We’re still digesting the MF Global collapse, and we’re guessing it will be the case study for the intersection of risk management and culture/ incentive systems – not that it could ever be separated, but this was the case that really drove it home because of the inconceivable use of client funds… We highlight several articles on counterparty risk, fraud and MF Global inside.
DLD 2012 has started today in Munich and runs until Jan. 24th. In it, people as diverse as Sheryl Sandberg, Arianna Huffington, the Dyson family and Hiroshi Mikitani share their views on what matters to them. The themes are varied and the program is packed with interesting talks and panels. In the age of multi-disciplinary events, this is one of the best.
Researchers have not been able to find a link between banker compensation and short-term performance metrics. In their words, their finding “refutes the suggestion that incentive structures in banks could be blamed for the crisis”. As we were reading the study’s description, we were alarmed that the professor equated “short-term performance” with the short-term movements in share prices, which is not usually how compensation is set in banks. Then we found a post by the Epicurean Dealmaker that destroys the study precisely on these arguments.
Two recent stories highlight the current moral double standards regarding defaults and indebtedness in general. The first article uses American Airlines’ Chapter 11 filing, lauded as a “smart move”, and contrasts this reaction to the stigma surrounding personal bankruptcies by home owners. The second article tries to tack the same “double standards” theme onto Germany, but it doesn’t work nearly as well.
In another building block in the “Banking: Global Mess” series, the World Bank says in a report released yesterday that the Latin American financial systems still seem sound, but there are a few yellow flags. The embedded 3-min video interview (inside) is a nice summary of findings.
The IMF has recently issued a report on China’s financial system’s stability that has grabbed plenty of headlines, and yet today it seemed that there were pessimistic articles about banking all over the world. European and US banks are also the subject of stories that highlight risk, interconnectedness, poor balance sheets etc.. While the financials’ situation isn’t necessarily news, it is the trend that’s interesting. Inside we collect quite a few articles about the world’s financial system, all of them very from yesterday or today. Collectively they plant a bleak picture, one that seems very different from what we (still) observe in Brazil’s banking system. It’s very hard to separate signal from noise, especially so in the middle of a crisis, but it’s great food for thought.
Three recent stories with one theme in common: the rise of the middle class and the availability of credit. Looking at banks or diversified financials top-down is not our specialty and, as we’ve said in our Q3 2011 report, “is only of interest to us in order to gauge an important part of the risks”. Keeping this in mind, one of the articles is bullish and points to recent reports showing that credit here has actually accelerated in September, despite talks of banks – and financial authorities – reining in loan growth. The other two articles are also bullish but still reflect, in a way, the difficulties of sustaining such growth.
Two very recent stories on CDSs (credit default swaps) highlight the issue of Risk. Risk has a lot of aspects to it and some get overlooked, such as counterpart risk, process risk, instrument risk (liquidity, clarity of regulations, how tested it was in real-life distressed situation etc.)… Not reading the fine print, for instance, has led more investors astray than they would like to confess. Much has been said about CDO-Squared and complex instruments in general, but the CDS was actually not supposed to be complex. Even so, investors in Greek debt CDSs are finding that “default” may not be what they thought it was… And another side of the debate is counterpart risk: what if the instrument is good, the writing is clear and so on – but the counterparts (whoever they are in this immensely interconnected financial world) just can’t honor their side of the deal?
Interesting Wall Street Journal editorial pointing out some contradictions within the Occupy Wall Street movement. As with all movements that start small and seem innocuous or naive at first, politicians and Wall Streeters ignore them at their own peril. How long before someone with any kind of political relevance gets tempted into picking up this flag?
“Synergy”, “two powerful minds working in unison”, “complementary skills” and so on: all that we try to achieve has to be checked against reality, especially when theory meets the REAL incentives and cultural aspects of a company. As we constantly repeat to ourselves, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. An article notes that the two co-heads of Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Securities Group can’t stand each other and, more importantly, that this personal dispute is disrupting business. The Epicurean Dealmaker wrote a very interesting analysis of this particular dispute in light of the bigger picture of the natural conflict of interests inside an investment bank. What he finds there can be applied almost anywhere else where such conflicts are, perhaps, less obvious.
