bubble, so depressing the value of long-dated bonds. This would not have been a problem if depositors retained confidence in the bank so that it could hold the securities to maturity. Yet, in practice, rich but nervous uninsured depositors worried that SVB was potentially insolvent if the securities were marked to market. 

 An inept speech by chief executive Greg Becker on March 9 quickly spread across the internet, causing a quarter of the bank’s deposit base to flee in less than a day and pushing SVB into forced sales of bonds at huge losses. The collapse of confidence soon extended to Signature Bank in New York, which was overextended in property and increasingly involved in crypto assets. Some 90 per cent of its deposits were uninsured, compared with 88 per cent at SVB. 

Fear spread to Europe, where failures of risk management and a series of scandals at Credit Suisse caused deposits to ebb away. The Swiss authorities quickly brokered a takeover by arch rival UBS, while in the UK the Bank of England secured a takeover of SVB’s troubled UK subsidiary by HSBC for £1. 

These banks do not appear to constitute a homogeneous group. Yet, in their different ways, they demonstrate how the long period of super-low interest rates since the great financial crisis of 2007-09 introduced fragilities into the financial system while creating asset bubbles. As Jon Danielsson and Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics point out, the longer monetary policy stayed lax, the more systemic risk increased, along with a growing dependence on money creation and low rates. 

The ultimate consequence was to undermine financial stability. Putting that right would require an increase in the capital base of the banking system. Yet, as Danielsson and Goodhart indicate, increasing capital requirements when the economy is doing poorly, as it is now, is conducive to recession because it reduces banks’ lending capacity. So we are back to the policy tensions outlined earlier. 

Part of the problem of such protracted lax policy was that it bred complacency. Many banks that are now struggling with rising interest rates had assumed, like SVB, that interest rates would remain low indefinitely and that central banks would always come to the rescue. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that US banks’ unrealised losses on securities were $620bn at the end of 2022. 

A more direct consequence, noted by academics Raghuram Rajan and Viral Acharya, respectively former governor and deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is that the central banks’ quantitative easing since the financial crisis, whereby they bought securities in bulk from the markets, drove an expansion of banks’ balance sheets and stuffed them with flighty uninsured deposits. 

Rajan and Acharya add that supervisors in the US did not subject all banks to the same level of scrutiny and stress testing that they applied to the largest institutions. So these differential standards may have caused a migration of risky commercial real estate loans from larger, better-capitalised banks to weakly capitalised small and midsized banks. There are grounds for thinking that this may be less of an issue in the UK, as we shall see. 

A further vulnerability in the system relates to the grotesque misallocation of capital arising not only from the bubble-creating propensity of lax monetary policy but from ultra-low interest rates keeping unprofitable “zombie” companies alive. The extra production capacity that this kept in place exerted downward pressure on prices. 

Today’s tighter policy, the most draconian tightening in four decades in the advanced economies with the notable exception of Japan, will wipe out much of the zombie population, thereby restricting supply and adding to inflationary impetus. Note that the total number of company insolvencies registered in the UK in 2022 was the highest since 2009 and 57 per cent higher than 2021. 

A system under strain  

In effect, the shift from quantitative easing to quantitative tightening and sharply increased interest rates has imposed a gigantic stress test on both the financial system and the wider economy. What makes the test especially stressful is the huge increase in debt that was encouraged by years of easy money. 

William White, former chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements and one of the few premier league economists to foresee the great financial crisis, says ultra easy money “encouraged people to take out debt to do dumb things”. The result is that the combined debt of households, companies and governments in relation to gross domestic product has risen to levels never before seen in peacetime. 

All this suggests a huge increase in the scope for accidents in the financial system. And while the upsets of the past few weeks have raised serious questions about the effectiveness of bank regulation and supervision, there is one respect in which the regulatory response to the great financial crisis has been highly effective. It has caused much traditional banking activity to migrate to the non-bank financial sector, including hedge funds, money market funds, pensions funds and other institutions that are much less transparent than the regulated banking sector and thus capable of springing nasty systemic surprises. 

