Unorthodox lending of last resort

In Bagehot’s view, lending of last resort is a rather clean affair: “Lend freely at high rates”. Actual lending of last resort in major crises is never as simple and clean as Bagehot wanted it to be. His model, however, approximates the Bank of England’s operations for a most of the 19^th century. The game changed when, as in 1890, the illiquidity (or likely insolvency) of a single intermediary threatened the stability of the whole system. The Bank of England rushed to organize an international consortium of banks to set up a guarantee fund for the debts of the too-big-to-fail Baring Bank. Bail outs of this kind inevitably entail discretionary decisions about resource allocation and a departure from the rule about the liquidity of central bank assets. Moreover, bail outs of too-big-to-fail intermediaries almost inevitably require working in close contact both with the government and with private banks. The purest advocates of central bank independence might have raised an eyebrow.

In the interwar years, lending of last resort and bail outs were necessarily

“messy”, entailing the use of various unorthodox tools.

A brief review of methods and tools of lending of last resort may well begin with the Bank of England, at the time the self-styled custodian of central bank orthodoxy. In the late 1920s, the Old Lady was called upon not only to bail out Banks but also to directly support industrial companies in distress, no longer eligible for loans from private sources. The Bank’s prestige and trea-sure came to be spent to bail out and reorganize industrial concerns.

Norman’s preferred ways were those of “privacy, speed, determination, and reliance on a few good men”, but sometimes direct financial intervention was needed, as in the case of the bail outs of the Williams Deacon’s Bank, of the Banca Italo-Britannica and Anglo-South Bank which left the Bank of England with an indirect holding of bank equity (Sayers 1976: 263).

In 1928, the Bank of England stepped in to save from bankruptcy a Newcastle armament manufacturing firm, Vickers-Armstrong. The rescue entailed the Bank getting involved with the restructuring and management of the company as well as holding substantial interests in it (Sayers 1976: 314-322). The Bank’s involvement with manufacturing companies increased when “the troubles of various industries came upon its doorstep” Governor Norman got personally more and more involved in an effort of “rationalizing the heavy industries of Britain […]” and came to regard this work “as his most effective contribution to the revival of industry and the reduction of unemployment”

(Sayers 1976: 322). When the Mac Donald labor government came to power, Norman’s efforts were increased by his commitment to exorcise “the specter of nationalization” (Sayers 1976: 324), seeking the “moral support” of Snow-den, the new Chancellor. In 1929, to manage its increasingly important stakes in manufacturing, the Bank of England created a Securities Management Trust, a company with limited capital designed to be “the channel through which the Bank itself would provide funds for schemes supported by the Bank” (Sayers 1976: 325). When the Securities Management Trust had to be explained to the Macmillan Committee, Norman said that “he was a public servant who believed that the Bank should be the catalyst in bringing together the needs for industrial reconstruction and the financial resources the City would mobilize” (Sayers 1976: 325). As the result of the Bank’s involvement with the manufacturing industry, Norman drew industrialists into the Court of Directors and hired a specialist in industrial affairs. The Governor “was con-scious that since the departure from the gold standard the Bank’s responsibili-ties in the narrowly monetary field had become more complex and more close-ly dependent on assessment of industrial and regional effects” ( Sayers 1976:

551).

The Bank of England’s involvement with manufacturing did not provide a major “stimulus” to the economy; nevertheless, the “exit strategy” was neither

easy nor quick. For most of the 1930s, the Bank’s original idea to marshal support from the City to ailing manufacturing sectors soon proved to be a dead end, leaving the Old Lady to run the Securities Management Trust largely with her own resources. It was only immediately before and during the war that the Bank could take the lead in “bringing a wide circle of City institutions into some permanent and public link between finance and industry”. Norman never regretted his deep involvement with industrial restructuring and believed that, in the operation, “not a bob seems to have been lost, notwithstanding the worldwide crisis through which we had to pass” (Sayers 1976: 551).

Lending of last resort in some continental countries – such as Austria, Germa-ny and Italy – led to a deeper involvement of central banks with industry than in the case of Great Britain. There are many reasons for this, including the central banks’ implicit mandate to sustain economic development besides monetary stability and their close links with governments. However, the main reason why bailing out banks also entailed bailing out industrial companies is to be found in the close links between commercial banks and industry.

During the 1920s Italian large commercial banks had gradually acquired an ever larger stake in manufacturing and utility companies. By the end of the decade they looked more like holding companies than commercial banks, while at the same time being deposit-taking institutions. In 1931, the three largest Italian banks had direct or indirect control of about one half of the companies listed in the Milan Stock Exchange. When, in the same year, the government required the Bank of Italy to provide a massive liquidity infusion to the three banks and taking industrial equity as collateral - thereby avoiding a major financial crisis - for a time the central bank found itself indirectly owing the majority stake in several of the country’s largest industrial companies (To-niolo 1995).

