Kweku Adoboli lost some $2.3bn for his employer, Swiss bank UBS. A couple of years ago Jérôme Kerviel lost over $6.5bn for Société Générale, while a dozen years back, Nick Leeson cost Barings $1.3bn and their independent existence. In all, around $10bn of losses were accrued by these three nice young men who were no doubt the pride of their parents. $10bn may seem a lot, but it’s less than a billion a year – a small price to pay for the continued freedom from regulation which enables investment banks to continue their rogue trading, which is hugely profitable for them, even if it costs the rest of us an arm and a leg.
One of the recent articles on Adoboli’s exploits, suggested that banks had failed to learn lessons and had not controlled individual traders effectively. Another suggested that securities had grown in complexity making it difficult to assess the trading risks involved. The internal risk controls within UBS were said to be obviously inadequate. The same was said about Baring’s in its day. But UBS, Société Générale and Barings, seem pretty typical members of the investment banking community. UBS may have differed slightly in requiring its female employees to wear flesh coloured underwear, but otherwise they seem fairly normal. The lack of risk control in investment banking must be endemic. Continue reading The Real Rogue Traders→
Former UK Chancellor Alistair Darling’s memoir describes Gordon Brown’s approach as ‘a shambles’. As illustration, the much quoted description of a speech by the former Prime Minister about “neoclassical endogenous growth theory”. Brown started before the speech was fully written, so that part way through delivery, “a hand appeared from behind a curtain and handed him the rest of the speech.” It may sound pretty shambolic, but much more important than that: what was Gordon Brown doing talking about neoclassical endogenous growth theory in the first place? He was shadow chancellor at the time, not some first year economics undergraduate. It’s an example of what Keynes described as the “madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
In this regard at least, Gordon Brown was far from unique. Politicians, bankers and business people tend to retain a residual belief in the academic ideology they learned at university and business school. When it’s relevant they seem likely to act according to its dictates, and to be eloquent in its defence, no matter how obviously stupid it appears to be. Thus the current debate about retention of the 50% tax rate for those earning over £150,000 pa. Continue reading Neoclassical Endogenous Growth and a 50% Tax Rate→
The Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) is expected, when it reports next Monday, to recommend ring-fencing investment banking (the speculative ‘casino’ activities) from the traditional bank role supporting the real economy. The aim of ring-fencing is said to be to ensure the government never again has to use tax payers’ money to bail out the banks when their speculations go wrong.
However, ring-fencing is a hugely ambiguous concept. No doubt the ICB will deliberate at length on its chosen interpretation. But why bother? If the aim is to insulate traditional banking from the high risk, high return speculation, why ring-fence? Why not separate the two completely, as they were prior to deregulation? Then, if the ‘casino’ banks create a bubble that bursts, they can be allowed to go to the wall with a more limited impact on the real economy. But the bankers wouldn’t like it. Continue reading Ring-fencing or Separating Banking Activities→
The Open Public Services White Paper, announced on 11th July, sneaked out under cover of the Murdoch mess, looks like being the next government created shambles. Like its approach to the NHS, it betrays a breath-taking lack of common-sense and understanding. The government claims its aim is to improve the quality and reduce the cost of all public services. This magical result is to be achieved by opening them up to provision by private and voluntary organisations, in competition with their existing public providers.
Mr Cameron has referred to five main aims in introducing his white paper: choice, diversity, accountability, decentralisation and fairness. The first three are standard shibboleths of the free-trade, open market ideology. They are quite irrelevant to the mass of people facing austerity. People don’t need choice so much as good quality, reliable provision where they can access it. The same applies to diversity. Choice and diversity may both be features of open competitive markets, but have little relevance to the provision of health and social services. Except on purely ideological grounds. Continue reading Big Society Public Services – the Next Government Shambles→
In 1914 UK owned 45% of the world’s foreign direct investment. America’s peaked at 50% in 1967, but is now less than half that, with the UK nowhere. Today China has just 6% but growing fast. America’s manufacturing productivity gains were in decline since 1970s (2.8% pa), well behind Germany (5.4%) and Japan (8.2%). American R&D expenditures in absolute decline. In relative terms the America’s real economy is following UK into absolute decline.
