Northern Rock, 2007Needs one idea

A solvent lender that could not refinance. The queues outside the branches were the second run; the first one had already happened in a market with no branches at all.

3 min read · 523 words

What happened

• The model — the bank grew a mortgage book funded to a large degree by borrowing in wholesale markets and by securitising loans, rather than by taking deposits from savers.
• August 2007 — as losses on US mortgage securities emerged, short-term funding markets tightened sharply and securitisation issuance largely stopped. Lenders who needed to roll wholesale funding could not.
• 13 and 14 September 2007 — news of emergency liquidity support from the Bank of England became public. Queues formed outside branches; it was the first widely reported run on a British bank in well over a century.
• Autumn 2007 — the government guaranteed retail deposits to stop the retail run. The wholesale funding did not return.
• February 2008 — the bank was taken into public ownership.

The mechanism

• The run happened in a market, not in a queue. Wholesale lenders declined to roll short-term funding weeks before any depositor queued. That decision is made by a credit committee and is invisible from outside.
• Maturity transformation is the business. Borrow short, lend long: that is what a bank is. The risk is not that the model is unusual, it is that the short side is a promise somebody else can decline to renew.
• Solvency and liquidity are separate questions. Mortgages that will be repaid over decades do not help with a payment due on Friday. A balance sheet can be sound and still stop.
• Securitisation was a funding channel, not just a risk transfer. When the market for the securities closed, the lender lost the pipe it used to turn loans into cash. See securitisation.
• Deposit insurance is designed against exactly this. The retail run stopped when the guarantee was announced, which is the mechanism working — after the fact, in public, rather than quietly in advance.

What it teaches

• Ask where the funding comes from, not only what is being funded. Two lenders with identical loan books and different funding are different businesses.
• Short funding is a promise renewed constantly. Every roll is a decision by somebody else, and they are all making it at the same time using the same information.
• Funding risk decides more institutions than credit risk does. The site's risk profiles mark this family explicitly; a bank is the archetype.
• The visible panic is usually the late part. This episode is the clearest case of a queue that was a consequence, and its images are still the ones people associate with the cause.

The mechanisms behind this

• Savings deposits — the promise a bank makes to the retail side.
• Securitisation — turning loans into fundable securities, and what happens when nobody buys them.
• Repo — the secured short-term borrowing that a lender is rolling constantly.
• SVB, 2023 — the same shape with a different funding base and a much faster clock.