I have referred to Jeremy Grantham's newsletter and quotes quote often on this blog and here are some of the past postings: here
For example, in the posting Bear Market Rallies, posted back in 2005.
- "Think of yourself standing on the corner of a high building in a hurricane with a bag of feathers. Throw the feathers in the air. You don't know how high they will go. You don't know how far they will go. Above all, you don't know how long they will stay up. Yet you know one thing with absolute certainty: eventually on some unknown flight path, at an unknown time, at an unknown location, the feathers will hit the ground, absolutely, guaranteed. These are situations where you absolutely know the outcome of a long-term interval, though you absolutely cannot know the short-term periods in between. That is almost perfectly analogous to the stock market." ( those above comments were taken from the book Bull, with the original comments originating from Sandra Ward's interview with Jeremy Grantham posted in Barron's 2001, entitled After the Deluge)
Now back in 2007, I posted the following: It's Bubble Everywhere - 'The necessary conditions for a bubble to form are quite simple, and number only two,' he said in his letter. 'First, the fundamental economic conditions must look at least excellent - and near perfect is better. Second, liquidity must be generous in quantity and price: it must be easy and cheap to leverage. If these two conditions have ever been present without causing a bubble, it has escaped our attention.'
- The big question is, of course, when will the bubble burst? Here's where those who are long on assets will take heart.
'Most bubbles, like Internet stocks and Japanese land, go through an exponential phase before breaking, usually short in time but dramatic in extent,' Mr Grantham wrote.
'My colleagues suggest that this global bubble has not yet had this phase and perhaps they are right. (A surge in money flowing into private equity might cause just such a hyperbolic phase.) In which case, pessimists or conservatives will take considerably more pain. Again.'
What will be the catalyst that bursts the bubble?
According to Mr Grantham, up until today we haven't quite agreed on the catalyst for the 1929, 1987, or 2000, or even the South Sea bubble bursts. Still, there are a couple of vulnerabilities in today's near-perfect market conditions. One is rising inflation; the other is declining profit margins.
( The full commentary from Mr. Jeremy Grantham can be read here: It's Everywhere, In Everything: The First Truly Global Bubble . ( registration is free but required ))
And burst it did!
However in Oct 2008, Jeremy Grantham Joins The Bullish Camp! (Fully recommended to re-read! :D)
The following passage WAS a gift to all value investors, from Jeremy - thank you again!.
- The Curse of the Value Manager
We at GMO have a strong value bias, and our curse, therefore, like all value managers, is being too early. In 1998 we saw horribly overpriced stocks that at 21 times earnings equaled the two previous great bubbles of 1929 and 1965. Seeing this new “peak,” we were sellers far, far too early, only to watch it go to 35 times earnings! And as it went up, so many of our clients went with it, reminding us that career risk is really the only other thing that matters. The other side of the coin is that only sleepy value managers buy brilliantly cheap stocks: industrious, wide-awake value managers buy them when they are merely very nicely cheap, and suffer badly when they become – as they sometimes do – spectacularly cheap. I said as far back as 1999, while suffering from selling too soon, that my next big mistake would be buying too soon. This probably sounded ridiculous for someone who was regarded as a perma bear, but I meant it. With 14 years of an overpriced S&P, one feels like a perma bear just as I felt like a perma bull at the end of 13 years of underpriced markets from 1973-86. But that was long ago. Well, surprisingly, here we are again. Finally! On October 10 th we can say that, with the S&P at 900, stocks are cheap in the U.S. and cheaper still overseas. We will therefore be steady buyers at these prices. Not necessarily rapid buyers, in fact probably not, but steady buyers. But we have no illusions. Timing is difficult and is apparently not usually our skill set, although we got desperately and atypically lucky moving rapidly to underweight in emerging equities three months ago. That aside, we play the numbers. And we recognize the real possibilities of severe and typical overruns. We also recognize that the current crisis comes with possibly unique dangers of a global meltdown.
