Financial Stability: Central Counterparties

Lord Ashton of Hyde Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)]

My Lords, I think I shall have to talk quickly. I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, for securing this debate and other noble Lords who contributed. It has been an important and rather select debate on a fairly technical subject. That being so, I will try to pick up a number of points made by noble Lords, but if I do not cover them I will check to see whether I need to write with a more comprehensive answer. In particular, I might have to write to the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, on some of his points.

As today’s discussion has highlighted, central counterparties, or CCPs, are critical parts of the financial infrastructure. Their purpose is to stand between the counterparties trading a financial instrument, guaranteeing that if one of those counterparties defaults on its obligations, the other will receive what it is due. They perform the function of a firewall, preventing contagion and increasing market confidence. They are more important than they have ever been, as has been noted. In 2009, the G20 agreed to mandate the use of CCPs in over-the-counter derivatives as appropriate. Fifty per cent of the global over-the-counter interest rate derivatives market—the largest segment of the OTC derivatives market—is now cleared through CCPs.

This is one of the key post-crisis reforms, which the Government fully supports. Its implication, as noble Lords have recognised, is that CCPs are increasingly systemically important. Therefore, I would like to set out the steps that have been taken here in the UK to ensure their resilience and that—in the unlikely event of a CCP’s failure—the authorities have the powers to step in to minimise the impact on financial stability.

As noble Lords will be aware, the coalition Government acted as soon as they came into office to overhaul the UK’s regulatory architecture, and a key part of this was to put the Bank of England in charge of the supervision of financial market infrastructures, including CCPs. The Bank of England has met this new responsibility by creating a special financial market infrastructures directorate that reports directly to the deputy governor for financial stability, and a dedicated decision-making committee. The FMI function reports annually to Parliament on its work.

In supervising CCPs, the Bank holds them to exacting requirements that are consistent with international standards, as implemented in the EU through the European Market Infrastructure Regulation. Each CCP must collect sufficient collateral from each user to ensure that if that user defaults the CCP has ready funding to cover its obligations to its counterparties. Over and above this, CCPs must maintain a pre-funded “default fund” to cover any losses due to a defaulting user which are not covered by the collateral that has been posted to the CCP by that user. They must hold enough own-capital, collateral and default fund assets to enable the CCP to withstand, under,

“extreme but plausible market conditions”,

the simultaneous default of the two users to which it is most heavily exposed.

That is already a tough requirement yet, as UK regulation requires, all UK CCPs go significantly further than this and have in place rules which ensure that if the default fund were ever exhausted, the CCP could require its users to make substantial cash contributions to ensure that the CCP continues to perform an uninterrupted service. A raft of other requirements covers CCPs’ risk management, operational capital, governance, liquidity and other arrangements. Noble Lords should understand that CCPs are regulated in this country to strict standards designed to ensure that they are highly resilient. For example, when Lehman Brothers failed, it went through only 35% of the margin held by its biggest CCP.

The chances of a CCP failure are reduced still further by the significant capital and other reforms that have been enacted here and elsewhere to enhance the robustness of global banks and to develop arrangements to resolve failed banks, the CCPs’ biggest users, in a way that avoids them defaulting on their obligations to a CCP.

However, it is, of course, not theoretically impossible that a CCP could fail and it is essential that the Government are prepared. For this reason, in 2012 the Government passed legislation to ensure that the Bank of England can intervene to resolve a failing CCP in a way similar to how it can intervene to resolve a failing bank by transferring a CCP or its property to either a private sector purchaser, a bridge CCP owned by the Bank of England or any other person. The UK moved ahead of the rest of the world in introducing this legislation. In answer to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, international work is seeking to ensure that the necessary powers and standards in this area are enhanced and adopted globally. The Government and the Bank of England are playing a leading role in these discussions at EU level, in the Financial Stability Board, of which the governor, Mark Carney, is the chairman, and through the CPMI-IOSCO group of global regulators. The EU Commission itself is represented on the relevant groups in the FSB.

International standards on recovery and resolution are critical to prevent UK banks being exposed when using overseas CCPs and to ensure a level international playing field for CCPs. There is also further work taking place in the areas of stress testing of financial resources, margin requirements, which I will say a bit about later in answer to the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, and liquidity requirements to enhance CCP resilience further.

