Out-there Scenarios: ISIS and Asset Management

I break risk management into three levels, Versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.

Risk Management 1.0 is the standard risk management of VaR and the like, where history is used as a guide, and thus where things work if the future is drawn from the same distribution as the past. Any approach that is looking at risks historically, whether using past prices or variance-covariance relationships or leverage numbers or credit ratings; whether using a normal distribution or a t distribution or a gamma distribution or a part of a distribution like semi-variance, is part of this. If the future looks like the past in some specific ways, it works; if the futures deviates from the past it might not work.

Risk Management 2.0 is a reaction to the fact that the 1.0 methods failed during the 2008 crisis. This failure is not surprising or unexpected by most of those working in risk management, because we understand the assumptions behind Version 1.0. But sometimes this was not articulated well when the numbers were passed up the chain. In any case, after 2008 risk management started to depend more visibly on stress testing. I say "more visibly" because anyone doing risk management over the past decades has done stress testing in one form or another. Certainly when there are non-linear risk-return tradeoffs, like with option exposures, it is a standard method. But after 2008 it became de rigor in the analysis of bank risk, for example using CCAR.

And there is Risk Management 3.0, which I won't get into here. It recognizes that a static stress will miss important dynamics that lead to feedback, contagion, and cascades. And it is not something that can be readily addressed with the standard economics. You can check out my book, The End of Theory, or some of my papers while I was at the Office of Financial Research to get more on this.

Here I am focused on what we need to do before we can get to these dynamics: We need to know what is triggering a market dislocation. And we are particularly interested in triggers that are large in either magnitude or in the number of agents that are affected. So even before worrying about the methods for dealing with crisis dynamics, the question to ask is: What can go wrong in a really big way.

I sometimes get at this by starting with something really extreme, and then dialing it back until it can be considered as a reasonable scenario. Reasonable does not mean it is likely to happen, but it also is not "what if an asteroid hits New York" either. Anyway, I want to run through some of the extreme scenarios that I have been thinking about. I'll put one out here and see if anyone responds, either with comments on it in particular, or with others that they are cooking up in a similar vein.

So, Out-there Scenario I: A large asset manager is rumored to be funding ISIS.

Suppose a rumor goes viral that a very large asset management firm is actually owned by, or at least is funding ISIS. This hits all the usual fake news outlets, and is then, of course, bounces into the real news if only as a "there is a rumor, unsubstantiated, making the rounds that...." The result will be large scale redemptions in that asset manager. This will start a downdraft in the markets. It will also lead to questions about other asset managers, and redemptions there as well. The resulting cascade could spread across the markets, erode confidence, and become a major market event.

Now, of course (at least I hope it is obvious) I am not saying specifically that this rumor is likely. But start with this and, as I suggested above, dial it down a bit. The point is, we can come up with scenarios where there can be massive redemptions in some particular major asset manager, and they can be exogenous to anything in the market, and on the face of it might be unreasonable.

One argument against this path to major redemptions hitting the market is that people can redeem by moving their holdings to another asset manager. If they do that there will be no actual selling of assets, and no market impact. This is the way investors will redeem if they continue to want to hold the assets and if they operate with professional aplomb. But the sort of people who would buy into a rumor like this are also likely to simply say, "give me my money", and then figure out what to do after that.

A little footnote: A few years ago the Office of Financial Research did a research study of the asset management community, with the key question being whether the largest asset should be SIFIs (systemically important financial institutions). The report was castigated, especially by the SEC, mostly, I think, because the SEC was honed for inter-agency rivalry. But in any case, no one threw the ISIS scenario into the report.