4.6.3 Bank Behaviour and Risk Transfer through Securitised Credit
In a speech in January 2009, Adair Turner provided an insightful assessment of the effectiveness
of risk transfer through securitised credit (Turner 2009). His perspective is as follows.
Securitised credit began to take off in the 1980s. A significant argument put forward in its
favour was that securitisation would reduce risks for individual banks by passing credit risk
to end investors, reducing the need for unnecessary and expensive bank capital. Rather than a
regional bank in the US, for instance, holding a dangerously undiversified holding of credit exposures
in that particular region, which created the danger of a self-reinforcing cycle between
the decline in a regional economy and the decline in the capital capacity of regional banks, it
was much better to package up the loans and sell them through to a diversified group of end
investors. Securitised credit intermediation could reduce risks for the whole banking system,
since while some of the credit risk would be held by the originating bank and some by other
banks acting as investors, much would be passed through to end non-bank investors. Credit
losses would therefore be less likely to produce banking system failure. However, that is not
what happened. When the crisis struck, and as figures from the IMF Global Financial Stability
Report of April 2008 made clear, the majority of the holdings of securitised credit, and the vast
majority of the losses which arose, did not lie in the books of end investors intending to hold
the assets to maturity, but on the books of highly leveraged banks and bank-like institutions.