An illustration of this came in the UK last September following the announcement by Liz Truss’s government of unfunded tax cuts in its “mini” Budget. It sparked a rapid and unprecedented increase in long-dated gilt yields and a consequent fall in prices. This exposed vulnerabilities in liability-driven investment funds in which many pension funds had invested in order to hedge interest rate risk and inflation risk. 

Such LDI funds invested in assets, mainly gilts and derivatives, that generated cash flows that were timed to match the incidence of pension outgoings. Much of the activity was fuelled by borrowing. 

UK defined-benefit pension funds, where pensions are related to final or career average pay, have a near-uniform commitment to liability matching. This led to overconcentration at the long end of both the fixed-interest and index-linked gilt market, thereby exacerbating the severe repricing in gilts after the announcement. There followed a savage spiral of collateral calls and forced gilt sales that destabilised a market at the core of the British financial system, posing a devastating risk to financial stability and the retirement savings of millions. 

This was not entirely unforeseen by the regulators, who had run stress tests to see whether the LDI funds could secure enough liquidity from their pension fund clients to meet margin calls in difficult circumstances. But they did not allow for such an extreme swing in gilt yields. 

Worried that this could lead to an unwarranted tightening of financing conditions and a reduction in the flow of credit to households and businesses, the BoE stepped in to the market with a temporary programme of gilt purchases. The purpose was to give LDI funds time to build their resilience and encourage stronger buffers to cope with future volatility in the gilts market. 

The intervention was highly successful in terms of stabilising the market. Yet, by expanding its balance sheet when it was committed to balance sheet shrinkage in the interest of normalising interest rates and curbing inflation, the BoE planted seeds of doubt in the minds of some market participants. Would financial stability always trump the central bank’s commitment to deliver on price stability? And what further dramatic repricing incidents could prompt dangerous systemic shocks? 

Inflation before all? 

The most obvious scope for sharp repricing relates to market expectations about inflation. In the short term, inflation is set to fall as global price pressures fall back and supply chain disruption is easing, especially now China continues to reopen after Covid-19 lockdowns. The BoE Monetary Policy Committee’s central projection is for consumer price inflation to fall from 9.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2023 to just under 4 per cent in the fourth quarter. 

The support offered by the Fed and other central banks to ailing financial institutions leaves room for a little more policy tightening and the strong possibility that this will pave the way for disinflation and recession. The point was underlined this week by the IMF, which warned that “the chances of a hard landing” for the global economy had risen sharply if high inflation persists. 

Yet, in addition to the question mark over central banks’ readiness to prioritise fighting inflation over financial stability, there are longer-run concerns about negative supply shocks that could keep upward pressure on inflation beyond current market expectations, according to White. For a start, Covid-19 and geopolitical friction are forcing companies to restructure supply lines, increasing resilience but reducing efficiency. The supply of workers has been hit by deaths and long Covid. 

White expects the production of fossil fuels and metals to suffer from recently low levels of investment, especially given the long lags in bringing new production on stream. He also argues that markets underestimate the inflationary impact of climate change and, most importantly, the global supply of workers is in sharp decline, pushing up wage costs everywhere. 

Where does the UK stand in all this? The resilience of the banking sector has been greatly strengthened since the financial crisis of 2007-08, with the loan-to-deposit ratios of big UK banks falling from 120 per cent in 2008 to 75 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2022. Much more of the UK banks’ bond portfolios are marked to market for regulatory and accounting purposes than in the US. 

The strength of sterling since the departure of the Truss government means the UK’s longstanding external balance sheet risk — its dependence on what former BoE governor Mark Carney called “the kindness of strangers” — has diminished somewhat. Yet huge uncertainties remain as interest rates look set to take one last upward step. 

