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Credit crisis shows that banks need wise men not wide boys
Telegraph.co.uk
05 Maggio 2008
Don't get me wrong. I haven't got it in for all senior executives and corporate board members. Some of my best friends are chief executives. Really. But I have come to wonder whether their colleagues are all quite what they are cracked up to be.
We all get things wrong. Even the most brilliant general or politician fails in some respect or other. Never mind economists. For us, getting it wrong is a way of life.
But for someone trying to analyse how good or bad a great leader was the key question to ask is why they failed. Was it bad luck, or bad judgment, or bad information - or what? Similarly when they succeeded, was this rooted in good decision-making or in good luck? The same is true for corporate leaders. But who makes such careful and critical assessments of them?
In practice, my concerns are most acute regarding financial businesses, and principally banks. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the degree of incompetence there is greater.
I do not mean to imply that the quality of people involved is necessarily lower, but rather that there is more chance that skills and practices do not match up to requirements. Financial businesses are inherently more complex and they can change that much faster. Accordingly, it is probably easier to make catastrophically bad decisions in finance than in any other business.
What has prompted these thoughts is the recent news of large-scale losses by banks. The shocking thing is that in the case of major corporate decisions we know so little. We don't really know whether individual senior bankers are culpable. Stock market analysts have, as so often, failed to ask the pertinent questions. Major shareholders, who have often been part of the problem by pushing managements to deliver short-term performance, could ask key questions. But their activities seem to be mainly confined to pushing for the occasional executive scalp, without really knowing whether that person was the root of the problem. On the whole, journalists have given corporate executives and their decision-making processes an easy ride too.
About the only powerful source of scrutiny is the Treasury Committee of the House of Commons (to which I act as an adviser on monetary policy). A grilling by those rottweilers can rattle the most confident of chief executives and raise a mighty stink. But the Committee does not have the time or resources to conduct major investigations into corporate decision-making.
Even though they have a clear self interest in understanding why they made a bad decision, I doubt whether even within the corporations themselves there is much self-analysis.
I have more than a suspicion that in most cases the answers would make your hair stand on end. There are several characteristics of senior bank executives which should make you worry.
First, they are not by nature very ruminative and not normally given to self doubt. This can, of course, be a good quality, but not when the world is so uncertain and the consequences of bad decisions so serious. Second, they do not lightly tolerate dissent and tend to attract sycophants among the ranks of other senior executives. Third, they normally have distinct blind spots in the two areas where a financial organisation can most easily be brought to fail, namely IT and complex financial instruments. Fourth, if an activity is making money they usually give it the benefit of the doubt.
In a properly functioning corporate world these failings of the executive would be both recognised and counter-balanced by the wisdom of the board. But many boards are best regarded as a form of club. The City is a peculiar mixture of geekish quants and rocket scientists, wide-boy traders who would otherwise be selling apples and oranges down the Commercial Road and time-serving apparatchiks. Typically a board consists of no one from the first two groups but quite a few from the third. In what position is Sir Thingummy Whatnot to question the real risk exposure of a bank? Does Dame Noditthrough really know her onions on complex derivatives?
And for presiding over all this, of course, senior bank executives get rewarded on a scale that ordinary mortals find fantastical. And when they fail, they get packed off into the sunset, often begonged, with a very comfy nest-egg indeed.
The inability of most normal human beings to understand what the quants are up to is devastating. Of course, the banks all have their risk assessment teams and procedures. But they are also highly quantitative and to normal people speak gobbledegook. More fundamentally, their model-based approach rests on the continuing relevance of recent experience - often over pathetically short runs of data - with scant regard paid to the "off-the-model risks" which in the real world are the usual sources of upset. Personally, I would sack at least half of the risk assessment boys and replace them with historians and people versed in English literature. Their brief would be to think the unthinkable - not to measure the easily quantifiable.
Not long ago, banks and other lenders were falling over themselves to lend on wafer-thin margins to people and propositions which their predecessors would not have touched with a bargepole: 125 per cent mortgages; huge multiples of earnings; self-certification. Now the lenders are shutting up shop and fancy mortgages have disappeared like melting snow. Both approaches cannot be right.
The silence about the corporate behaviour which led us to this pretty pass is scandalous. Come off it boys, you were sucked into a bubble of the classic sort. You were persuaded to believe that nothing could go wrong. Yet any study of financial history would have set the alarm bells ringing. But do you ever read any? To his great credit, the Governor of the Bank of England warned explicitly and publicly of the risks. But did you listen? Outside commentators and analysts, and even, in some cases, your own in-house experts, pointed out the over-valuation of property. But did you pay any attention?
We cannot go on like this. There are all sorts of ways in which banks must be restrained and regulated to be better behaved in future, including with regard to their remuneration packages. But the structure and behaviour of boards and banks' procedures for assessing risk should also be an important part of this reform.
Supposedly the justification for the gargantuan pay packages of recent years has been the supreme cleverness of bankers. Yet so much of modern banking is a form of gambling. Those clever bankers, nodded on by their gilded boards, have done the equivalent of put a few billion quid on the 3.30 at Newmarket - and lost. Clever or not, what they really need more of is not cleverness but wisdom. And what they need less of is money.
By Roger Bootle
Source > Telegraph.co.uk
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