The critical element of the SPOE strategy is the recapitalization of the company’s material operating subsidiaries with the resources of the parent company. For the SPOE top-down approach to work effectively, there must be sufficient resources at the holding company level to absorb all the losses of the firm, including losses sustained by the operating subsidiaries.
SPOE is being touted as the solution to the too-big-to-fail problem. You have a gigantic bank holding company that gets in trouble. You (the FDIC) want to keep all the subsidiaries going, because you want depositors and counterparties not to panic. So you put the holding company into receivership, and only pay off shareholders and debtholders of the holding company after your are sure you have got money to do that.
I may not fully understand this. Here is what I think happens. The value of the subsidiaries as ongoing concerns is positive, say $100. However, if you subtract the value of the outstanding debt of the holding company, the value of the holding company is negative. With, say, $150 in outstanding debt, the holding company’s value is -$50. The receivership creates a new holding company, which will eventually be sold back to the public, but without the outstanding debt. When the new holding company is sold, the debtholders in the old company get first dibs on the proceeds, and if there is anything after that, the equity holders can get it. Again, I could be completely wrong about this, but that is my understanding.
Simmons continues,
The capitalization of the bridge financial company must be sufficient…not only to allow the operating subsidiaries to obtain needed capital from the bridge to continue operations but also to allow stakeholders and the broader public to view the entity as safe and viable as it transitions from failed firm to bridge financial company, and ultimately to emergence as a new firm.
The problem is that financial firms have multiple self-fulfilling states of equilibrium. There is a state in which everyone believes in you, so you pay low interest rates on your debt, and you are fine. There is a state in which counterparties do not believe in you, so your interest costs soar, and you are dead. One key question about SPOE is whether it can prevent a jump from the good equilibrium to the bad equilibrium.
Suppose that we had this strategy in place, with all of the legal means for implementation. I still believe that if JP Morgan Chase or Citigroup got into trouble, the Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary would be wetting their pants. In a crisis, the probability that they would go through with SPOE, rather than undertake an ad hoc bailout, is very low.
I don’t think there is any difference here between SPOE and a bailout. The FDIC and indirectly Treasury is providing the funding at higher priority than existing debt, so it is only how good those look as spinoffs without that backing. If the answer is not so good, it would be liquidated, possibly with some bribing to get someone to take it off their hands, or some division of assets with the FDIC writing off the bad ones, similar to smaller institutions it already has.