Saturday, March 21, 2009

In denial

Over in the parallel universe that is the financial sector, people are not happy about the "clawbacks":

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4ff2f77e-1584-11de-b9a9-0000779fd2ac.html

There are some terrific quotes in the piece. Here are a few:

“Finance is one of America’s great industries, and they’re destroying it,”said one banker at a firm that has accepted public money.

“The work we have all done to try to stabilise the financial system and to get this economy moving again would be significantly set back if we lose our talented people because Congress imposes a special tax on financial services employees,” [Vikram Pandit, Citigroup CEO] wrote.

“There are three big industries where the US has global leadership: financial services, media and technology. Introducing this 90 per cent tax is like taking one of those industries out the back and shooting it,”

Leaving aside people who were knowingly fraudulent, or borderline fraudulent, my feeling is that the majority of people in the sector did not have bad intentions, but were simply greedily responding to wage signals. If you could make several times as much working the City or on the Street as you might in an alternative career, why not go for it? If you were the thinking type it might have occurred to you that something was a bit odd about the sheer size of your pay packet relative to equally or better qualified friends who were working long hours doing seemingly useful things like medicine, teaching or technology. But you figured, hey this is what the market's saying, it must be right. Plus there would have been persuasive voices (not least in the FT, WSJ and Economist) explaining that your sector was indeed magically creating wealth on a scale large enough to justify your pay packet.

But now that reality has made a belated appearance, where do these people go psychologically? Do they accept that much of the justification for their earnings was false? That perhaps some of the people they admired for their drive and ambition were in fact frauds? This is a lot to take on board, so these people are now in denial.

If we allow things to drift, they will stay in denial, and there will be none of the broad changes in sectoral culture and norms which are needed. And in a few years we will have a replay of the crisis, but on an even bigger scale. Yes, you can change regulation - and we should - but one-off legal and regulatory changes alone are never enough, you have to somehow change the culture and norms as well. Else, once public and political attention is elsewhere, regulatory capture will rear it's ugly head again and the seeds of a new crisis will be sown.

This is why it's so important to get the policy response right, not just in terms of the immediate economic impact of the bailout, but in terms of psychology, in terms of the message it sends to actors in the financial sector.

52 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could not have written it better myself. Excellent post, stating an obvious fact. I'm going to use it in my own blog today, with reference and link of course.

Anonymous said...

@beezer

Thanks Beezer.

On a personal note: I once upon a time interned at one of the I-banks, but then rejected a job offer. So I might well have ended up working in the financial sector myself. If I had, how would I feel at this point, and how would I rationalize my cumulative earnings to date?

Anonymous said...

The culture and the denial by those in it will stay with us, with the first reinforced and the second becoming a triumphant cry, when we bail it out. Your post's analysis is OK, but you don't draw out the only realistic the policy prescription: Let 'em fail, Chapter 11. The alternative is more and yet bigger crises.

Anonymous said...

@d4winds

I agree with the spirit of what you say: if we are not careful, we will simply be setting ourselves up for an even bigger crisis in a few years time.

For this reason, I have for some time been arguing in favour of pushing these firms through some form of bankruptcy:

http://compulsivetheorist.blogspot.com/2009/03/why-we-need-to-nationalize-now.html

http://compulsivetheorist.blogspot.com/2009/02/moral-hazard-20_16.html

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