Gilt Market Break: Charlatans & Leverage

Sarah Breeden, the Bank of England’s Executive Director for Financial Stability Strategy and Risk, has delivered a speech titled Risks from leverage: how did a small corner of the pensions industry threaten financial stability?:

But in the days leading up to that fateful Wednesday and following the announcement of the Government’s growth plan on 23 September, long-dated gilt yields in particular had moved with extraordinary and unprecedented scale and speed.

Now volatility itself does not warrant Bank of England intervention. Indeed, it’s essential that market prices are allowed to adjust to changes in their fundamental determinants efficiently and without distortion.

However, some liability-driven investment (LDI) funds were creating an amplification mechanism in the long-end of the gilt market through which price falls had the potential to trigger forced selling and thereby become self-reinforcing. Such a self-reinforcing price spiral would have resulted in even more severely disrupted gilt market functioning. And that would in turn have led to an excessive and sudden tightening of financing conditions for households and businesses.

In response to this threat, the Bank of England intervened on financial stability grounds. But what led to that intervention?

The root cause is simple – and indeed is one we have seen in other contexts too – poorly managed leverage.

Many UK DB pension schemes have been in deficit, meaning their liabilities – their commitments to pay out to pensioners in the future – exceed the assets they hold. DB pension schemes invest in long-term bonds to hedge the interest rate and inflation risk that arises from these long-term liabilities. But that doesn’t help them to close their deficit. To do that, they invest in ‘growth assets’, such as equities, to get extra return to grow the value of their assets. An LDI strategy delivers this, using leveraged gilt funds to allow schemes both to maintain material hedges and to invest in growth assets. Of course that leverage needs to be well managed.

The rise in yields in late September – 130 basis points in the 30-year nominal yield in just a few days – caused a significant fall in the net asset value of these leveraged LDI funds, meaning their leverage increased significantly. And that created a need urgently to delever to prevent insolvency and to meet increasing margin calls.

The funds held liquidity buffers for this purpose. But as those liquidity buffers were exhausted, the funds needed either to sell gilts into an illiquid market or to ask their DB pension scheme investors to provide additional cash to rebalance the fund. Since persistently higher interest rates would in fact boost the funding position of DB pension schemes[1], they generally had the incentive to provide funds. But their resources could take time to mobilise.

The issue was particularly acute for one small corner of the LDI industry – pooled funds. In these funds, which make up around 10-15% of the LDI market, a pot of assets is managed for a large number of pension fund clients who have limited liability in the face of losses. The speed and scale of the moves in yields far outpaced the ability of the large number of pooled funds’ smaller investors to provide new funds who were typically given a week, in some cases
two, to rebalance their positions. Limited liability also meant that these pooled fund investors might choose not to provide support. And so pooled LDI funds became forced sellers of gilts at a rate that would not have been absorbed in normal gilt trading conditions, never mind in the conditions that prevailed during the stressed period.

Other LDI funds, with segregated mandates, were more easily able to raise funds from their individual pension scheme clients. However, given their scale, at 85-90% of the market, some of these funds were also contributing to selling pressure, making the task at hand for pooled LDI funds even harder. And of course if the pooled funds had defaulted, the large quantity of gilts held as collateral by those that had lent to the funds would potentially be sold on the market too.

With the gilt market unable to absorb such forced sales, yields would have been pushed even higher, making the scale of the selling need even larger still. This is the self-reinforcing spiral that the Bank intervened to prevent.

The Bank’s 13 day and £19.3 billion intervention was made on financial stability grounds. It was the first example of us acting to deliver our financial stability objective through a temporary, targeted intervention in the gilt market.

But let me emphasise: the asset purchases were a means to an end. They were designed to create the right conditions in the right part of the gilt market for long enough so that the LDI funds could build resilience so that their leverage would be well managed once the asset purchases had ceased and should gilt market instability return.

A common factor across all the uses of leverage I have just described is that it can increase the exposure of the leverage taker to underlying risk factors – whether that be house prices, earnings, interest rates, currencies or asset prices. It follows therefore that leverage can amplify shocks to each of these risk factors. And in a stress, that can lead both to sudden spikes in demand for liquidity – either to support the financing of leveraged positions or as deleveraging leads to forced sales – and a corresponding contraction in liquidity supply, with potentially systemic consequences.

Leverage is of course not the only cause of systemic vulnerability in the non-bank system – as we have seen with liquidity mismatch driving run dynamics in money market funds (MMFs) and open-ended funds (OEFs) during the dash for cash.[4] But it is important where any form of leverage is core to a non-bank’s business and trading strategy. Indeed what happened to LDI funds is just the latest example of poorly managed non-bank leverage throwing a large rock into the pool of financial stability. From Long Term Capital Management in 1998; to the 2007 run on the repo market; to hedge fund behaviour in the 2020 dash for cash; and the failure of Archegos in 2021.

These episodes highlight the need to take into account the potential amplifying effect of poorly managed leverage, and to pay attention to non-banks’ behaviours which, particularly when aggregated, could lead to the emergence of systemic risk.

Regulators worked with LDI funds during the Bank’s operations to ensure greater resilience for future stresses. And in aggregate, intelligence suggests that LDI funds raised over £40 billion in funds and made over £30 billion of gilt sales during our operations, both of which have contributed to significantly lower leverage.

As a result, LDI funds report that their liquidity buffers can withstand very much larger increases in yields than before, well in excess of the previously unprecedented move in gilt yields. And so the risk of LDI fund behaviour triggering ‘fire sale’ dynamics in the gilt market and self-reinforcing falls in gilt prices is – for now at least – significantly reduced. It is important that it stays that way.

I’m sure there will be more material on this liquidity black hole to follow, but for now I’ll just register my continuing disgust with the charlatans and nincompoops who are such a feature of the investment management industry.

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