Risks for borrowers and investors 

For mortgage borrowers, the picture is mixed. The BoE’s Financial Policy Committee estimates that half the UK’s 4mn owner-occupier mortgages will be exposed to rate rises in 2023. But, in its latest report in March, the BoE’s FPC says its worries about the affordability of mortgage payments have lessened because of falling energy prices and the better outlook for employment. 

The continuing high level of inflation is reducing the real value of mortgage debt. And, if financial stability concerns cause the BoE to stretch out the period over which it brings inflation back to its 2 per cent target, the real burden of debt will be further eroded. 

For investors, the possibility — I would say probability — that inflationary pressures are now greater than they have been for decades raises a red flag, at least over the medium and long term, for fixed-rate bonds. And, for private investors, index-linked bonds offer no protection unless held to maturity. 

That is a huge assumption given the unknown timing of mortality and the possibility of bills for care in old age that may require investments to be liquidated. Note that the return on index-linked gilts in 2022 was minus 38 per cent, according to consultants LCP. When fixed-rate bond yields rise and prices fall, index-linked yields are pulled up by the same powerful tide. 

Of course, in asset allocation there can be no absolute imperatives. It is worth recounting the experience in the 1970s of George Ross Goobey, founder of the so-called “cult of the equity” in the days when most pension funds invested exclusively in gilts. 

While running the Imperial Tobacco pension fund after the war he famously sold all the fund’s fixed-interest securities and invested exclusively in equities — with outstanding results. Yet, in 1974, he put a huge bet on “War Loan” when it was yielding 17 per cent and made a killing. If the price is right, even fixed-interest IOUs can be a bargain in a period of rip-roaring inflation. 

A final question raised by the banking stresses of recent weeks is whether it is ever worth investing in banks. In a recent FT Money article, Terry Smith, chief executive of Fundsmith and a former top-rated bank analyst, says not. He never invests in anything that requires leverage (or borrowing) to make an adequate return, as is true of banks. The returns in banking are poor, anyway. And, even when a bank is well run, it can be destroyed by a systemic panic. 

Smith adds that technology is supplanting traditional banking. And, he asks rhetorically, have you noticed that your local bank branch has become a PizzaExpress, in which role, by the way, it makes more money? 

 A salutary envoi to the tale of the latest spate of bank failures. 

Do Government Bailouts of Banks Worsen Economic Conditions?

 Ruchir Sharma in The FT 

As bank runs spread, it has become clear that anyone who questions a government rescue for those caught underfoot will be tarred as a latter-day liquidationist, like those who advised Herbert Hoover to let businesses fail after the crash of 1929. 

Liquidationist is now challenging fascist as the most inaccurately thrown insult in politics. True, it’s no longer politically possible for governments not to stage rescues, but this is a snowballing problem of their own making. The past few decades of easy money created markets so large — nearing five times larger than the world economy — and so intertwined, that the failure of even a midsize bank risks global contagion. 

More than low interest rates, the easy money era was shaped by an increasingly automatic state reflex to rescue — to rescue the economy from disappointing growth even during recoveries, to rescue not only banks and other companies but also households, industries, financial markets and foreign governments in times of crisis. 

The latest bank runs show that the easy money era is not over. Inflation is back so central banks are tightening, but the rescue reflex is still gaining strength. The stronger it grows, the less dynamic capitalism becomes. In stark contrast to the minimalist state of the pre-1929 era, America now leads a rescue culture that keeps growing to new maximalist extremes. 

Today’s troubles have been compared to bank runs of the 19th century, but rescues were rare in those days. America’s founding hostility to concentrated power had left it with limited central government and no central bank. In the absence of a financial system, trust was kept at a personal, not an institutional level. Before the civil war, private banks issued their own currencies and when trust failed, depositors fled. 

Had the US Federal Reserve existed at the time, it would not have helped much. The ethos of contemporary European central banks was to help solvent banks with solid collateral — in practice they were tougher, protecting their own reserves and “turning away their correspondents in need”, as a Fed history puts it. 