We recognize, in short, that we are very probably buying too soon. Caveat emptor.Click here for his newsletter: http://www.gmo.com/websitecontent/JGLetter_3Q08.pdf
Feb 2009, there was a great interview on Forbes posted here: Grantham Calls It "Cheapest In 20 Years"
Still not convinced?
DO I ONLY POST NEGATIVES ON THIS BLOG? LOL! Have a look at this posting on March 2009: Grantham: Do Not Let Fear Terrify You From Investing!
But that's then.
GMO news letter is out.
Just Deserts and Markets Being Silly Again
Here is a great tip from Jeremy once more.
The following few passages from his newsletter.
- The Last Hurrah and Markets Being Silly Again
The idea behind my forecast six months ago was that regardless of the fundamentals, there would be a sharp rally.1 After a very large decline and a period of somewhat blind panic, it is simply the nature of the beast. Exhibit 1 shows my favorite example of a last hurrah after the first leg of the 1929 crash.
After the sharp decline in the fall of 1929, the S&P 500 rallied 46% from its low in November to the rally high of April 12, 1930. It then, of course, fell by over 80%. But on April 12 it was once again overpriced; it was down only 18% from its peak and was back to the level of June 1929. But what a difference there was in the outlook between June 1929 and April 1930! In June, the economic outlook was a candidate for the brightest in history with effectively no unemployment, 5% productivity, and over 16% year-over-year gain in industrial output. By April 1930, unemployment had doubled and industrial production had dropped from +16% to -9% in 5 months, which may be the world record in economic deterioration. Worse, in 1930 there was no extra liquidity flowing around and absolutely no moral hazard. "Liquidate the labor, liquidate the stocks, liquidate the farmers"2 was their version. Yet the market rose 46%.
How could it do this in the face of a world going to hell? My theory is that the market always displayed a belief in a type of primitive market efficiency decades before the academics took it up. It is a belief that if the market once sold much higher, it must mean something. And in the case of 1930, hadn't Irving Fisher, arguably the greatest American economist of the century, said that the 1929 highs were completely justified and that it was the decline that was hysterical pessimism? Hadn't E.L. Smith also explained in his Common Stocks as Long Term Investments (1924) - a startling precursor to Jeremy Siegel's dangerous book Stocks for the Long Run (1994) - that stocks would always beat bonds by divine right? And there is always someone of the "Dow 36,000" persuasion higher prices in previous peaks must surely have meant something, and not merely have been unjustified bubbly bursts of enthusiasm and momentum.
Today there has been so much more varied encouragement for a rally than existed in 1930. The higher prices preceding this crash (that were far above both trend and fair value) had lasted for many years; from 1996 through 2001 and from 2003 through mid-2008. This time, we also saw history's greatest stimulus program, desperate bailouts, and clear promises of years of low rates. As mentioned six months ago, in the third year of the Presidential Cycle, a tiny fraction of the current level of moral hazard and easy money has done its typically great job of driving equity markets and speculation higher. In total, therefore, it should be no surprise to historians that this rally has handsomely beaten 46%, and would probably have done so whether the actual economic recovery was deemed a pleasant surprise or not. Looking at previous "last hurrahs," it should also have been expected that any rally this time would be tilted toward risk-taking and, the more stimulus and moral hazard, the bigger the tilt. I must say, though, that I never expected such an extreme tilt to risk-taking: it's practically a cliff! Never mess with the Fed, I guess. Although, looking at the record, these dramatic short-term resuscitations do seem to breed severe problems down the road. So, probably, we will continue to live in exciting times, which is not all bad in our business.
- Economic and Financial Fundamentals and the Stock Market Outlook
The good news is that we have not fallen off into another Great Depression. With the degree of stimulus there seemed little chance of that, and we have consistently expected a global economic recovery by late this year or early next year. The operating ratio for industrial production reached its lowest level in decades. It should bounce back and, if it moves up from 68 to 80 over three to five years, will provide a good kicker to that part of the economy. Inventories, I believe, will also recover. In short, the normal tendency of an economy to recover is nearly irresistible and needs coordinated incompetence to offset it – like the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which helped to precipitate a global trade war. But this does not mean that everything is fine longer term. It still seems a safe bet that seven lean years await us.