Given London’s leadership in this area—we have globally significant CCPs here, such as LCH.Clearnet Ltd and ICE Clear Europe—noble Lords will understand that it is essential that these standards are developed in co-ordination with the other major jurisdictions to ensure that CCPs in the EU are not put at a competitive disadvantage to those located elsewhere. This is a key priority for the Government going forward.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, asked about recovery and resolution on CCPs. UK CCPs are required to produce recovery plans. In addition, the UK has a resolution regime for CCPs allowing the Bank of England to transfer some or all of the business of a CCP to a private purchaser, as I mentioned, and to transfer ownership of the CCP to another person.

As far as international developments are concerned, in October 2014 international central banks and regulators published guidelines on CCP recovery and resolution: the CPMI-IOSCO report Recovery of Financial Market Infrastructures and the annexe on FMI resolution in the Financial Stability Board’s Key Attributes of Effective Resolution Regimes for Financial Institutions. The European Commission continues to work on the legislative proposal regarding CCP recovery and resolution, which has not yet been published. This will supplement the resolution tools already available to the Bank under the UK resolution regime.

The noble Baroness also asked about stress testing. In October, the Bank of England said that it is considering explicitly including CCPs in its wider stress testing of the financial system over the medium term. She mentioned dark pools, which are something that the Bank of England is thinking about. Previously, non-standardised OTC derivatives presented a significant potential risk to the financial system due to the leverage risk exposures they presented to market counterparties and to their opacity. International standards have been developed and are being implemented that require counterparties to derivative trades that are not subject to central clearing to exchange margin to cover those exposures. Uncleared derivative exposures are also considered in the higher capital leverage requirements European banks will be required to meet. With regard to the transparency of these products, all derivatives trades by EU counterparties have to be reported to regulated trade repositories.

As far as the use of block chain, which is an interesting new development, this distributed ledger technology may represent a change in how payment systems work—indeed, it does represent a change in how payment systems work—but the use of this technology is currently very small. The Bank of England as supervisor of payment systems would continue to monitor its application.

On risk of contagion and greater price volatility from CCPs’ actions, are the scale of risks and extent understood? Banks are now far more resilient and both they and their supervisors will assess the risk against the CCP, exercising its assessment rights in full. As far as price volatility is concerned, international policy developments on recovery and resolution in particular are considering the adequacy of tools, including the impact of these tools on clearing members and clients.

The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, asked what progress we are making on reducing interconnectedness between CCPs. Of course the whole point is that they are interconnected, so the Financial Stability Board, a global body, is undertaking work on interconnectedness and how these risks may be mitigated. The FSB will report by the end of 2016.

The noble Lords, Lord Tunnicliffe and Lord Sharkey, asked whether there was sufficient co-ordination on international standards for CCPs. We think co-ordination at an international level is working well, which is obviously very important. It is important for both financial stability purposes and for the competitiveness of the EU that CCPs are able to operate on an international level playing field.

The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked about the Senior Managers and Certification Regime, which we are hoping to apply in the Bank of England Bill. This will not apply to CCPs because these bodies are not authorised persons under the Financial Services and Markets Act. They have always been subjected to a specialist regime. The SMCR will not apply to them, but governance is a key focus of the Bank of England in its supervision of CCPs to ensure that commercial objectives are not inappropriately prioritised over systemic risk management, building on the PRA’s work during 2014 on governance, banks and insurers. The Bank of England does have the right powers to hold CCP senior managers to account.

Lastly—I am running out of time—do we think that the concept of “too big to fail” applies to CCPs? Well, they can clearly be systemic. This is not only due to the significant exposures, but more importantly because of their critical role in the operation of markets. That is why we have introduced legislation to establish a resolution framework for CCPs, and why we support the international and EU reforms to enhance the resilience of CCPs.

I apologise for not answering all the different questions, and I will definitely write to all noble Lords who have participated. I would like to thank again the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, for securing this debate. I hope that I have shown in the limited time available that we do have a robust regime in place, but that the Bank and the Government are not complacent and are still working to develop national and international standards.

[Baroness Kramer]

My Lords, I would like thank all the Members who took part in this—my noble friend Lord Sharkey and the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe—and to say to the Minister that we appreciate the efforts that he made to respond and look forward to the further Written Answers.