Double-entry bookkeeping is an extremely powerful concept. Dating at least from the 13th century (or possibly much earlier), it is the idea that any increase or decrease on one side of an entity’s balance sheet has an equal and opposite impact on the other side of the balance sheet. Put differently, whenever an asset increases, either another asset must decrease, or the sum of liabilities plus net worth must increase by the same amount.
In this post, we provide a primer on the nature and usefulness of private sector balance sheets: those of households, nonfinancial firms, and financial intermediaries. As we will see, a balance sheet provides extremely important and useful information. First, it gives us a measure of net worth that determines whether an entity is solvent and quantifies how far it is from bankruptcy. This tells us whether an indebted firm or household is likely to default on its obligations. Second, the structure of assets and liabilities helps us to assess an entity’s ability to meet a lender’s immediate demand for the return of funds. For example, how resilient is a bank to deposit withdrawals?
After discussing how balance sheets work, we show how to apply the lessons to the November 2007 balance sheet of Lehman Brothers—nearly a year before its collapse on September 15, 2008….
The two biggest U.S. P2P lenders, Prosper and Lending Club, started operations in 2005 and 2007, respectively. Over the past decade, their business has grown so that they now originate more than $10 billion in loans per year. The public information provided by Lending Club gives us an opportunity to judge how they are doing. At first, P2P lending returns appear remarkably high (adjusted for volatility), but growing evidence of adverse selection highlights how difficult it will be to sustain growth.
When we last wrote about P2P lending, we suggested that profitability might be a consequence of the booming economy (see here and here). We concluded that one would need to see performance in a recession before judging P2P’s long-run potential. That is, when you are making consumer loans, it is relatively easy to make money as the unemployment rate falls from 10% to 3.5%. However, profitability over the course of an entire business cycle, including periods when joblessness is rising, is an entirely different story.
Many features of our financial system—institutions like banks and insurance companies, as well as the configuration of securities markets—are a consequence of legal conventions (the rules about property rights and taxes) and the costs associated with obtaining and verifying information. When we teach money and banking, three concepts are key to understanding the structure of finance: adverse selection, moral hazard, and free riding. The first two arise from asymmetric information, either before (adverse selection) or after (moral hazard) making a financial arrangement (see our earlier primers here and here).
This primer is about the third concept: free riding. Free riding is tied to the concept of a public good, so we start there. Then, we offer three examples where free riding plays a key role in the organization of finance: credit ratings; schemes like the Madoff scandal; and efforts to secure financial stability more broadly....
During the 2016 campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump discussed his broad experience with debt. He would bring the skills and sensibilities of a real estate mogul to government debt management, and the result would be a better deal for the American public. He even broached the idea of renegotiating the obligations of the U.S. Treasury.
Well, the day of reckoning has arrived. The Treasury has announced that by the end of September, it will face a shortfall. Without the authority to issue additional debt, the government will not be able to pay all of its bills—including the interest on the outstanding debt. In response, President Trump has threatened the Congress: either fund the wall along the Mexican border, or he will shut down the government.
If the U.S. government fails to meet its obligations for any significant period, we will all be big losers. A government that cares about the people—both now and in the future—would never willingly inflict such a wound.
Changes in financial regulation are having a profound impact on the demand for safe assets—assets with a fixed nominal value that may be converted at all times without loss into the means of payment. Not only is demand for safe assets on the rise, but the ability of the private sector to produce them is being constrained by new rules that limit the extent and nature of things like securitizations.
So far, the fallout from increased demand and constrained supply looks reasonably benign. But for several years now, broad financial conditions have been very calm, with measures of financial volatility and stress at or near long-term lows. What will happen when the financial system comes under stress again? What if there is a drop in risk tolerance (or a surge in risk awareness) and a flight to safety that causes a jump in the demand for safe assets or a plunge in the supply? Or, as in 2008, what will happen if both materialize at the same time? We need to be ready.
As we will explain in more detail, central banks in advanced economies can satisfy the heightened need for safe assets under stress (as well as the precautionary demand in normal times) by offering commercial banks committed lines of credit for a fee against collateral, as the central banks in Australia and South Africa currently do. In our view, this mechanism for ensuring sufficient supply of safe assets in a crisis has important advantages compared to one in which the central bank operates perpetually—in good times and bad—with a very large balance sheet.
To see how this would work, we start with an explanation of post-crisis liquidity regulation....
In early 2015, we expressed skepticism about the prospects for peer-to-peer (P2P) lending. Like other efforts to slash financial transactions costs (think “block chain”), P2P was all the rage. The notion was that the lenders and borrowers could cut out the middle man, “disrupting” traditional finance.
For that to work, for P2P investors to get an attractive risk-adjusted return, it would have to embody a technology that can screen and monitor borrowers at a lower cost than do existing intermediaries in the long-established sector of consumer credit. That seemed especially doubtful in a competitive industry like credit card lending, which is what P2P lending often turns out to be...
Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is all the rage. The idea is that individuals can bypass traditional financial intermediaries and borrow directly from investors at lower cost (or obtain credit that banks would not provide). Improving the lot of borrowers would be great if it works. But the key question is whether lenders can efficiently screen and monitor borrowers to get an attractive risk-adjusted return on their investment. In effect, individuals would be beating the technology that traditional lenders use. It’s far too early to tell, but there is plenty of scope for skepticism...
