Eliminating Conflicts of Interests in Banks: The Significance of the Volcker Rule

The gradual weakening and subsequent repeal of most provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 allowed commercial banks to acquire investment banking subsidiaries, to grow substantially in size, and to access even more information through more diverse banking activities. At the same time, proprietary trading became a major source of revenue for the banks. The subsequent financial crisis of 2008 exposed another glaring weakness of banking in the post-Glass-Steagall era. Banks had grown too big, too risky and too interconnected, many surpassing trillions of dollars in assets, interbank loans and liabilities on and off balance sheet. The sheer size, risk and interconnectedness of banking alone raised concerns about systemically important and too-big-to-fail banks. After numerous attempts to bring back Glass-Steagall failed, Congress attempted to contain banking systemic banking risk by passing the Volcker rule to prohibit proprietary trading, and enacting consumer protection and other ring-fencing and fire-wall provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act. To test the potential importance of the Volcker Rule, we would need to know the amount of profits banks make from using proprietary adverse information about their clients. However, the source of the proprietary information banks use to execute their proprietary trading programs is typically confidential. Furthermore, banks do not disclose where and how they obtain this confidential information, which helps them create billions of dollars of profits every year. In this paper we investigate one possible source of this information. Specifically, we investigate the importance of the private information banks acquire as part of their financial intermediary and financial advisory role for their client firms. Banks often attain insider trading status and become subject to insider trading reporting requirements and trading restrictions when they are hired to provide financial advice to their client firms. When banks become temporary insiders, they must also report all of these trades executed on Forms 3, 4, and 5 alongside other legal insiders. Using this insider trading database, we demonstrate that banks can and do access important, private, material information about their clients and trade on this information. On average, the inside information that banks acquire and trade on is highly valuable, allowing the banks to earn more on 25% on their proprietary trades. Furthermore, we find that relaxation and elimination of the Glass-Steagall restrictions allowed the banks to trade more frequently and earn greater amount of abnormal profits. Since 2002, banks tend to trade and earn more than 40% abnormal profits from adverse information about their client firms. Consequently, we demonstrate that an added benefit of enforcement of the Volcker Rule would be to eliminate the incentives to trade on material, non-public information about their clients by eliminating proprietary trading by banks. Thus, we argue that enforcing the Volcker Rule would also help contain some the current conflicts of interest in the banking system resulting from the elimination of Glass-Steagall restrictions.