PrefBlog

There may be new restrictions on short-selling:

Concern that short-sellers accelerate stock declines may prompt the Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt a rule next month aimed at curbing bearish bets when equities are plunging.
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Forcing short sellers to wait for a stock to rise above the best price bid may prevent them from flooding the market with sell orders and causing losses to multiply. Some exchange officials say the restrictions known as uptick rules don’t work, citing studies that shows they may be less effective during panics that drive prices down and volatility up.

“There is no empirical data to support the introduction of a new rule,” Hyndman said yesterday at a securities industry conference in Chicago. “But this is the least intrusive of the proposals the SEC was considering.”

BIS has released its Compensation Principles and Standards Assessment Methodology. I was amused by Principle 3:

Staff engaged in financial and risk control must be independent, have appropriate authority, and be compensated in a manner that is independent of the business areas they oversee and commensurate with their key role in the firm. Effective independence and appropriate authority of such staff are necessary to preserve the integrity of financial and risk management’s influence on incentive compensation.

Standard 2: For employees in the risk and compliance function:
o remuneration should be determined independently of other business areas and be adequate to attract qualified and experienced staff;
o performance measures should be based principally on the achievement of the objectives of their functions.

The boxtickers are making sure their post-regulatory positions will be lucrative and unaffected by the firm’s stock price!

Econbrowser‘s James Hamilton writes a spirited argument regarding Why Bernanke should be reconfirmed:

I shake my head when I look at the list of senators who say they’ll vote “no.” How could there possibly be an alternative whom Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) would both prefer to Bernanke?

Perhaps some senators reason that a “no” vote could score them political points. If so, it’s all the more reason to be alarmed. One of my big criticisms of Bernanke has been that he has put in peril the independence of the central bank from political pressure to help solve the nation’s fiscal challenges. Even if the present skirmish over reconfirmation proves to be just a shot across the bow, it is not an encouraging development in terms of the long-run health of U.S. monetary policy.
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Or if you’d like to hear others saying the same thing, check out
Edmund Andrews, King Banaian, Brad DeLong, Richard Green, and Mark Thoma.

POW.PR.C was relatively well-behaved today, easing off a little (gently, gently!) from its recent absurd highs. It traded a mere 5,890 shares on the TSX – back to normal there, anyway – in a range of 24.93-04 before closing at 24.90-04, 10×1. Still expensive! Dump ’em while they’re hot!

It was a good day for the Canadian Preferred Share market, as PerpetualDiscounts gained 10bp and FixedResets were up 12bp on good volume. The updraft was well-behaved, with only five issues showing a total return with an absolute value in excess of 1% on the day.

The bank regulators have spent the past few years decrying regulatory arbitrage – the idea that differing jurisdictions can have different rules. Looks like regulatory arbitrage will increase:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown distanced his government from proposals by President Barack Obama to split up banks, saying nations require solutions tailored to their own needs.

Brown’s plan to force banks to detail how they’d unwind in case of their demise is strong enough to protect the U.K., spokesman Simon Lewis told reporters today in London. In contrast, the opposition Conservative Party, said it wanted “Obama-style regulation” to prevent future banking crises.
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Brown’s response underscores the failure of leaders to develop a coordinated approach to global banking regulations and opens a battle line with the Conservatives before an election that must be held by June. Opposition leader David Cameron praised the bid to keep banks from the “casino operations of proprietary trading.”

The Financial Services Authority, the U.K.’s banking regulator, called the U.S. plans “interesting.” FSA Chairman Adair Turner, who heads a committee examining the issue for the Financial Stability Board, which guides policy for the Group of 20 Nations, opposes a legal split of deposit-taking and trading units, and argues that capital charges on bank trading books help curb excessive risk.

Mind you, nobody knows the definition of proprietary trading:

Other analysts pointed to uncertainty surrounding the detail of Obama’s plan. “We are in the dark as to how proprietary trading activities can be effectively distinguished from Treasury activities and the risk-assumption inherent to market making,” analysts at Keefe, Bruyette and Woods Ltd. said in a note today.

Since prop trading will be allowed if it done to serve customers, and since a counterparty to a trade necessarily has a trading account with the bank and since somebody with an account is by definition a customer … a broad interpretation will have no effect whatsoever!

The Bank of Canada has published a working paper by Teodora Paligorova titled Corporate Risk Taking and Ownership Structure:

This paper investigates the determinants of corporate risk taking. Shareholders with substantial equity ownership in a single company may advocate conservative investment policies due to greater exposure to firm risk. Using a large cross-country sample, I find a positive relationship between corporate risk taking and equity ownership of the largest shareholder. This result is entirely driven by investors holding the largest equity stakes in more than one company. Family shareholders avoid corporate risk taking as their ownership increases unlike mutual funds, banks, financial and industrial companies. Stronger legal protection of shareholder rights is associated with more risk taking, while stronger legal protection of creditor rights reduces risk taking.

Hmm …. so the Bank Act, with its restrictions on control, serves to increase the propensity for risk taking by banks …. hmmmm …

Econbrowser‘s James Hamilton takes a look at inflation fears and concludes that we don’t need to worry … yet:

Click for big

Inflation is not something you should be afraid of for 2010. But what we need is a convincing commitment from the government to both near-term stimulus and longer-term fiscal responsibility in order to be assured that it’s not a concern over the next decade.

And that’s not what I’m seeing from the U.S. Congress.

POW.PR.C continued to trade well in excess of its normal volume but the peak of the idiocy appears to have passed. Moody’s massive downgrade of BMO Prefs did not have any immediate effect on their price.

Volume declined a little but remained elevated, as PerpetualDiscounts gained 6bp and FixedResets lost 5bp.

Sheila Bair criticized the size of banks’ prop trading books in her Crisis Committee testimony. Comrade Peace Prize is going one step further:

President Barack Obama will offer proposals to limit financial institutions’ size and trading activities as a way to reduce risk-taking, an administration official said.

Obama will announce the rules today after meeting with former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker at the White House. The proposals will be part of an overhaul of regulations and will specifically address firms’ proprietary trading, the official said yesterday on the condition of anonymity.

Hedge funds here we come! The above was written last night when the first news came out; I devoted a post to the actual announcement.

The Bank for International Settlements has released a massive collection of papers titled Monetary Policy and the Measurement of Inflation, Prices, Wages and Expectations.

The Bank of Canada has released the January 2010 Monetary Policy Report.

PerpetualDiscounts got slapped down today, losing 33bp, while FixedResets kept on trucking with a gain of 3bp. Heavy volume!

There was another big whack of retail-sized trades today in POW.PR.C, with Nesbitt buying 20,900 shares on the TMX (against total volume of 34,297) at an average price of 25.555. If CPD is behind the buying, this will almost certainly hurt performance.

Another day of good volume with the FixedResets scoring yet another shut-out on the volume table as – presumably – some players rejigged their portfolios with the closing of the AER.PR.A and BPO.PR.N issues.

PerpetualDiscounts lost 15bp on the day, while FixedResets lost 10bp.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.75%, equivalent to 8.05% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.4x. Long Corporates now yield about 5.9% (maybe a hair more), so the pre-tax interest equivalent spread (also called the Seniority Spread) is now about 215bp, a widening from the 205bp reported January 13.