A restrained government was a key feature of the industrial revolution, marked by painful downturns and robust recoveries, resulting in strong productivity and higher per capita income growth. Right into the 1960s and 1970s, resistance to state rescues still ran deep, whether the supplicant was a major bank, a major corporation or New York City. 

Though the early 1980s is seen as a pivotal moment of broader government retreat, in fact this era was marked by the rise of rescue culture when Continental Illinois became the first US bank deemed too big to fail. In a move that was radical then, reflexive now, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation extended unlimited protection to Continental depositors — just as it has done for SVB depositors. 

Recent bank runs have been compared to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Triggered in part by regulation that made it impossible for S&Ls to compete in an environment of rising rates, the crisis was resolved by regulators who wound down more than 700 of these “thrifts” at a cost to taxpayers of about $130bn. The first preventive rescue came in the late 1990s, when the Fed organised support for a hedge fund deeply tied to foreign markets, in order to avoid the threat of a systemic financial crisis. 

Those rescues pale next to 2008 and 2020, when the Fed and Treasury smashed records for trillions of dollars created or extended in loans and bailouts to thousands of companies across finance and other industries at home and abroad. In each crisis, rescues held down the corporate default rate to levels that were unexpectedly low, compared with past patterns. They are doing the same now even as rates rise and bank runs begin. 

The hazards are not just moral or speculative, as many insist — they are practical and present. The rescues have led to a massive misallocation of capital and a surge in the number of zombie firms, which contribute mightily to weakening business dynamism and productivity. In the US, total factor productivity growth fell to just 0.5 per cent after 2008, down from about 2 per cent between 1870 and the early 1970s. 

Instead of re-energising the economy, the maximalist rescue culture is bloating and thereby destabilising the global financial system. As fragility grows, each new rescue hardens the case for the next one. 

No one who thinks about it for more than a minute can wax nostalgic for the painful if productive chaos of the pre-1929 era. But too few policymakers recognise that we are at an opposite extreme; constant rescues undermine capitalism. Government intervention eases the pain of crises but over time lowers productivity, economic growth and living standards.

Is Hummus a near-sacred foodstuff, or a bland, beige paste with good PR?

How to make perfect hummus

Felicity's perfect hummus. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian

Whatever happened to the dip? Once the apogee of sophisticated entertaining in their dinky quartered tubs, these gloopy mixtures – thousand island, cheese and chive, the graveyard of a million splintered Pringles – were quietly dethroned, sometime in the late 1990s, by an invasion from the eastern Mediterranean: salmon pink taramasalata, garlicky tzatziki and, most successful of all, hummus, the colour and texture of wet mortar. Suddenly, the world went beige.
Of course, it wasn't long before we made hummus our own, adding sweet chilli sauce, pesto, sun-dried tomatoes – in fact, the chickpea has good-naturedly absorbed well-nigh every food fad that's gripped the nation over the last decade – but despite its popularity, very few of us actually make our own. Which is a shame, because fresh hummus is a world away from the sour slurry, seasoned with preservatives, and solid enough to retile the bathroom with, sold under the name in many supermarkets – and half the price too.

