What is Shadow Banking?

What is shadow banking? Announcing a new index—hat tip to Ryan McCarthy—Deloitte offers its own definition:

“Shadow banking is a market-funded, credit intermediation system involving maturity and/or liquidity transformation through securitization and secured-funding mechanisms. It exists at least partly outside of the traditional banking system and does not have government guarantees in the form of insurance or access to the central bank.”

As the Deloitte study makes clear, this definition is fairly narrow—it doesn’t, for example, include hedge funds. Though Deloitte puts the size of the shadow banking sector at $10 trillion in 2010, other well-known measures range from $15 trillion to $24 trillion. (One of those alternative estimates comes from an important study by Zoltan Pozsar, Tobias Adrian, Adam Ashcraft, and Hayley Boesky from the New York Fed.)

What definition of shadow banking you prefer probably depends on the questions you are trying to answer. Since the interest in shadow banking today is clearly motivated by the financial crisis and its regulatory aftermath, a definition that focuses on systemically risky institutions has a lot of appeal. And not all entities that might be reasonably put in the shadow banking bucket fall into the systemically risky category. Former PIMCO Senior Partner Paul McCulley offered this perspective at the Atlanta Fed’s recent annual Financial Markets Conference (video link here):

“…clearly, the money market mutual fund, that 2a-7 fund as it’s known here in the United States, is the bedrock of the shadow banking system…

“The money market mutual fund industry is a huge industry and poses massive systemic risk to the system because it’s subject to runs, because it’s not just as good as an FDIC bank deposit. We found out that in spades in 2008…

“In fact, I can come up with an example of shadow banking that really didn’t have a deleterious effect in 2008, and that was hedge funds with very long lockups on their liability. So hedge funds are shadow banks that are levered up intermediaries, but by having long lockups on their liabilities, then they weren’t part and parcel of a run because they were locked up.”

The more narrow Deloitte definition is thus very much in the spirit of the systemic risk definition. But even though this measure does not cover all the shadow banking activities with which policymakers might be concerned, other measures of the trend in the size of the sector look pretty much like the one below, which is from the Deloitte report:

(click to enlarge)

The Deloitte report makes this sensible observation regarding the decline in the size of the shadow banking sector:

“Does this mean that the significance of the shadow banking system is overrated? No. The growth of shadow banking was fueled historically by financial innovation. A new activity not previously created could be categorized as shadow banking and could creep back into the system quickly. That new innovation might be but a distant notion at best in someone’s mind today, but could pose a systemic risk concern in the future.”

Ed Kane, another participant in our recent conference, went one step further with a familiar theme of his: new shadows are guaranteed to emerge, as part of the “regulatory dialectic”—an endless cycle of regulation and market innovation.

In getting to the essence of what the future of shadow banking will (or should) be, I think it is instructive to consider a set of questions that were posed at the conference by Washington University professor Phil Dybvig. I’m highlighting three of his five questions here:

“1. Is creation of liquidity by banks surplus liquidity in the economy or does it serve a useful economic purpose?

“2. How about creation of liquidity by the shadow banking sector? Was it surplus? Did it represent liquidity banks could have provided?…

“5. If there was too much liquidity in the economy, why? Some people have argued that it was because of too much stimulus and the government kept interest rates too low (and perhaps the Chinese government had a role as well as the US government). I don’t want to take a side on these claims, but it is an important empirical question whether the explosion of the huge shadow banking sector was a distortion that was an unintended side effect of policy or whether it is an essential feature of a healthy economy.”

Virtually all regulatory reforms will entail costs (some of them unintended), as well as benefits. Sensible people may come to quite different conclusions about how the scales tip in this regard. A good example is provided by the debate from another session at our conference on reform of money market mutual funds between Eric Rosengren, president of the Boston Fed, and Karen Dunn Kelley of Invesco. And we could see proposals by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the future to enact further reforms to the money market mutual fund industry. But whether any of these efforts are durable solutions to the systemic risk profile of the shadow banking sector must surely depend on the answers to Phil Dybvig’s important questions.

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