In a forthcoming book – ‘The Road to Co-operation: Escaping the Bottom Line’ – these various economies are identified as on different positions of the economy life cycle: UK and US being post-industrial, Japan and Germany, industrial, and China and India, industrialising. But what does post-industrial mean?
Industrialisation is what fired capitalism. Prior to that most capital was held in the form of land and buildings with not a lot of spare cash lying around waiting to be invested. Nor any pressing need for it. But when industrialisation began in the eighteenth century, it required major infrastructural investment in things such as canals, turnpike roads and subsequently railways. These huge projects took years before producing any return and the sums required were way beyond the capacity of wealthy individuals. Dispersed shareholding and large scale credit finance were brought into existence to enable the massive capital investments of industrialisation.
Contributory sums from large numbers of relatively small investors were multiplied by the bankers new found capacity for lending a proportion of deposits lodged with them for safe keeping. Even Marx acknowledged the ‘capitalistic system’ worked, having ‘created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.’ That was years before joint stock companies were allowed to provide the luxury of limited liability to their shareholders. When Marx was working on the Communist Manifesto, shareholders responsibility for their companies was total. If the company went bankrupt, they were liable for its debts and would in all probability go bankrupt with it. The possibility of bankruptcy was what gave the ‘capitalistic system’ its edge. As widely asserted, capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without hell. Continue reading Capitalism without bankruptcy: too big to fail→
From time to time the real world where people eat, drink, sleep and have their being, is impacted by the very unreal financial world of speculative markets, and invariably to its huge disadvantage. The bursting bubble of 2007-8 was one such example, which some hoped might be a tipping point, leading to a more civilised future. But not just yet. Now, the speculating elements are picking over the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Japan, to seize the chance of a quick profit. And there is still no sign the ‘madmen in authority’ have the stomach for making any fundamental change. The real world will continue its devastation.
The almost universal acceptance of neoclassical economic theory, at least in Britain and the United States, has resulted in much destruction of professional management practice. The so simplistic dogma leads to a set of mindless clichés which have not only severely damaged enterprise management practice, but, also the wider management of the real economy, as has been seen over the past two years.
Despite their much vaunted economic expertise, the leading national and global institutions failed to prevent the financial and economic crisis they’re now arguing over how to clear up. The IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) reported last month on why the IMF, as one such institution, failed to identify the risks and give clear warnings. The prime causes of that failure were identified as ‘analytical weaknesses’, which were actually shared by all relevant institutions. These analytical weaknesses included a tendency, among IMF economists, to be dominated by neoclassical free market dogma, and so to believe ‘market discipline and self-regulation’ would be sufficient to avoid financial disaster, and to trust the new mathematically based techniques for spreading financial risk, and to conflate the financial and industrial sectors, thus ignoring the influence of finance over the real economy. ‘Perhaps the more worrisome was the overreliance by many economists on models as the only valid tool to analyze economic circumstances that are too complex for modelling.’ (Paragraph 46).
In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky suggested the lack of any alternative big theme gave the free marketeers a head start in shaping and continuing to dominate the United States economy. The free market big theme may have been planted by Adam Smith, but it developed on the open prairies of North America where land was the free resource – confirmed by the Homestead Acts – which drove the early development of the US economy. So the big theme was not just markets freed from government interference and control, but personal freedom to claim a bit of America and the right to defend it with guns to fight off its previous occupants, the native Americans. That tradition gave primacy to ownership. When Friedman declared that corporate officials had no social responsibility other than to make as much money as possible for shareholders, it was hardly a shot out of the blue, but the confirmation of a long tradition.
Fighting for Fairness by Remaking the Real Economy 