Chickpeas in our time: tinned v dried v posh

The beauty of hummus, as far as I'm concerned, is how easy it is to sling together at the last minute from the cupboard – a tin of chickpeas, a spoonful of tahini, some lemon juice and garlic, and you've got the makings of lunch … as well as plenty of time to reflect upon your sins in using such inferior produce, because no true hummus head can abide tins. They're all wrong texturally, apparently, and the flavour … well, according to blogger Helen Graves, they "pong" to boot. Well, that's me told.
Claudia Roden's hummus recipe with (clockwise from top left), tinned, dried, jarred and skinned tinned chickpeas. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian However, in the interests of lazy cooks everywhere, I'm making two identical hummuses from Claudia Roden's recipe in Arabesque – one using dried chickpeas, as she directs, and one with a tin from the cupboard. The dried chickpeas definitely have a nuttier flavour (although, having helped myself to a few, I reject the idea that the others are actively unpleasant), but they also give the hummus a grainier texture. I've obviously been lucky with my tin; according to complaints online, many brands are crunchy and undercooked, whereas the Italian ones sold by my local (Turkish) grocer are fast approaching mushy.
Flavourwise though, I need to trade up, which is where Lebanese food writer Anissa Helou comes in. Although she decries such conveniences in her 2003 book, Lebanese Cuisine ("I do not like the taste or texture of tinned food"), by 2007's Modern Mezze, her attitude has relented: "I used to make hommus the old-fashioned slow way … However, you can now buy jars of excellent ready-cooked chickpeas, preserved in water and salt, without added artificial preservatives".
I find some in my local overpriced organic supermarket, modestly priced at just £2.99 for 425g – but I can at least see the difference. They're double the size of the tinned sort, and the hummus I make with them is buttery and smooth, with what my flatmate describes in a forced blind tasting as a "lovely flavour". If you're going to cheat, do it properly.

Secret (softening) agents

The problem with Roden's chickpeas may well be that, despite lengthy pre-soaking (28 hours, in fact), and four hours of cooking to render them edible, they're just not soft enough. I suspect my local shop, which bills itself as a Mediterranean Supermarket, has quite a high turnover in the dried chickpea department, but the fact remains that, without a pressure cooker, melting softness can be quite difficult to achieve – and it's absolutely vital for good hummus.
Ottolenghi recipe hummus. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian Everyone else, from Anissa Helou to Yotam Ottolenghi, recommends adding a little bicarbonate of soda to the soaking water: this time-honoured trick, according to kitchen chemistry whizz Hervé This, prevents the calcium in my London tapwater from cementing together the pectin molecules in the pea's cell walls – in fact, the alkaline water that it produces actively encourages these pectins to separate, producing a softening effect (I recommend a perusal of This's Kitchen Mysteries for a more coherent scientific explanation).
Ottolenghi uses 1½ tbsp bicarb per 500g dried chickpeas: 1 tbsp in the soaking water, and the rest in the pan. After the same soaking period as Roden's, his chickpeas take a quarter of the time to cook – and achieve that lovely fluffy texture which makes such great hummus. Nigella, meanwhile, who makes a very sensible point about the global conspiracy to pretend chickpeas cook far quicker than they do (see also, risotto), uses a slightly different method, credited to her mentor, Anna del Conte.
She soaks the dried chickpeas in cold water and a mixture of bicarb, flour and salt – the last, according to Harold McGee, speeds the eventual cooking time, but reduces the swelling of starch granules within the beans, giving a "mealy internal texture, rather than a smooth one", but the rationale behind the flour I'm unable to fathom. In any case, Nigella's chickpeas take very slightly longer than Ottolenghi's, and have a slightly grittier texture, so I'll trust the latter on this one.
(Two points to note – too much bicarb can give the chickpeas an unpleasant soapy quality, so always err on the side of caution. It's also been suggested that it robs them of much of their nutritional value, but I couldn't find any data on this, or what effect the alternative, a much lengthier cooking time, has: all information most welcome.)

Two top tips

Paula Wolfert hummus. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian While trawling through reams of hummus lore online, I come across Paula Wolfert's claim that, during an assignment on "the best hummus in Israel", she discovered that peeling chickpeas gave a "superior colour and flavour" to the end product. The fact that chickpeas even had skins was news for me, but they're actually very easy to slip off, once the chickpeas are cooked; although given the size of the things, it's a mindless, rhythmic activity for a night in front of the telly. I don't like the texture it gives Roden's recipe though – hummus varies from chunky to silken smooth, and this is too far down the latter road to for my taste; more like a mousse than a dip.
Wolfert also passes on a tip she picked up on her trip: mixing the tahini with lemon juice and garlic until it "tightens up", and then loosening it with cold water before stirring it into the hummus – a move intended to create a lighter, creamier texture. She's right on this one – it makes a subtle, but discernible difference, preventing the clagginess that sometimes dogs this dip.

