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The Case for Narrow Banking
By
Kevin R. James

kevin.james@bankofengland.co.uk Sao Paulo, May 2007 ©Kevin R. James

The Case for Narrow Banking

The views I express in this presentation are my own, and do not
necessarily represent those of the Bank of England. The Bank of
England does not accept any liability for misleading or inaccurate
information or omissions in the information provided.


I. The Problem with Banks


What Are We Trying to Do?
Financial regulators (should) act to ensure that the real
economy has access to the services that the financial
sector provides
Money as a store of value
Raise and sustain investment

Banks have traditionally been central to providing both
services

So we spend a lot of time attempting to keep the banking
system stable


The Cost of Failure

If we fail and a banking/financial crisis does occur,
the costs are huge
− A country selected at random has an 8% (on average) chance of being
in crisis
− A crisis imposes an average loss of 9% of GDP
− Poverty increases dramatically (Chen and Ravallion [2001])
− Women and children suffer most (Atine and Walton [1999])
Source: Bordo, Eichengreen, Klingebiel, and Martinez-Peria [2001]


The Problem With Banks
We supervise banks/financial systems because banks
have strong private incentives to take bigger than
efficient risks (as they gamble with depositor wealth)

Regulators must then stop them from acting in their
own self-interest

We’re not particularly good at that


Stop!
Regulators can constrain banks in two ways:

– Hammer on the financial system

– Intrusive Supervision

Neither method is very satisfactory


Hammer on the financial system

If the domestic financial market is very tightly
controlled, then there is much less chance that
currency mismatches/lending booms (etc.) will set in
train events that lead to a crisis

Regulating in this way will dramatically reduce the
level of financial development…


…Imposing massive costs on the economy
− Beck, Levine, and Loayza [2000] find that increasing the
level of financial intermediary development enhance total
factor productivity growth
− “Finance and the Sources of Growth”, JFE

− Bekaert, Harvey, and Lundblad [2003] find that equity
market liberalization increases GDP growth by 1% over a 5
year period
− Columbia University Working Paper


Intrusive Supervision
Alternatively, one can let banks do what they want
subject to close monitoring

The problems are obvious
– Formal frameworks are highly imperfect (Basle I, Basel I.5,
Basle II…)
– Supervisors find it difficult to fully understand what is
going on in a big bank
- Deutche Bank is run as a single economic entity, but it
consists of almost 2000 legal entities


Powerful regulators tend to screw up the system
– Who supervises the supervisors?
– Barth, Caprio, and Levine [2005], Rethinking Banking
Regulation: ‘Till Angels Govern, Cambridge U Press


II. Mu!

Student: Does a dog have a Buddha nature?

Teacher: Mu!


If you can’t get there from here…

Question: How can we efficiently and effectively
regulate banks subject to strong moral hazard
incentives?

Answer: we can’t.


…Let’s start from somewhere else!

If we can’t be sure of our ability to prevent banks
from acting upon their natural (given the current
structure) moral hazard incentives…

…Let’s transform the incentives themselves


Narrow Banking
The moral hazard problem exists because banks can
invest in more or less anything with depositor cash

So, let’s eliminate the problem by requiring a bank to
depositor wealth in only safe assets

If depositor wealth can only go into safe assets, then
there is no moral hazard problem

A bank that can act in this way is a “Narrow Bank”

Finance Houses
If banks invest in only safe assets, then other
institutions—Finance Houses—must arise to invest in
risky projects

These institutions will raise their capital on domestic
and international financial markets

Shareholders will then have the right incentives to
monitor them, so there will be no need for intrusive
supervision


The Advantages
Narrow Banks
– Provide liquidity services (as banks do now)
– No moral hazard problem
– Reduced chance that a financial crisis wipes out people’s
savings

Finance Houses
– Provide investment services
– No temptation/ability to gamble with depositor wealth
– Suppliers of capital (with the right incentives) monitor the
institutions
– So, no need for (ineffective and inefficient) government
supervision, reduced chance of a financial crisis

The Classic Narrow Bank
Papers
The case for narrow banks has been put forth by
- Litan [1987]
- Pierce [1991]
- Bryan [1991]

