By John Crawford, UC Hastings College of Law
Systemically important bank holding companies (“SIBs”) have always had an abundance of creditors that can legally absorb losses in the event of failure. The SIB bailouts of 2008, however, were driven by regulators’ unwillingness to allow losses to fall on these creditors. The Fed has recently proposed a rule requiring SIBs to issue large quantities of “loss-absorbing” long-term debt (“LTD”) out of their parent holding companies. If, however, regulators were averse to haircuts for SIB creditors before, how will creating a new class of debt help? I attempt to answer this question here. First, regulators fear the consequences of loss or delay for SIBs’ short-term creditors. These consequences include, inter alia, the risk of “contagion by simile,” as short-term creditors of other SIBs “run” to avoid a similar fate. This risk does not extend to long-term debt per se. The challenge of imposing losses on long-term debt while protecting short-term debt goes beyond mere repayment priority, however, as involuntary haircuts typically require a bankruptcy or resolution process that creates the risk of uncertainty or delay for all claims—potentially triggering the very contagion dynamics regulators wish to avoid. I nevertheless argue that the combination of a “single point of entry” resolution strategy for SIBs and a set of proposed “clean holding company” requirements plausibly solves the problem for LTD, so that it can absorb losses without creating these risks. In short, LTD may be the “credible loser” that SIBs previously lacked.
The full article may be found here.