Flavourings

Although I'm not averse to abusing the chickpea's easy-going nature on occasion (I can particularly recommend the carrot and cardamom hummus from Alice Hart's new book, Vegetarian), here I'm sticking to the time-honoured quartet of chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice and garlic – no peanut butter, Nigella, and no dried mint thank you Elizabeth David.
Nigella recipe hummus. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian Nigella's basic recipe, however, is interesting in that it's lightened with Greek yoghurt – "as far as authenticity goes, I don't make any claims," she admits, but "homemade hummus can be stodgy and claggy, and I love the tender whippedness that you get in restaurant versions". I agree – it adds richness without weight, but after experimenting, I discover a similar texture can be achieved through judicious application of chickpea cooking water.
I don't think you need the olive oil Nigella adds either; I prefer to keep mine as a topping, to be soaked up by the pitta – but one innovation I will be keeping is her pinch of cumin. It's not a standard ingredient, although by no means unknown in the Middle East, but it makes a real difference to the end result.
The balance of garlic and lemon juice is very personal, but I'd stick with the ratio of tahini to chickpea given here: too much of the sesame seed paste gives a sticky, sweet result – I think even Ottolenghi overplays it. As my tester observes, hummus ought to taste of chickpeas.

How to top it

Hummus is, of course, ideal dipping material, but it can also be dressed up into a proper meal – Ottolenghi's recipe in Plenty has it with broad bean paste, hard-boiled eggs and raw onion (not "the lightest affair, but … completely delicious"), while the recipe in the Moro cookbook includes a sweetly spiced topping of minced lamb, caramelised onions and pine nuts, which I urge you to try. Even if you're serving it as a dip, a sprinkling of paprika, or (my own personal favourite), lemony za'tar, sets it well apart from the common supermarket herd.

Perfect hummus

Felicity's perfect hummus. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian Hummus may be simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy – there's an awful lot of disappointing dips out there. Take time to cook the chickpeas properly, and season ever-so-gradually, until the heat of the garlic, and the zing of the lemon suits your particular idea of perfection, and you'll remember just why this unassuming Middle Eastern staple stole our hearts in the first place.
Serves 4
200g dried chickpeas
1½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
6 tbsp tahini
Juice of 1 lemon, or more to taste
3 cloves garlic, crushed, or according to taste
Pinch of cumin
Salt, to taste
Olive oil, to top
Paprika or za'tar, to top (optional)
1. Put the chickpeas in a bowl and cover with twice the volume of cold water. Stir in 1 tsp of bicarbonate of soda and leave to soak for 24 hours.
2. Drain the chickpeas, rinse well and put in a large pan. Cover with cold water and add the rest of the bicarb. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer gently until they're tender – they need to be easy to mush, and almost falling apart, which will take between 1 and 4 hours depending on your chickpeas. Add more hot water if they seem to be boiling dry.
3. Leave them to cool in the water, and then drain well, reserving the cooking liquid, and setting aside a spoonful of chickpeas as a garnish. Mix the tahini with half the lemon juice and half the crushed garlic – it should tighten up – then stir in enough cooled cooking liquid to make a loose paste. Add this, and the chickpeas, to a food processor and whizz to make a purée.
4. Add the cumin and a generous pinch of salt, then gradually tip in enough cooking water to give a soft paste – it should just hold its shape, but not be claggy. Taste, and add more lemon juice, garlic or salt according to taste.
5. Tip into a bowl, and when ready to serve, drizzle with olive oil, garnish with the reserved chickpeas and sprinkle with paprika or za'tar if using.
Is hummus a near-sacred foodstuff, or a bland, beige paste with good PR? Will anyone come out in favour of tinned chickpeas – or exotic flavourings? – and please, what on earth should I do with 8 bowls of the stuff?

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