Bankers' incompetence more lethal than avarice
Oct 01, 2009 04:30 AM
David Olive
The widespread belief that excessive banker pay played a big role in the global credit crisis is wrong, to hear some folks now argue.
Never mind that Alistair Darling, the British finance minister, vowed on Monday to soon introduce legislation to outlaw automatic annual bonuses for bankers and use "clawback" schemes to recoup bonuses from bankers whose bets later go bad.
"We won't allow greed and recklessness, ever again, to endanger the whole global economy and the lives of millions of people," Darling said.
Disregard also that Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., who has pulled in $176.3 million (U.S.) in pay over the past five years, is also calling for a ban on guaranteed annual bonuses and for clawbacks.
Blankfein said last month that Main Street "controversy and anger" over outsized financier pay is "understandable and appropriate."
But now that the worst of the crisis is behind us, the inevitable backlash has arrived.
Two finance professors, based at U.S. and Swiss universities, have collaborated on a "working paper" released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. They found, on average, that the CEOs of the 98 banks they looked at each lost $30 million (U.S.) on stocks in their own banks in 2007-08.
If it was greed that drove those bankers to take excessive risks, jeopardizing the global credit system, why didn't they cash in when the danger signals started flashing in 2007?
"It's plausible that compensation does generally affect risk-taking behaviour," Mark Hulbert, editor of the Hulbert Financial Digest, wrote in his weekly New York Times column last Sunday.
"But so far, the evidence doesn't show a specific link between that pay and the recent debacle."
The quasi-libertarian Critical Review, which more than a few bank lobbyists use as ammunition in their case against proposed pay reforms on Capitol Hill, notes that 81 per cent of the mortgages banks bought during the boom were labelled triple-A by credit-rating agencies.
Again, if bankers were greed-driven, why wouldn't they have shunned the low-risk, low-yield triple As, and instead feasted on high-risk, high-yield junk mortgages?
But, by 2006, the triple-A rating was rubber-stamped on just about every batch of subprime loans and other future "toxic waste" by the credit-rating oligopoly of Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch.
The raters were paid by the issuers of securities, a conflict of interest for the ages. Keen to goose their fee revenues, the raters applied lipstick to packages of subprimes on Appalachian trailer homes that a New York bank was eager to flip to a lender in Frankfurt or Zurich.
That anomaly alone, in which suddenly four-fifths of mortgages thrown up by the hinterlands carried a triple-A rating, should have alarmed any CEO worth the $10 million (U.S.) pocketed by the head of Citi last year. (Citi is now a ward of the state).
And much of the "money" lost by bank CEOs wasn't real but in the form of stock options. In any event, the likes of Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp. (R.I.P.), the leading vendor of U.S. subprimes, cashed in at the boom's peak to the tune to about $160 million (U.S.).
When Stan O'Neal was shown the door at Merrill last year, with the world's largest brokerage poised for a 2008 loss of $13.5 billion (U.S.), he ankled off with a severance of $140 million (U.S.). The anti-pay-reform folks are correct that other factors were at play. Chief among these was the "easy money" policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. Plus, banks' reserves to cushion them in bad times were too low. Their leverage ratios were too high.
That is, they lent or invested as much as $40 for every $1 they had in capital, compared with the Canadian norm of about 20 times.
With his proposed voluntary reforms, Blankfein is trying to avoid legislated ones "designed around protecting us from the 100-year storm."
The what?
The $8 trillion (U.S.) dot-com and tech bust was less than a decade ago. The bank-abetted North American commercial real estate bust was a decade before that, when we were still recovering from the late-1980s savings and loan crisis.
It seems there's always a "100-year storm" around the corner. And the next one will be a doozy, given that errant banks in the latest debacle were bailed out instead of allowed to fail. Now banks that take undue risks know they're "too big to fail."
Ultimately, the anti-pay-reform crowd has to concede that if the bankers weren't motivated by avarice, they "were simply ignorant of the risks their institutions were taking," as Critical Review says.
At Dairy Queen, incompetence gets you fired with maybe two weeks' pay. It's tough to argue that it should be any different for failed masters of the universe.
