Caso Northern Rock

Northern Rock Case Study

THE NORTHERN ROCK CRISIS: A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL PROBLEM WAITING TO HAPPEN David T Llewellyn1 BACKGROUND For three days in August 2007, the UK experienced its first run on a bank since Overend and Gurney, the London wholesale discount bank in 1866. Around £3 billion of deposits were withdrawn (around 11 percent of the bank’s total retail deposits) from a medium sized bank– Northern Rock (NR). The unedifying spectacle of widely-publicised long queues outside the bank’s branches testified to the bank’s serious problems. The NR crisis was the first time the Bank of England (BOE), the UK’s central bank, had operated its new money market regime in conditions of acute stress in financial markets, and it was the first time it had acted as a lender-of-last-resort formany years. Northern Rock (previously a UK mutual building society) converted to bank status in 1997. Without the previous constraints on its operating permissions, it acquired legal powers to conduct the full range of banking business. However, it remained focussed predominantly on the residential mortgage market. From the outset, it adopted a securitisation and funding strategy which wasincreasingly based on secured wholesale money (by issuing mortgage-backed securities) and other capital market funding. Before considering the nature of the NR crisis, several points of perspective are noted at the outset: the bank remained legally solvent (the nominal value of assets exceeding liabilities), only months earlier the bank had reported record profits, the quality of its assets was never inquestion, its loan-loss record was good by industry standards, and for many years the bank was regarded as a star-performer in the financial markets. Two problems emerged during the summer months of 2007: there was a generalised lack of confidence in a particular asset class (mortgage bank securities) associated in large part with developments in the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States;and doubts emerged about the viability of the NR business model in particular. In September 2007, NR was forced to seek substantial assistance from the BOE even after the regulatory authorities, the UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the Treasury (the UK government’s finance office), had given assurances that the bank was solvent, and all deposits at the bank would be guaranteed. THECONTEXT OF FINANCIAL MARKET TURMOIL The NR episode needs to be set in the context of the global financial market turbulence experienced during the summer of 2007. Recent years have experienced an unprecedented wave of complex financial innovation with the creation of new financial instruments and vehicles. In the words of the BOE, this financial innovation had the effect of “creating often opaque andcomplex financial instruments with high embedded leverage” (BOE, 2007a). Two major instruments at the centre of the financial market turmoil were Securitisation and Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs – instruments created from a portfolio of asset-backed securities and then broken into tranches of varying default risk with resulting varied prices): in both cases issue volumes rose sharply in theyears prior to the crisis. Figure 1 shows the sharp rise in European securitisations, and figure 2 indicates the volume of global CDO issues and particularly the sharp increase in 2006 and the first half of 2007, followed by an almost total collapse in the summer months of that year. Securitisation involves a bank bringing together a large number of its loans (e.g. mortgages) into a single packageand selling the portfolio into the capital market. The portfolio might be bought by other financial institutions or by specially created Special Purpose Vehicles, Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs), or Conduits established by the securitising bank itself. The buyer issues securities (e.g. FRNs, asset-backed commercial
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Copyright David T Llewellwn
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Northern Rock Case Study...