Corporate ex-financials profit margins remain above average and, if I am right about the coming seven lean years, we will soon enough look back nostalgically at such high profits. Price/earnings ratios, adjusted for even normal margins, are also significantly above fair value after the rally. Fair value on the S&P is now about 860 (fair value has declined steadily as the accounting smoke clears from the wreckage and there are still, perhaps, some smoldering embers). This places today’s market (October 19) at almost 25% overpriced, and on a seven-year horizon would move our normal forecast of 5.7% real down by more than 3% a year. Doesn’t it seem odd that we would be measurably overpriced once again, given that we face a seven-year future that almost everyone agrees will be tougher than normal? Major imbalances are unlikely to be quick or easy to work through. For example, we must eventually consume less, pay down debt, and realign our lives to being less capital-rich. Global trade imbalances must also readjust. To repeat my earlier forecast, I expect developed markets to grow moderately less fast – about 2.25% – for the next chunk of time, and to look pretty anemic compared to emerging countries growing at twice that rate. We are nervous about the possibility of a major shock to Chinese growth. (My personal view of a major China stumble in the next three years or so is that it is maybe only a one in three chance, but is still the most likely important unpleasant surprise of the fundamental economic variety.) Notwithstanding this concern, I believe we are well on the way to my “emerging emerging bubble” described 18 months ago (1Q 2008 Quarterly Letter). I would recommend to institutional investors, including my colleagues, to give emerging equities the benefit of value doubts when you can. For once in my miserable life, I would like to participate in a bubble if only for a little piece of it instead of getting out two years too soon. Riding a bubble up is a guilty pleasure totally denied to value managers who typically pay a high price to the God of Investment Discipline (Thor?) for being so painfully early. I think the first 15 percentage points over fair value would satisfy me. If I’m right, the first 15% will be a small fraction of the eventual bubble premium. So in a sense, we would be early once again.
Ah... in a sense, we would be early once more. (If you are a follower of what Jeremy had been saying, you would understand perfectly what he's saying now!)
His market outlook continues..
- We believed from the start that this market rally and any outperformance of risk would have very little to do with any dividend discount model concept of value, so it is pointless to “ooh and ah” too much at how far and how fast it has traveled. The lessons, if any, are that low rates and generous liquidity are, if anything, a little more powerful than we thought, which is a high hurdle because we have respected their power for years. And what we thought were powerful and painful investment lessons on the dangers of taking risk too casually turned out to be less memorable than we expected. Risk-taking has come roaring back. Value, it must be admitted, is seldom a powerful force in the short term. The Fed’s weapons of low rates, plenty of money, and the promise of future help if necessary seem stronger than value over a few quarters. And the forces of herding and momentum are also helping to push prices up, with the market apparently quite unrepentant of recent crimes and willing to be silly once again. We said in July that we would sit and wait for the market to be silly again. This has been a very quick response although, as real silliness goes, I suppose it is not really trying yet. In soccer terminology, for the last six months it is Voting Machine 10, Weighing Machine nil!
Price, however, does matter eventually, and what will stop this market (my blind guess is in the first few months of next year) is a combination of two factors. First, the disappointing economic and financial data that will begin to show the intractably long-term nature of some of our problems, particularly pressure on profit margins as the quick fix of short-term labor cuts fades away. Second, the slow gravitational pull of value as U.S. stocks reach +30-35% overpricing in the face of an extended difficult environment.
On a longer horizon of 2 to 10 years, I believe that resource limitations will also have a negative effect (see 2Q 2009 Quarterly Letter). I argued that increasingly scarce resources will give us tougher times but that we are collectively in denial. The response to this startling revelation, for the first time since I started writing, was nil. It disappeared into an absolutely black hole. No one even bothered to say it was idiotic, which they quite often do. Given my thesis of a world in denial, though, I must say it’s a delicious irony.
