Global banking – does it hurt ‘national champions’?

There has been a lot of comment recently on the slimming down at Barclays investment bank. This has generally been couched as a change in business plan, with less of a focus on fixed income, commodities and derivatives, to a less capital intensive more traditional model. One of the interesting things for us is that this is not an idiosyncratic event, but part of a trend.

Barclays, like RBS, UBS, and Credit Suisse, has decided to reverse its pre crisis ambition of being a dominant player in the global fixed income market. From a pure opportunity set this seems strange as the huge increase in volume of outstanding corporate and government debt is potentially an enormous business opportunity. So why the retreat?

Like any company that exits a business line, presumably it’s because Barclays believes it is or will be less profitable. Despite the expansion of fixed income markets, banks are less able to make money due to a change in their cost of capital. Regulators have effectively reduced the banks’ ability to make money, via constraints on leverage ratios, which are a good thing from a bondholder’s perspective but increases their effective costs and reduces profitability.

However, this banking trend also has a European flavour. The firms scaling back their ambitions are all non US banks. Why the difference across the Atlantic given both economic blocks have faced harsher regulation and more capital requirements? We think North American banks have a natural advantage versus their “alien” investment bank counterparts in three ways.

Firstly they operate in the largest capital market in the world. This gives them strong economies of scale compared to those whose ‘national champion’ home market advantage is in  smaller markets.

Secondly, even when comparing the big US capital markets with the second largest Euro capital markets, the European players have a disadvantage. The euro is a single market, but  banks  are constrained nationally.  They are all large relative to their domestic economy, which makes the home regulator understandably nervous, imposing higher capital, leverage and loss-absorbing debt requirements on the banks in their jurisdiction. This is less of an issue in the US, where the geographic regulated area and the currency coincide for a significantly greater percentage of their business. Therefore the US regulator can be more relaxed about having large banks.

Thirdly, globalisation is also resulting in more dominance from US non-bank corporations, whether that be through their innovation, or their own natural economies of scale in the US. This can be seen over the last year with Vodafone selling its wireless business to Verizon, Liberty Global buying Virgin Media, and the potential attempts by Pfizer to take control of Astra Zeneca. It is natural for US businesses to work with US banks, and the development of large corporations with large funding needs means there needs to be a large capital market. All these things point to a reinforcing increase in the relative size of the US capital markets. This is one of the factors that has been driving the increase in the relative sizes of the European and US investment grade bond markets, as illustrated in the chart below.

Barclays’ reduced ambition is part of a banking trend. We have seen these kind of moves before in the banking sector where bank management move together in the same direction. The lesson from these recent moves is that globalisation will not only change the face of the world economy, but will benefit those nations not only who are efficient and innovative, but have the largest efficient domestic markets, thus allowing economies of scale. Good news for the US listed companies, and a potential issue for the rest of the world.