A brutal combination of bad financial decisions and serious misjudgments about the inherent value and liquidity of securitized instruments, coupled with the use of excessive leverage, contributed to the demise of Bear Stearns and seriously weakened the capital structure of other major broker-dealers.
The Securities and Exchange Commission oversees the financial condition of all broker-dealers, and it used from 1975 to 2004 a "net capital rule" as its primary tool to ensure that broker-dealers had adequate capital bases and sufficient liquidity.
The rule, which I participated in formulating, required that every broker-dealer compute its net capital daily by doing two things. First, it had to value all liquid assets at market prices and then subject that value to a "haircut" of a specified percentage, depending on the assets' expected market risk. (A 30-year Treasury bond was carried for net capital purposes at 94% of its market value because changes in interest rates would affect its market value; riskier securities were subject to bigger haircuts.) Second, the broker-dealer was limited in the amount of debt it could incur, to about 12 times its net capital, though for various reasons broker-dealers operated at significantly lower ratios.
The SEC's basic net capital rule, one of the prominent successes in federal financial regulatory oversight, had an excellent track record in preserving the securities markets' financial integrity and protecting customer assets. There have been very few liquidations of broker-dealers and virtually no customer or interdealer losses due to broker-dealer insolvency during the past 33 years.
Under an alternative approach adopted by the SEC in 2004, broker-dealers with, in practice, at least $5 billion of capital (such as Bear Stearns) were permitted to avoid the haircuts on securities positions and the limitations on indebtedness contained in the basic net capital rule. Instead, the alternative net capital program relies heavily on a risk management control system, mathematical models to price positions, value-at-risk models, and close SEC oversight.
As the SEC itself has noted, this alternative program requires significant judgment, as contrasted with the numerical tests and capital charges (the haircuts) imposed on broker-dealers under the basic net capital rule. The alternative approach also requires substantial SEC resources for complex oversight, which apparently are not always available.
The SEC has maintained that the Bear Stearns collapse was precipitated by rumors and an unprecedented crisis of confidence, driven by lack of liquidity for the large securities positions it held. If, however, Bear Stearns and other large broker-dealers had been subject to the typical haircuts on their securities positions, an aggregate indebtedness restriction, and other provisions for determining required net capital under the traditional standards, they would not have been able to incur their high debt leverage without substantially increasing their capital base.
The losses incurred by Bear Stearns and other large broker-dealers were not caused by "rumors" or a "crisis of confidence," but rather by inadequate net capital and the lack of constraints on the incurring of debt.
The SEC should reexamine its net capital rule and consider whether the traditional standards should be reapplied to all broker-dealers. Moreover, broker-dealer losses should give the SEC pause regarding its recent proposal effectively to abandon the objective debt ratings of nationally recognized statistical rating organizations in favor of "subjective" tests of broker-dealers in determining adequate levels of regulatory net capital.
As the Bear Stearns collapse showed, no broker-dealer is "too big to fail" — unless the federal government comes to the rescue.
