Consider the possibility? Nah.
Posted on November 23rd, 2008
by Scott McConnell |
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I’m reading the long New York Times piece on Citbank’s demise. Deep into it there’s this paragraph:
<<To make matters worse, Citigroup’s risk models never accounted for the possibility of a national housing downturn, this person said, and the prospect that millions of homeowners could default on their mortgages. Such a downturn did come, of course, with disastrous consequences for Citigroup and its rivals on Wall Street.>>
And then this one:
<<In fact, when examiners from the Securities and Exchange Commission began scrutinizing Citigroup’s subprime mortgage holdings after Bear Stearns’s problems surfaced, the bank told them that the probability of those mortgages defaulting was so tiny that they excluded them from their risk analysis, according to a person briefed on the discussion who would speak only without being named.>>
Maybe someone can explain this to me. I don’t know personally anyone who makes a financial decision without considering the possibility that the markets could shift direction. But if you’re entrusted with managing tens of billions of other people’s money, and are paid, I don’t know, five or ten or, in the case of Thomas Maheras, $30 million a year to do so, you don’t consider that possibility? It genuinely baffles me.
Knowing much better the milieu they come from, I think I understand how Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz could make the mistakes they made. But this makes little sense.
I do wish there would be some “accountability” though, some serious jail sentences. Since I read that Citigroup board member Robert Rubin –a key formulator of the bank’s “strategy” –is considered one of Barack Obama’s top economic advisors, I’m not too optimistic.
Filed under: Culture, Economics, Uncategorized
No reasons to be optimistic about any economics issue as long as B.O. is in charge.
http://rightklik.blogspot.com/
If anyone is to be jailed for this irrational fiasco, it should include those whose job it was to oversee and regulate the financial industry… starting at the top, for example, Bush, Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson, Phil Gramm; and to be sure, there were some Democrats and Clinton people involved as well. They all went on and on assuming that these derivative and other markets could regulate themselves, that government should be small and unobtrusive and not restrict creativity. And they were all completely dead wrong, and none of what was done was illegal. The entire economy became a Ponzi scheme based on driving growth numbers to increase executive compensation… modeled in Excel it would have returned errors for containing circular references. These ‘believers’ in a ‘free’ market were ideologically deluded and essentially believed that human nature had somehow been repealed, by the circular logic that people in such positions as themselves and the heads of the firms involved simply could not, would not behave so irrationally and allow everything to blow up. But they were wrong, all of them. Yes, these morons in effect drove a financial truck at 100 MPH into an intersection crowded with civilians. But the government posted no STOP sign, no speed limit. It was all legal. The fact is, and this will be interesting to see conservatives deal with in the coming years… the complexity and interdependency between public and private endeavor, and the mismatch between the digital, instant sophistication of the finance industry and the analog, horse-paced formal processes of the political industry means this: the era of small government is over. What we have had is a mouse in charge of protecting a hen from a cat…
@Greg,
I don’t think that the failings of financial regulation during the Bush years can possibly mean that the era of small government is over. First off, we have had a large and active government that spent money and regulated at an unprecedented level (see SarbOx for example). The problem is that the regulations were written by representatives of the (fraudulent) financial industry. Unless Obama is going to change that (and given the fact that he raised more money from the financial sector than McCain did and presumably expect a return on their investment) we are going to have more of the same.
Call it the “end of the small-government era” if you want, but you’ll be broadcasting the end of something that never exactly existed. Can we hope for the “end of the corporation-government collusion era”? That would be nice, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.
Q: Tom Maheras, how could you have made such a dreadful mistake?
Maheras: Look, I walked away with $137 million…What mistake??!!
What? Republicrats don’t bring any change? I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (”The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”) has been yelling about this coming for some years.
He regards the mathematical models used by most empty-suits as intellectual charlatanism that is little more than a way for institutions avoid responsibility en masse.
One of my favourite quotes of his is:
“Anybody invested in the Stock Market who is critical of religion is a hypocrite… stock markets analysts are worse than useless…”
There is a briliant clip of him in full swing on BBC Newsnight at:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ABXPICWjFIo
“There was virtually nobody who saw that low-probability event as a possibility.” - Robert Rubin.
This is such an outrageous falsehood, such a huge counterfactual and moral abdication, that I feel it is on a par with one of the “big lies” from the mouth of Goebbels.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock -
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/11/rubins-arrogance-and-denial-is.html -
as well as Nassim Taleb -
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ -
were two of the many who saw this coming, and who were loudly and intelligently proclaiming it.
This is a Stalinist airbrushing of history and deserves to be condemned, loudly, from the rooftops. This is unexcusable, and these people need to be publicly and repeatedly called out.
[...] the amount of economic damage world-wide, the effect on poor people and the planet that this institutional and structural irresponsibility that this represents. And now the capo-di-tutti-capos for this state-sanctioned international ponzi-scheme (consider [...]