The Bipartisan Policy Center Gets It Wrong: The Lincoln Amendment is Critical to Financial Reform

A wide variety of people, ranging from Senators Elizabeth Warren and David Vitter to Representative Maxine Waters and FDIC’s Thomas Hoenig, are trying to stop a last-minute attempt to remove an important piece of financial reform. They are all speaking up against a move to repeal the Lincoln Amendment using language written by Citigroup in the year-end budget process.

Given the wide variety of people against it, it’s interesting how few people are for it. One of the few institutions that has defended it is the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), whose Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative released a statement saying:

“The Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act is consistent with BPC’s recommendations to repeal the Lincoln Amendment and to substantially increase funding for the SEC and CFTC.”

These recommendations they cite date back to a 2013 paper, “Better Path Forward on the Volcker Rule and the Lincoln Amendment,” that included arguments against pushing out swaps.

What’s their case, and does it hold up under scrutiny? We argue it does not. It misreads the purpose and scope of the Volcker Rule, disregards their own analysis on how financial reform should proceed, misses recent developments in the derivatives market, and ignores the issue of what an implicit government support means for exotic derivatives.

As a reminder, the Lincoln Amendment pushing out swaps (which we’ll refer to as 716) insists that the largest banks hold their exotic, customized, and non-cleared derivatives outside of their FDIC-insured entities in separately capitalized subsidiaries. 716 exempted most standardized derivatives, including interest rate and foreign exchange swaps, as well as cleared credit default swaps (CDS). This provision only applies to the odd and dangerous stuff.

So what are BPC’s arguments?

716 and Volcker Accomplish Different Goals

Their core argument is that 716 is redundant, and therefore unnecessary, because of the Volcker Rule.  As they put it,“[L]ike the Volcker Rule, the Lincoln Amendment was intended to separate certain securities-related activities from traditional banking activities.” BPC further argues that with a “proper implementation of the Volcker Rule… the rationale for the Lincoln Amendment may no longer apply.”

This is not the case. The Volcker Rule is about risky activities, and focuses on eliminating the gambling risks associated with proprietary trading and exposure to certain types of investment funds. 716, on the other hand, is about risky products, and aims to reduce risk to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) by utilizing separately capitalized entities for the riskiest derivatives.

While there is some overlap between the two, there are significant gaps. For instance, exemptions in the Volcker Rule allow some of the riskiest trades to be done within FDIC-insured entities — things like making markets in bespoke, exotic, uncleared credit default swaps. Indeed, walking away from the financial crisis with an attitude that uncleared credit default swaps are no big issue is quite troubling. This puts the Deposit Insurance Fund at risk. 

716 complements Volcker by forcing the riskiest and most non-vanilla derivatives and CDS into a separately capitalized entity, something Volcker doesn’t do by itself. This helps protect the DIF in case a firm gets into trouble market-making bespoke trades that can’t be perfectly hedged – a Volcker-compliant activity. 

The Final Volcker Rule Isn’t Fully Implemented

Shockingly, BPC is violating its own analysis with this recommendation. In the 2013 paper, BPC “recommends a wait-and-see approach regarding the Lincoln Amendment until more experience can be gained from the Volcker Rule.” Only then, if the full implementation of the Volcker Rule is working well, could the Lincoln Amendment “be repealed without any negative effect.”

It is disturbing that the BPC supports this removal of the Lincoln Amendment before the Volcker Rule is fully implemented in mid-2015, and even before we’ve had time to see how it impacts the financial markets. It’s not even clear how they are judging whether the Volcker Rule is working the way they want, given that the data and metrics they rely on so heavily have only just begun to be reported to regulators, and are non-public.

Shoving a bank-written addition into a budget bill, not unlike the CFMA of 2000 which helped create the crisis, is the exact opposite of a “wait-and-see approach.”

Pushout Doesn’t Harm Bank Resolution

Another argument made against 716 was that it would complicate the ability of regulators to deal with a bank failure. BPC points out that regulators are empowered to grant a temporary stay to derivatives, preventing derivative creditors from grabbing collateral while others wait two days, as they did with Lehman Brothers. (Under bankruptcy, derivatives are exempt from this temporary stay, which can complicate and accelerate bankruptcy.)

Part of the argument is true: Dodd-Frank did grant the FDIC new powers under the Orderly Liquidation Authority, which allows them to force a 24-hour stay on derivatives (overriding the exemption), but this only applies to banks under FDIC purview.

BPC argued that the largest banks should be allowed to keep derivatives inside the FDIC accounts, so that they could utilize the FDIC’s OLA power. BPC writes that the 716 “subsidiaries would not enjoy the temporary stay on the unwinding of contracts that applies to banks under FDIC resolution procedures. Rapid termination of such contracts in the event of a bank failure would have a disruptive impact on financial markets.”

But this argument is much less valid than it was when it was written, precisely because regulators are anticipating this problem. Eighteen of the major banks and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) agreed in October that they’d contractually apply temporary stays to derivatives. With wide agreement among the banks to apply temporary stays anyway, the proper course of action is to work through this process of standardizing derivatives for automatic stays across the financial sector, rather than trying to use taxpayer funds to backstop them.

Apart from the BPC arguments, we wish to raise an additional point:  

Should Policy Allow Firms to Capitalize on Market-Perceived Subsidies?

Keeping derivatives in FDIC-insured entities lowers their costs: creditors charge lower rates, as FDIC accounts are seen as having the backing of the federal government. And these FDIC accounts typically have higher credit ratings, which is why, in 2011, Bank of America moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch subsidiary, which had just suffered a downgrade, into its FDIC-insured subsidiary, much to the chagrin of the FDIC.

As Peter Eavis writes in The New York Times, this directly helps Citigroup, who lobbied for and wrote the change, as they own a lot of CDS: “With some $3 trillion of exposure, the bank is one of biggest default swap dealers in the United States. Those swaps right now live inside an entity called Citibank N.A. that enjoys federal deposit insurance. Nearly $2 trillion of those swaps are based on companies or other entities with a junk credit rating.”

And as Eavis points out, it’s very likely that a huge portion of Citigroup’s CDS are uncleared, as very few CDS overall are cleared: “Only about 10 percent of such swaps are centrally cleared, according to official surveys.”

Banks keeping derivatives in the FDIC accounts lower their cost of doing business, due to the market perception of an implicit government support. It should not be the role of policy to artificially lower the cost of bank borrowing, and as such we find the case for removing the Lincoln Amendment to be unconvincing.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Alexis Goldstein is a former Wall Street professional, who now serves as the Communications Director at Other98.org.

Caitlin Kline is a derivatives specialist at Better Markets.

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