It's A Solvency Problem, Not A Liquidity Problem!

Discussion is swirling around the Fed’s new quantitative easing program, QE2.

The wisest comment I have heard up to this point about the QE2 exercise is the quote attributed to the economist Allan Meltzer at a recent celebration on Jekyll Island, Georgia commemorating the clandestine meetings that resulted in the creation of the Federal Reserve System 100 years ago.

Mr. Meltzer is quoted as saying, “There isn’t a liquidity problem.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/business/economy/08fed.html?ref=business)

But, one of the problems of this whole exercise is that almost the whole effort to reverse the financial meltdown and the economic slowdown has been attributed to the fact that many of our governmental leaders, Mr. Geithner and Mr. Bernanke, have seen the crisis as a “liquidity” problem. That is, to the problem that financial institutions can’t sell their assets.

And, these leaders continue to assess the situation as a “liquidity” problem. Some of us, however, see the continuing problem as a “solvency” issue. There is a world of difference between the two.

The original response of the government to the financial crisis was to create a program, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which would allow the Treasury “to purchase illiquid, difficult-to-value assets from banks and other financial institutions.” This was enacted by Congress on October 3, 2008.

On October 14, 2008, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson and President Bush announced the first revisions to the program. Without going into the revisions more deeply, the Treasury announced their intention to buy senior preferred stock and warrants in the nine largest American banks. For there on, the effort “to purchase illiquid, difficult-to-value assets” all but completely disappeared.

Yet, the leadership in Washington, D. C. continued to speak as if the whole financial crisis was just a “liquidity crisis”.

I have addressed this issue many times before in my writings. But, let me use the words of Richard Bookstaber in his book “Demon of Our Own Design”: “A liquidity crisis is generally related to financial institutions and not to nonfinancial institutions. This is because financial institutions have assets on their balance sheets that have ‘liquidity’. The very ability to liquidate is at the root of the liquidity crisis.”

In a liquidity crisis there is the problem of “asymmetric information”. This problem occurs where one party to a potential transaction has all or most of the information about the value of an asset and other parties do not have the same information.

A liquidity event is most often set off with a shock to the market. In the case of Long Term Capital Management, an arbitrage situation was interrupted by a default by Russia on outstanding bonds. In the case of the Penn Central Crisis, the Penn Central railroad company declared bankruptcy when it had been thought to be a going concern. The buy-side of the market goes away because investors have little or no information.

Exacerbating this situation, Bookstaber states, is the fact that, very often, market participants can identify the seller that MUST sell its assets and this means that the buy side can be even more selective as to when buyers want to enter the market or not. In the recent problem experienced by the French bank, Society General, the market knew who was having problems and that they had to sell a substantial amount of assets to unwind certain transactions on their books.

In many cases associated with a liquidity crisis, without the intervention of the central bank, there is no reason for buyers to re-enter the market until more information becomes available to them. The bottom line to this analysis is that a “liquidity crisis” is a short term affair that requires immediate central bank action. Funds must be made available to the financial markets so that market participants can feel and believe that a “bottom” is reached in terms of the decline in asset values. This is where the Federal Reserves’ “Lender of Last Resort” function comes into play.

The “solvency crisis” is not usually such an immediate problem. Solvency issues can play a part in the liquidity crisis (note the longer term outcomes relating to Long Term Capital Management, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers) but the real solvency crisis relates to a longer period of time and has to do with cleaning up balance sheets and raising new capital. It is not just an issue of “liquidating” an asset in the market place. The value of assets can deteriorate either due to changes in market valuations or due to the financial condition of borrowers. It is a question as to the ability of someone to fully repay another.

A solvency crisis is longer term than a liquidity crisis because the financial institutions need to proceed in an orderly way to work out the situation they face with respect to the value of the assets on their balance sheets. But, this “working out” process may take six months or a year to resolve. The working out of assets requires a substantial amount of time and attention from the managements of financial institutions. Thus, to get back to business as usual requires that a management get the problems behind them so that they can concentrate on what they really should be doing…running a business, not “working out” loans.

If a recession is not to broad or deep then some kind of governmental stimulus can “buy the banks” out of their solvency problems by means of inflation. If the problems have existed for some period of time and are also connected with too much risk taking and excessive amounts of financial leverage, the problems may not be so easily overcome. And, in these latter cases, fiscal and monetary stimulus may not be able to accomplish much in helping financial institutions “get back to business.” Inflation doesn’t help a lot.

How, then, should we interpret the current “crisis”? Well, do you believe that our main problem is still “liquidity” or is our main problem “solvency”?

For those that read this blog regularly, they know that I believe that the “liquidity crisis” occurred a long time ago, in the fall of 2008. I believe that we have been dealing with a “solvency” crisis since then. And, I believe that we are still going through this “solvency” crisis.

If you look at my post of November 8, 2010 you can see that I believe that the “solvency” crisis still has a ways to run. (http://seekingalpha.com/article/235487-the-banking-system-seems-to-be-dividing-large-vs-small-commercial-banks) If you believe as I do that we are still in the midst of a solvency crisis then you also should believe that further additional fiscal or monetary stimulus will have little or no effect on the banking system or the economy. Financial institutions are still “working out” their bad assets and they will not really want to return to “business-as-usual” until they can devote their full attention to making loans.

It is a hard thing to do to run a financial institution. I have been involved in the running of three of them. In order to be successful you need to give your complete attention to running the business and not to “working out loans” which is very demanding and very time consuming. A “liquidity crisis” does not draw this kind of long-time attention.