So, back to timing. It is hard for me to see what will stop the charge to risk-taking this year. With the near universality of the feeling of being left behind in reinvesting, it is nerve-wracking for us prudent investors to contemplate the odds of the market rushing past my earlier prediction of 1100. It can certainly happen.
Conversely, I have some modest hopes for a collective sensible resistance to the current Fed plot to have us all borrow and speculate again. I would still guess (a well informed guess, I hope) that before next year is out, the market will drop painfully from current levels. “Painfully” is arbitrarily deemed by me to start at -15%. My guess, though, is that the U.S. market will drop below fair value, which is a 22% decline (from the S&P 500 level of 1098 on October 19).
The last passage.
- Lesson Not Learned: On Redesigning Our Current Financial System
I can imagine the company representatives on the Titanic II design committee repeatedly pointing out that the Titanic I tragedy was a black swan event: utterly unpredictable and completely, emphatically, not caused by any failures of the ship's construction, of the company's policy, or of the captain's competence. "No one could have seen this coming," would have been their constant refrain. Their response would have been to spend their time pushing for more and improved lifeboats. In itself this is a good idea, and that is the trap: by working to mitigate the pain of the next catastrophe, we allow ourselves to downplay the real causes of the disaster and thereby invite another one. And so it is today with our efforts to redesign the financial system in order to reduce the number and severity of future crises.
After a crisis, if you don't want to waste time on palliatives, you must begin with an open and frank admission of failure. The Titanic, for example, was just too big and therefore too complicated for the affordable technology of its day. Given White Star Line's unwillingness to spend, she was under-designed. The ship also suffered from agency problems: the passengers bore the risk of unnecessary speed and overconfidence in "too big to sink!" while the captain stood to be rewarded for breaking the speed record. No captain is ever rewarded for merely delivering his passengers alive. Greenspan, nearly 100 years later in his short-lived "irrational exuberance" phase, did not enjoy being metaphysically slapped by the Senate Subcommittee for threatening the then speedy progress of the economy. What is needed in this typical type of agency problem is for the agent on those rare occasions when it really matters, whether a ship's captain or a Fed boss, to stop boot licking and say, "No, this is wrong. It is just too risky. I won't go along."
We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to effect genuine change given that the general public is disgusted with the financial system and none too pleased with Congress. I have no idea why the current administration, which came in on a promise of change, for heaven's sake, is so determined to protect the status quo of the financial system at the expense of already weary taxpayers who are promised only somewhat better lifeboats.
It is obvious to most that there was a more or less complete failure of our private financial system and its public overseers. The regulatory leaders in particular were all far too captured and cozy in their dealings with reckless and greedy financial enterprises. Congress also failed in its role. For example, it did not rise to the occasion to limit the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. Nor did it encourage the regulation of new financial instruments. Quite the reverse, as exemplified by the sorry tale of CFTC Chairman Brooksley Born's fight to regulate credit default swaps.
But, at least now, Congress seems to realize the problem: the current financial system is too large and complicated for the ordinary people attempting to control it. Even Barney Frank, were he on his death bed, might admit this; and most members of Congress know that they hardly understand the financial system at all. Many of the banks individually are both too big and so complicated that none of their own bosses clearly understand their own complexity and risk taking. The recent boom and the ensuing crisis are a wonderfully scientific experiment with definitive results that we are all trying to ignore. And, except for bankers, who have Congress in an iron grip, we all want and need a profound change. We all want smaller, simpler banks that are not too big to fail. And we can and should arrange it!
