Understanding losses and bankruptcy in the old system.
This is a Bloomberg article about loss absorbing capacity for a bank under regulations. In the sandbox, the assumptions are that we have an S&L offering deposits and loans, but the S&L is not the currency issuer and has a stop loss at zero accumulated bit error. We do not have the problem as long as interest The loss absorbing problem comes up when the contracts specify term length, hence it is up in smart contracts. In smart contracts I will drag out enough math to compute conditional odds on bit error vs time indices. It is doable, a pain, but part of the 'fails to deliver' analysis is going on in smart contracts. The pure cash distributions have to be resampled with the 'synch' function, counting accumulated time index sampling error, but it is done in a finite spectral space. That is, assume newton and indivisible time, convert to frequency spectrum and segment out the chunks you want.
Not stationary, key point
As you read, remember the probability of a loss is a varying set of odds. If the odds depend on bets piling up then you are not stationary. So in these smart contracts, you run your risk analysis often, checking for changed conditions.
Jamie Dimon is America’s most famous banker, and Neel Kashkari is its most outspoken bank regulator, so it’s not a shock that they would eventually come to blows. What’s interesting is that their contretemps is over an acronym that most Americans have never heard of, but one that may be central to preventing another recession.
TLAC, which is pronounced TEE-lack, is something you need to know about if you want to judge the sparring between Dimon, the well-coiffed chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Kashkari, the very bald man who ran for governor of California on the Republican ticket and is now president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
On April 6, Kashkari went after Dimon in a way that circumspect central bankers ordinarily don’t. In an essay published on Medium and republished on the Minneapolis Fed website, he challenged Dimon’s assertion in his annual letter to shareholders that 1) there’s no longer a risk that taxpayers will be stuck with the bill if a big bank fails, and 2) banks have too much capital (meaning an unnecessarily thick safety cushion). Wrote Kashkari: “Both of these assertions are demonstrably false.”
This is where TLAC comes in, so bear down for a bit of bank accounting. TLAC stands for total loss-absorbing capacity. The more capacity that a bank has to absorb losses, the smaller the risk that it will require a taxpayer-funded government bailout. So lots of TLAC is good. But not all TLAC is created equal. Kashkari argues that a lot of what Dimon calls TLAC on paper wouldn’t be available to absorb losses in a real-world crisis.
Imagine that a whale swims up the Thames River and beaches itself in the City of London, causing billions of dollars in losses to Bank X. If the loss is really big or Bank X is weak (unlike JPMorganChase, which most emphatically is not weak), then one such hit could push it into insolvency. The first thing that happens is that the price of the stock falls to zero. Shareholders, in other words, are the first to absorb losses. That’s fair: Shareholders get all the profit that a bank makes after paying its expenses, so they should have to take the hit when the bank’s profit is wiped out unexpectedly.
The fight between Dimon and Kashkari is over who absorbs the rest of the loss. According to Dimon, it’s the unsecured bondholders. (Unsecured meaning they don’t have a legal claim to any specific asset on the bank’s balance sheet.) Unsecured bondholders are informed that, sorry, there’s been a loss. They’re not going to get their interest payments anymore, and their bonds are being converted into common shares. Now they’re at the back of the line with the rest of the bank’s shareholders; they’ll get paid only if the bank starts making a profit again.
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