Scholars are still debating whether in the summer of 1931 Germany was hit by banking or a currency crisis (Temin 2008). The debate need not interest us here. More interesting is the fact that the desperate state of the major banks took the Reichsbank and the government by surprise. Apparently, the authori-ties were ill informed both of the magnitude of long-term lending by the large banks to industry and of their vulnerability to withdrawals of short term depo-sits by foreign lenders (James 1985). Lack of information delayed central bank

action as lender of last resort until after the fall of the Danat Bank, heavily invested in the textile sector. The “lesson” from this episode is that a central bank is more “useful” when bank supervision is entrusted to it, and it is well organized for the task (including coordination with government authorities).

In Germany, as in Italy, last resort lending to ‘universal banks’ entailed ac-cepting long term industrial paper as collateral, in violation of the central bank’s statutes. The Golddiskontobank, a subsidiary of the Reichsbank, created during the monetary stabilization period and allowed to continue as a tool for foreign trade financing, was instrumental in providing guarantees for bank liabilities. The government also “arranged for an Akzept & Guarantee Bank to provide a third signature for papers to make it eligible for discount at the Reichsbank” (Kindleberger 1984: 377). The banking sector was reorga-nized and, eventually, as in Italy, the large Banks came under government con-trol. “This was the price for substantial Reich support during reorganization:

by 1932, 91% of Dresdner’s capital was in public ownership, 70% of the Commerzbank and 35% of the Deutsche” (James 1985: 210). After 1931, the Reichsbank “became practically a dictator over the credit life of the nation.

The increased importance of the Reichsbank came not only through its posi-tion of court of last resort for foreign exchange, money, and credit but also through actual ownership participation in the control of the Joint Stock banks and the central banking institutions” (Northorp 1938). Under Schacht’s second tenure as President, the Reichsbank became a powerful tool of resource alloca-tion under the Five Years Plan.

The American case stands out for the absence of lending of last resort by the central bank throughout the most acute phase of the Great Depression. The reasons why the Fed did not intervene to ‘bail out’ illiquid banks are partly the same that explain the timid monetary response to the slump (Bordo and Whee-lock 2010). However, there is little reason to believe that all Federal Reserve Banks objected in principle to ‘saving’ individual banks and/or the lacked the experience in carrying swift and effective lending of last resort: in July 1929 the Atlanta Fed had been perfectly able to rapidly shift all the needed liquidity to a number of Florida banks hit by an exogenous shock to the economy (Carl-son et al. 2010). It is nevertheless true that not all the Federal Reserve Banks were equally capable or inclined.

Support to ailing banks came from the Administration and Congress. In 1931, the National Credit Corporation (NCC) was set up to stem liquidity crises.

Funding would come from the banks themselves, invited to join the NCC on a voluntary base. The initiative was met by lukewarm enthusiasm from the Fed and the banking community and turned out to be quite ineffective (Mitchener and Mason 2010). A new institution, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), was created in 1932 to grant credit to banks that could not get it from the market. When the Emergency Banking Act was passed on 9 March 1933, the RFC was called upon to reorganize and support the banks that were de-clared solvent. In 1934, the RFC and Federal Reserve began lending directly to business and in due time the former came to have direct or indirect control of institutions, particularly banks, in which it was invested. It often used this position to “replace officers and significantly alter the business practices of the institution” (Mitchener and Mason 2010).

It is perhaps possible to see an analogy between the RFC and the Trouble As-sets Relief Program (TARP) of 2008, in the close cooperation between the Treasury and the central bank, in the impact each program had on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet and also in their costs turning out to be a small fraction of what was originally planned or feared. By early 1936 the amount of RFC exposure had fallen by 35 per cent of its end 1934 peak, bringing hefty revenue to the budget. The 1937 results were even more favorable to the ad-ministration. The ‘lesson’ here is that governments (and central banks, as their adviser and technical arm) should not be deterred from initiating support pro-grams for ailing financial institutions by fears about their long-term fiscal im-pact: in due time, markets recovered and what in 1933 looked like a heavy burden on the federal budget, turned out to be of much lesser relevance by 1937. The subordinate ‘lesson’, of course, is that both patience in avoiding a fire sale of assets and the choice of the appropriate exit timing are of crucial importance.

One of the most relevant consequences of the massive lending of last resort that took place during the Great Depression was to convince legislators that bank supervision was essential to the pursuit of financial stability. In various countries public enquiries had shown that the balance sheets of the banks

were, if not utterly ‘cooked’, inflated by unrealistic valuations of assets and credits (Giannini 2004: 220).

Until the mid-1920s, of all central banks, only the US Fed was endowed with powers of bank supervision. Such powers were however shared with the Comptroller of the Currency. The banking crises of the early 1920s, with their huge bail out costs, resulted in supervisory authority being conferred on the Bank of Italy in 1926. Japan followed suit in 1928. During and after the Great Depression, provisions for bank supervision became a standard item in the legislation adopted by most countries to regulate the banking system (and, in many cases central banking). The US Emergency Banking Act of 1933 streng-thened supervision and added supervisory powers to the newly-created Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Supervision was at the heart of bank legisla-tion in Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy. The main exceplegisla-tion was the United Kingdom where the Treasury and the central banks preferred to issue “recommendations” to the commercial banks. (Giannini 2004: 221)