Step 1 should be to ban or spin off that part of the trading of the bank's own money that has become an aggressive hedge fund. Proprietary trading by banks has become by degrees over recent years an egregious conflict of interest with their clients. Most if not all banks that prop trade now gather information from their institutional clients and exploit it. In complete contrast, 30 years ago, Goldman Sachs, for example, would never, ever have traded against its clients. How quaint that scrupulousness now seems. Indeed, from, say, 1935 to 1980, any banker who suggested such behavior would have been fired as both unprincipled and a threat to the partners' money. I, for one, saw Goldman in my early days as a surprisingly ethical firm, at worst "long-term greedy." (This steady loss of the old partnership ethic is typically underplayed in descriptions of Goldman.) Today, Goldman represents a potential hedge fund trade as being attractive precisely because they themselves have already chosen to do it. These days, all - or almost all - large banks do proprietary trading that is pure hedge fund in nature. Indeed the largest bank, Citi (owned by us taxpayers), is gearing up to substantially increase its aggressive prop trading as I write. ("No, no, we're not!")
Some insiders have argued that we should not worry about prop trading because they claim it did not play an important part in the recent crisis. I think this is completely wrong for it misses the very big picture. Prop trading can easily introduce an aggressive hedge-fund type mentality into the very hearts of what ideally should be conservative, prudent - even boring - banks. This hedge fund mentality became a dominant organizing principle, particularly with respect to compensation practices. It encouraged personal aspirations over corporate goals and invited bonus-directed behavior at the clients' expense and ultimately, as we have seen, at the taxpayers' expense to rid itself of this problem. All Congress has to overcome is the lobbying power and campaign contributions of the finance industry itself, which I admit is no small feat. In a bank with a hedge fund heart, you can't reasonably expect ethical or non-greedy behavior, and you haven't seen it.
Of course, commercial and investment banks need to invest their own capital. They probably should have the right to do genuine hedging against investments that flow naturally from their banking business. As for the rest, they could easily be required either to limit the leverage used on prop desk trading or to be restricted to investing in government paper and, at the very least, play by the same rules as other hedge funds. What they certainly should insurance, as is now the case.
In the early 1930s, following the famous Pecora hearings, the conflict of interest between the management of other people's money as fiduciary and the business of dealing and underwriting in securities was considered so inimical to the public interest that Congress almost compelled separation of proprietary trading and client trading. Close, but no cigar. Instead, Glass-Steagall made the probably less useful step of separating commercial and investment banking. Unfortunately, they left intact the obvious conflict between the banks' managing their own money and simultaneously that of their clients. We now have a unique opportunity to revisit this matter.
(As we ponder the problem of prop trading, let us consider Goldman's stunning $3 billion second quarter profit. It appeared to be almost all hedge fund trading. Be aware also that this $3 billion is net of about $6 billion reserved for future bonuses. Goldman's CEO had, in fact, the interesting job of deciding how much of this $9 billion profit would be arbitrarily awarded to shareholders. [In this case, one-third. Could be worse!] This means that they extracted every penny of $9 billion from a fragile financial system. "Good for them," you may say, and they indeed are very smart. But surely they should not have been insured against failure by us taxpayers! Remember, they are now also a commercial bank yet very, very little of their $9 billion came from making loans. Three months later their bonus pool for the year is estimated to be a new record at $29 billion. And the whole banking industry is back to a new record for remuneration. How resilient! How remarkable! How basically undesirable for our economy!)
In Step 2, the Justice Department, together with Congressional and other advisors, should be invited to develop a special set of rules for the banking industry that recognizes the moral hazard of "too big to fail." If really too big to fail, banks should be divided by Justice into manageable, smaller pieces that can indeed be allowed to fail. With these two steps and possibly with an intelligent son of Glass-Steagall, the deed would be done! Regulators would have a fighting chance of being able to regulate, unlike their recent woeful past. If an angel appeared, waved his wings and, lo, it was so, almost every single Congressman would sigh with relief.
