Are banks too opaque to manage?

Fabrizio Spargoli and Christian Upper have a BIS Working Paper with a different title: “Are Banks Opaque? Evidence from Insider Trading” with the following findings:

Our results do not support the conventional wisdom that banks are more opaque than other firms. Yes, purchases by bank insiders are followed by positive stock returns, indicating that banks are opaque. But banks are not special as we find the same effect for other firms. Where banks are special is when bad news arrive. We find that sales by bank insiders are not followed by negative stock returns. This suggests that bank insiders do not receive bad news earlier than outsiders. By contrast, insider sales at non-banks tend to be followed by a decline in stock prices.

My interpretation of the result is quite the opposite: banks are so opaque that even insiders cannot see through the opacity when bad things happen. Sometimes, as in the case of the London Whale, a market participant outside the bank has greater visibility to what is going on.

It appears to me that the findings of Spargoli and Upper are evidence that banks are too opaque to manage. Even a very competent chief executive can be clueless about some activities in a corner of the bank that have the potential to bring down the bank or at least cause severe losses. That would be an additional argument for moving from bank-dominated to market-dominated financial systems.

Posted at 3:47 pm IST on Tue, 13 Feb 2018         permanent link

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