The explosive growth of the ABCP market between 2004 and 2007: A "search for yield" story

The years immediately preceding the financial crisis of 2007 witnessed an explosive growth in the supplies both of the long-term securities issued by the shadow banking entities, the asset-backed securities (ABSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and of the short-term securities issued by these entities, notably asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP). Although there is now some acknowledgment that the search for yield was the major driver of ABS and CDO growth in the United States, the same is not true of the U.S. ABCP market where other factors such as regulatory arbitrage on the part of banks or the safety and liquidity concerns of institutional investors are seen as having been the more important growth driving force. This article argues that the search for yield did play a crucial role in U.S. ABCP growth between 2004 and 2007. To back up this argument, the article points to four variables that were closely correlated with this growth: the federal funds rate; U.S. money market mutual funds asset holdings; the change in the geographical breakdown of the institutions supplying ABCP; and, finally, the change in the program breakdown of the ABCP market

Financialisation and the limits of circuit theory

The theory of the monetary circuit aims to provide a highly stylised account of the workings of a modern monetary production economy. While there may have been a time when it succeeded in this aim, that time is over. The key development in the monetary sphere of capitalism over recent decades is the advent of financialisation, a phenomenon that circuit theory cannot explain other than by omitting some of its most important characterising features while indiscriminately dismissing those features that it does address as dysfunctional outgrowths. The fact is that a theory that has the aggregate monetary circuit as its methodological framework and whose sole focus is on the financing needs of firms is simply not flexible enough to accommodate the new reality of financialisation. To make that accommodation what is needed is a framework that is sufficiently elastic as to be able to encompass a broad range of socio-economic factors, most notably those associated with demographic change, as co-drivers of financialisaton. This article argues that a framework based on Marx’s commodity principle meets this requirement

The contribution of wealth concentration to the subprime crisis: a quantitative estimation.

The crisis that broke out in mid-2007 was caused by the fact that the CDO market had grown to a size sufficient to wreak general havoc when it suddenly collapsed. Several authors have argued that economic inequality was important to the growth of this market. This paper attempts to strengthen this argument by concentrating attention on global wealth concentration. After summarising recent evidence on the negative impact of investor demand on US bond yields in the pre-crisis period, new evidence regarding the specific contribution of high net worth individuals to this negative impact is presented. The paper then goes on to show how, after having helped to caused a yield problem in the major US debt markets, high net worth individuals (via hedge funds) continued to be a major source of the pressure on US banks to resolve this yield problem through the mass production of CDOs

Why the European Commission is Wrong to Push for a European Financial Transactions Tax

A financial activities tax (FAT) and a nancial transactions tax (FTT) represent alternative ways of taxing the nancial sector. In preparing a common proposal for the European Union, the European Commission initially appeared to favour the FAT but then swung its weight behind the FTT in late 2011. Its reasoning was that in addition to generating revenue this tax could also help to stabilize the nancial markets by curb- ing excessive speculative trading. is paper takes a di erent position. It argues that the FTT would amplify rather than dampen market instability by interfering with the functions of important nancial institutions. Its conclusion is that the FAT would be superior to the FTT.

The proposed EU Financial Transactions Tax is both illogical and likely to be economically damaging

In 2011, the European Commission proposed a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) to raise revenue from the financial sectors in EU countries following the financial crisis. To date, however, only 11 EU states have so far agreed to implement such a tax. John Grahl and Photis Lysandrou write that while they broadly agree with the objectives behind the FTT, the approach adopted toward the financial sector is simplistic. By applying an indiscriminate tax to all forms of trading, the FTT could create serious unintended consequences and fail to meet its intended goals

Germany's brake on European capital-market development

In February 2015, the European Commission published a Green Paper in which it put forward the goal to ‘build a true single market for capital’ for all European Union member states by 2019. The present paper argues that there is no realistic prospect of achieving this goal given that the Green Paper omits any reference to a formidable impediment blocking a European capital-market union: the German government's stance on debt. The inescapable fact is that this government's reluctance to increase the supply of its bonds is depriving the European capital market of one of the essential ingredients necessary to its enlargement on the one hand and to the efficiency of its operation on the other: the former because capital-market enlargement crucially depends on attracting institutional investors who must hold a substantial proportion of their bond portfolios in the form of safe government bonds; the latter because the efficient functioning of the capital markets crucially depends on the efficiency of the money markets where safe government bonds are by far the most important form of collateral

The contribution of us bond demand to the us bond yield conundrum of 2004 to 2007: an empirical investigation

Although the federal funds rate started rising from mid-2004 US long term rates continued to fall. A likely contributory factor to this conundrum was the contemporaneous increase in US bond demand. Using ARDL-based models, which accommodate structural breaks, this paper estimates the impact of demand on US bond yields in the conundrum period. This impact is shown to have been everywhere significantly negative. The fact that our model fully explains the bond yield conundrum gives support to the hypothesis that the US CDO market was rapidly expanded before 2007 chiefly to absorb the overspill of global demand for safe asset

The Greenspan conundrum of 2005-7 and the acceleration in US ABCP supply: a single ‘reach for yield’ story

The period 2005 through to mid-2007 saw a sharp acceleration in the rate of supply of US asset backed commercial paper (ABCP). This same period also saw the yield on 10-year US treasury bonds remain stubbornly below the federal funds rate, an event so unusual as to cause the then Chairman of the Federal reserve, Alan Greenspan, to talk of a bond yield ‘conundrum’. The central hypothesis of this paper is that these parallel developments were causally linked, with the reach for yield on the part of institutional investors being the key linking factor. To support this hypothesis, we use a dynamic system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) model to estimate the relationship between US ABCP issuance in the pre-crisis period and such determining factors as short term interest rates, the strength of demand for US ABCP from US institutional money market mutual funds (MMMFs), the geographical breakdown of the bank-sponsored conduits that were the principal suppliers of ABCP and conduit characteristic

The contribution of US bond demand to the US bond yield conundrum of 2004–2007: An empirical investigation

Although the federal funds rate started rising from mid-2004 US long term rates continued to fall. A likely contributory factor to this ‘conundrum’ was the contemporaneous increase in US bond demand. Using ARDL based models, which accommodate structural breaks, this paper estimates the impact of foreign and domestic demand on AAA rated US bond yields in the ‘conundrum’ period. This impact is shown to have been everywhere significantly negative. The fact that our model fully explains the ‘bond yield conundrum’ gives support to the hypothesis that the US CDO market was rapidly expanded before 2007 chiefly to absorb the overspill of global demand for safe assets. Moreover, our models demonstrate that there are strong linkages between the 10-year Treasury yield and the long term yields of AAA rated non-Treasury bonds

The European Commission's Proposal for a Financial Transactions Tax: A Critical Assessment

A financial activities tax (FAT) and a financial transactions tax (FTT) are the main alternative ways of recouping some of the public money used to bail out the financial sector after the great crisis of 2007–08. In preparing a common proposal for the European Union, the European Commission initially appeared to favour the FAT, but then swung its weight behind the FTT in late 2011. Its rationale was that in addition to generating revenue, this tax could also help to stabilize the financial markets by curbing excessive speculative trading. This article takes a different position. Its central argument is that the FTT would amplify rather than dampen market instability by interfering with the functions of important financial institutions. Its chief conclusion is that the FAT is superior to the FTT