The separation of commercial banking from investment banking is not as vital as the removal of prop desk complicated enterprises both smaller and simpler, which characteristics I for one believe are probably essential if we are to avoid further disasters. So what is the problem? The argument against all major changes, without at least some of which we will soon surely be back in another crisis, is always the same. "Oh, you can't roll back the clock." But, even repeated twice before every breakfast, it is not persuasive. Why exactly can't you roll back the clock? We did it once before and, although it was very imperfect and probably missed the central point of conflict of interest, it still produced an improved system that was successful enough for 50 years. In general, countries with simpler and less aggressive banks have had much less pain in the recent crisis while we were pawning the Crown Jewels - sorry, the Federal Jewels - to bail out aggressive bankers who were out of their depth in the new complexities.
Step by step, even as the complexity grew, our regulatory leaders enabled systemic risk to grow. They continued to push the boundaries for banks by allowing more leverage, new instruments, and less control. The details are familiar. All this was done in the name of untrammeled, unfettered capitalism, and almost all of it was a bad idea.
"Oh!" say the bankers, "If we become smaller and simpler and more regulated, the world will end and all serious banking will go to London, Switzerland, Bali Hai, or wherever." Well, good for those other places. If that means they will have knee-buckling, economy cracking, taxpayer-impoverishing meltdowns every 15 years and we will be left looking like a boring back water, that sounds fine to me. Remember, just like our investment management branch of the financial system, banking creates nothing of itself. It merely facilitates the functioning of the real world.
Yes, of course every country needs a basic financial system to function effectively with letters of credit, deposits, and check writing facilities, etc. But as you move beyond that it is worth remembering that every valued job created by financial complexity is paid for by the rest of the real economy, and talent is displaced from real production, as symbolized by all of the nuclear physicists on prop trading desks. Viewed from the perspective of the long-term well-being of the whole economy, the drastic expansion of the U.S. financial system as a percentage of total GDP in the last 20 years has been a drain on the health and cost structure of the balance of the real economy. To illustrate this point, in 1965 the financial sector of the economy took up 3% of the GDP pie. The 1960s were probably the high water mark (or one of them) of America's capitalism. They clearly had adequate financial tools. Innovation could obviously have occurred continuously in all aspects of finance, without necessarily moving its share of the economy materially over 3%. Yet by 2007 the share had risen to 7.5% of GDP!
The financial world was reaching into the GDP pie and taking an unnecessary extra 4%. Every year! This extra rent is enough to lower the savings and investment potential of the rest of the economy. And it shows. As mentioned earlier, the growth rate of the GDP had been 3.5% a year for a hundred years. It had proven to be remarkably robust. Even the Great Depression bounced off it, and soon GDP growth was back on the original trend as if the Depression had never occurred. But after 1965, the growth of the non-financial slice, formerly 3.4%, slowed to 3.2%. After 1982 it dropped to 3.1% and after 2000 fell to well under 3%, all measured to the end of 2007, before the recent troubles. These are big declines. It is as if a runner has a growing and already heavy blood sucker on him that is, not surprisingly, slowing him down. In the short term, I realize that job creation in the financial industry looked like a growth driver, as did the surge in financial profits (which we now realize were ludicrously overstated). But in the long term, like a sugar high, this stimulus was temporary and unhealthy.
The financial system was growing because it could. The more complex and confusing new financial instruments became the more "help" ordinary citizens needed from the experts. The agents' interests were totally unaligned with the principle/clients' interests. This makes a mockery of "rational expectations" and the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which assumes (totally unproven, as usual) equivalent and perfect knowledge on both sides of all transactions. At the extreme, this great advantage in knowledge and information held by the financial agents has the agents receiving all the rewards, according to the recent work3 by my former partner, Paul Woolley, and his colleagues at the Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality. (With a great name like that their job is half done before they start.)