Here I am interested in the idea of narrow banking
rather than the nature of the optimal narrow bank

- See Kobayakawa and Nakamura [2000] for a
comparative analysis of the proposals


Narrow Banks: The Critiques


The Triple Threat

Narrow banks are not practical
– The pool of safe assets is too small to back narrow banks
– The world pool of liquid savings is too small to support
finance houses (or: investment must be financed from local
deposits)

Narrow banks are not efficient
– Narrow banking destroys a key liquidity provision
externality


Narrow banks have nowhere to invest
deposits


Can Narrow Banks provide liquidity
services?
What will narrow-banks invest in?
- A leading candidate is Money Market Mutual Funds
– Assets: commercial paper, government securities

- Miles (2001) investigated the properties of MMMF’s,
and found that they stable liquidity provision both to
depositors and to the commercial paper market
– “Can Money Market Mutual Funds Provide Sufficient
Liquidity to Replace Deposit Insurance?”, J. of Economics and
Finance 25, Fall 2001

Thus, narrow banking will work on the narrow bank
side

The world pool of liquid savings is too
small to sustain finance houses


The Savings Glut
Far from facing a shortage of liquid savings to invest,
the world is suffering from a lack of good investment
opportunities
– Rajan, “Is There a Global Shortage of Fixed Assets?”, IMF
Speech, 1 December 2006

Thus, intermediaries with access to good projects in
sound economies should have no trouble attracting
the funds they need to finance the projects

In other words, investment need not be financed from
domestic savings

If you build it, they will come

Source: Patrick Honohan, “Small Countries Coping with EMU: The Case of Ireland”


Kashyap, Rajan, and Stein:
Scarce Liquidity and Wide Banks


Economies of Scope
in Liquidity Provision
Kashyap, Rajan, and Stein argue that the two sides of
a wide bank are really in the same business, viz., that
of supplying liquidity

Depositors: Draw down demand deposits to meet
liquidity needs

Borrowers: Draw down lines of credit to meet liquidity
needs


In order to meet this (stochastic) demand, banks must
keep a supply of liquid assets on hand

If the depositor and borrower demands for liquidity
are not perfectly correlated, then a single bank
offering liquidity services to both types of customers
can meet both demands with a smaller pool of
(costly) liquid assets

Hence, wide banks enjoy a natural economy of scope
– Kashyap, Rajan, and Stein, “Banks as Liquidity Providers:
An Explanation for the Coexistance of Lending and
Deposit Taking”, JF, 2002

Do banks in fact behave
as if liquidity is costly?

From James and Willison, “Collateral Posting Decisions in CHAPS Sterling”,
Financial Stability Review, December 2004


From James and Willison, “Collateral Posting Decisions in CHAPS Sterling”,
Financial Stability Review, December 2004


Why don’t banks economize
on liquid asset holdings?
Banks (at least in the UK) use an average of only
about 60% of the liquidity they post in the payment
system

Holding liquid assets is cheap
– The gap between the secured lending (Repo) and unsecured
lending (LIBOR) rates averages only about 7 basis points

So, banks are willing to hold liquid assets on their
balance sheets on the off chance they may need them


The provision of liquidity
as an economy of scope
Since banks do not behave as if providing liquidity is
costly, the empirical magnitude of the liquidity
economy of scope can not be very big

Hence, this economy of scope probably does not
explain why banks look the way the do…

…Nor does it constitute an argument against narrow
banks


III. Conclusion


Keep your eye on the ball!

Banks that lend out depositor wealth (especially
insured depositor wealth) are inevitably subject to
strong moral hazard incentives

Since banks can resist everything but temptation…

…We supervise them (ineffectively) to prevent them
from acting upon those incentives


Let’s just exploit the marvelous developments that
modern finance has created to simply eliminate those
incentives!

Narrow banks provide the crucial “store of value” and
payment services aspects of a financial system

Finance houses have the right incentives to allocate
and monitor capital…

And all of this can be done without requiring either
intrusive supervision or crippling restrictions on
financial system development

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