Insolvency of Significant Non-Financial Enterprises: What Can We Learn from Bank Failures and Bank Resolution?
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Reform, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, International and Comparative | 0

By Ilya Kokorin, Leiden Law School (The Netherlands)

Ilya Kokorin

The current economic downturn triggered by the spread of COVID-19 demonstrates that the role of insolvency law should not be restricted to resolving conflicts between private parties (i.e. creditors and debtors). Nevertheless, the very framework of insolvency law remains primarily: (i) microprudential – single entity focused and designed to protect individual debtors and their creditors, (ii) contractarian – implementing the idea of creditors’ bargain and solving coordination problems between creditors of a single entity, and (iii) reactive – centred around post-crisis liquidation of assets and allocation of proceeds among creditors. It may therefore be ill-fitted to serve the public interest in mitigating the negative externalities of large-scale (systemic) corporate debacles (e.g. Chrysler, GM, British Steel, Carillion) or handling the economy-wide instability experienced nowadays.

In contrast to corporate insolvency, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 (GFC), bank resolution in the European Union (EU) and the USA went through fundamental changes that seek to preserve financial stability and ensure continuity of critical functions. Bank resolution has increasingly embraced the macroprudential vision, recognizing the need for an advanced preparation and a speedy intervention to ensure continuity of critical functions, preservation of financial stability and avoidance of bailouts. This vision has resulted in the specific proactive and reactive recovery and resolution strategies. In the recent paper Insolvency of Significant Non-Financial Enterprises: Lessons from Bank Failures and Bank Resolution, I explore whether the modern approaches to bank crises can be extended to non-financial enterprises. I discuss how insolvency law might help minimize social harm stemming from wide-ranging shocks and grand-scale business failures and suggest what we can learn from bank failures and bank resolution.

The failure of Carillion, once the UK’s second-largest construction company, has shown that the reactive approach to crisis resolution, centred around post-crisis intervention, posed significant risks not only for creditors but also for other stakeholders and communities at large. Carillion had around 43,000 workers, of whom 19,000 were based in the UK. It owed around GBP 2 billion to the extensive network of 30,000 suppliers, sub-contractors and other creditors and left the pension liability exceeding GBP 2.5 billion. Even though the signs of financial distress appeared long before Carillion filed for liquidation in January 2018, these warning signals were largely ignored. The failure of Carillion had substantial implications for the provision of public services, raising environmental, health and safety concerns. It ultimately led to a state intervention backed by taxpayers’ money. However, the actual economic and social cost of Carillion’s insolvency are hard to quantify. Financial distress of such a significant enterprise (significant non-financial enterprise or SNFE) required timely state intervention. Nevertheless, its multiple profit warnings came as a surprise to the Cabinet Office.

Insolvency of Carillion was characterized by the absence of timely reaction to prevent crisis escalation, a genuine threat of public disruption and a vast complexity determined by both the debtor’s organizational structure, consisting of more than 320 group members, and the nature of its activities. Many of the same features were observed in the failure of banks and banking groups during the GFC. As a response, both the EU (BRRD) and the USA (Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act) have embraced a proactive and precautionary approach focused on preparation and early response. In my paper, I use the case of Carillion to inquire whether selected bank recovery and resolution tools could have been adopted to prevent the collapse of Carillion, or to mitigate its negative consequences.

In particular, I analyse three such tools, namely: (i) intervention powers granted to state authorities for early (preventive) reaction to the escalation of financial problems before the actual insolvency, (ii) entity and group recovery and resolution planning, and (iii) administrative-led insolvency process. I conclude that while the first two mechanisms may prove beneficial, the last one is rather controversial. While an administrative-led process has certain advantages and prevails in bank resolution, it may be difficult and unnecessary to replicate or transpose to non-financial enterprises. Instead, a transparent court-supervised process with active involvement of creditors and debtors, as well as a limited and targeted engagement of public authorities on matters of public interest should be encouraged.

The full paper is available here.

The Dark Side of Bank Resolution: Counterparty Risk through Bail-in
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, International and Comparative | 0

By Wolf-Georg Ringe and Jatine Patel (University of Hamburg – Institute of Law & Economics, University of Oxford)

Bail-in and its supplementary capital requirements have much touted potential. Beyond their promise to reign in financial institutions’ bail-out moral hazard, bail-in intends to stem systemic risk whilst maintaining “critical” banking functions. It seeks to do this by allocating responsibility for recapitalization of banks to their individual creditors, immediately upon resolution, and in a pre-defined manner, for each financial institution individually. Counterparties to banking capital are therefore intrinsic to the current regulatory framework.

In our recent paper, we show, however, that bail-in legislation may have had counterproductive effects. Our key finding is that the introduction of bail-in has led to increased interconnectedness among banks, which involves more rather than less systemic risk. Worse still, increased interconnectedness between banks may jeopardize the effectiveness of the bail-in regime altogether since resolution authorities may be reluctant to exercise bail-in powers in the face of highly interconnected and contagious banks.

Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we provide evidence for this from the introduction of bail-in powers at the Eurozone level on January 1, 2016 when it entered into force under the European legislation known as the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive, and the corresponding Single Resolution Mechanism (as part of the Banking Union) became effective. Using data from the European Central Bank’s Securities Holdings Statistics, we demonstrate that beginning in early 2016, financial institutions’ investments in securities issued by other financial institutions has been following a markedly increasing rate. What is more, at the same time non-banks have continued to decrease their investments in the same issuances. Put differently, banks’ holdings of securities in each other increased following the introduction of bail-in legislation, while non-banks continued to divest their holdings of bank securities.

We interpret these findings as evidence of a relative cost advantage that financial institutions have in comparison with other investors when investing in banks’ securities. We know from prior literature that increased interconnectedness may stabilize the banking sector for small external shocks (Acemoglu et al. 2015). For large, systemic shocks, in contrast, bank interconnectedness may frustrate any bail-in decision due to the systemic risk it creates (Bernard, Capponi, and Stiglitz 2017).

We subsequently discuss the challenges in regulating this problem, noting that in addition to the incentive problems mentioned above, there are also extensive knowledge and incentive challenges. Those challenges are symptomatic of the same legal and economic difficulties expressed in the literature and evident in recent bail-in cases.

Whilst some aspects of the current regulatory framework, including the Basel III and the TLAC framework, and standardized information disclosure under IFRS 9, indirectly affect those knowledge and incentive issues, they insufficiently address the bail-in counterparty problem especially because those measures address pre-resolution systemic risk perceptions, and not post-resolution systemic risk. More crucially perhaps, they do not facilitate optimization, or the who should hold corollary.

Finally, we explore some potential regulatory supplements to the current framework that may assist in reducing the challenge of knowing who should hold banking issuances, particularly ensuring that markets are better informed and able to allocate banking securities to optimal holders in accordance with principles of portfolio management, as opposed to attempting to prescribe ideal holders. More analysis and further holistic research are required to understand better what combination of regulatory instruments would be appropriate.

The full article is available here.