The second problem, right on the heels of the too-big-and complicated issue, is that of inadequate public oversight. Even with existing institutions, we would have avoided most of the recent pain, borne by taxpayers, if we had had better public leadership. Yes, the public bodies had flaws, but the individuals running the shop had far bigger flaws. Greenspan, with arguably the most important job in the world, simply did not believe in interfering with capitalism at all. His regulatory colleagues such as Bernanke and Geithner fell into line without any challenges. And Congress, strongly influenced by the financial industry, or merely misguided, or often both, facilitated the approach that capitalism in general and banking in particular would do just fine if left entirely alone. It was a very expensive error. Does anyone think we would have run off the cliff with even one change - Volcker at the Fed? I, for one, am confident that we would have done far less badly.
Behind this weakness in the recent cast of characters is a systemic (suddenly the trendiest word in the English language) weakness in our method of job selection. How can Greenspan, with his long-established record of failure as a professional economist, have resurfaced as the Fed boss? With no record of success in any important job, he gets one of the world's two most important jobs! Now we have to decide how much more decision-making power to give to the Fed - an institution with a 25-year proven record of failure. How can we separate the logical neatness of institutional design from our recent proven inability to pick effective, principled leaders with strong backbones?
It is a conundrum: too many regulatory agencies and you have too many opportunities for financial interests to shop around for regulatory bargains and to find and exploit the ambiguous seams between them. Too few agencies and we run the risk of my worst nightmare: waking up and finding Alan Greenspan with twice the authority!
At the least we must recognize the improbability of acquiring great leaders and that our financial system must be simple and robust enough to withstand the worst efforts from time to time of poor or even bad leadership. A simpler, more manageable financial system is much more than a luxury. Without it we shall surely fail again. And it looks as if we are bound and determined to bend once again to the will (and the money) of the financial lobby, which is encouraged by the unexpected conservatism of the current administration's "Teflon" men. They seem terrified to make any substantial changes. And the one person with the character to make tough changes - Paul Volker - is window dressing, exactly as I suggested in January. A sad, wasted opportunity!
Summary
* Yes, this was a profound failure of our financial system.
* The public leadership was inadequate, especially in dealing with unexpected events that often, like the housing bubble breaking, should have been expected.
* Of course, we should make a more determined effort to do a more effective job of leadership selection. But excellence in leadership will often be elusive.
* Equally obvious, we could make a hundred improvements to the lifeboats. Most would be modest beneficial improvements, but in the long run they would be almost completely irrelevant and, worse, they might kid us into thinking we were doing something useful!
* But all of the above points fail to recognize the main problem: the system has become too big and complicated for even much-improved leaders to handle. Why should we be confident that we will find such improved leaders? For, even in an administration directed to "change," Obama and his advisors fell back on the same cast of characters who allowed, even facilitated, the development of the current crisis. Reappointing Bernanke! What a wasted opportunity to get a "son of Volker" type. (Or should that be "grandson of Volker?")
* The size of the financial system continues to grow and shows every sign of being out of control. As it grows, it becomes a bigger drain on the rest of the economy and slows it down.
* The only long-term hope of avoiding major recurrent crises is to make our financial system simpler, the units small enough that they can be allowed to fail, and, above all, to remove the intrinsically conflicted and dangerously risk-seeking hedge fund heart from the banking system. The rest is window dressing and wishful thinking.
* The concept of rational expectations - the belief in the natural efficiency of capitalism - is wrong, and is the root cause of our problems. Hyman Minsky, on the other hand, was right; he argued that the natural outcome of ordinary people interacting is to make occasional financial crises "well nigh inevitable." Crises are desperately hard to avoid. We must give ourselves a chance by making the job of dealing with them much, much easier.
* All in all we are likely to have learned little, or rather to act, through lack of character, as if we have learned nothing. In doing so we are probably condemning ourselves to another serious financial crisis in the not too- distant future.
PS: As quite often happens, since I write painfully slowly (even without extra tick-borne delays), a professional slipped in with a great column that gets to the heart of this matter. Please read John Kay in the Financial Times of July 9. It is short and persuasive. "Our banks are beyond the control of mere mortals" - now, that's what I call a title!
Read more...
