July 30 2019

Ever since the financial crisis started there has been a plethora of explanations about why traders and bankers behaved as they did.  Some have been purely descriptive: what happened and when, allowing us to marvel at the folly of it all, at least in hindsight.  At the time these clever financiers were praised by pretty much everyone from Chancellors down. There were very few pointing out at the time that the Emperor had no clothes.

But increasingly there have been attempts to use the insights gleaned from other disciplines to explain why what happened in the way it did. The latest neuroscientific findings were used to describe the biology of boom and bust (The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, for instance). Behavioural economics has had its say, as has nudge theory. Rather than nudging people to behave well, all the payment and reward incentives nudged financiers into doing what suited them financially irrespective of the effect on the customer and no matter what the expressed good intentions of the firm were. Goodness! Whoever could have predicted that, without a theory to explain it.

Psychologists have had their say, of course, though only a cynic might wonder about how much actual knowledge about the realities of life in the financial sector they have. No matter: all could opine merrily on the importance of culture in finance and on all the wonderful insights that these disciplines could bring to those seeking to manage and regulate the financial sector.

And now the anthropologists have got in on the act, as in this article by Gillian Tett. In it she points out how anthropologists have tried to analyse the cultural patterns, the rituals and symbols, even the words people use in finance to understand what was going on under the surface. In truth, the insights brought by anthropologists (at least as described here) are pretty obvious rather than thought-provoking; the article does not need them to be worth reading.

What is interesting, though, is how commentators on finance and perhaps also regulators are, perhaps unconsciously, making the same mistake as many of those traders and bankers. They are over-complicating, coming up with all sorts of theories and hypotheses apparently grounded in science or other social studies, described and interpreted by experts, using technical language to describe common human behaviours. Just as too many traders developed over-complicated products which they only half-understood and managers kidded themselves into believing that they had found a foolproof solution to valuation or risk management or any of the other difficult tasks they had, so there is a risk of developing overly complex explanations for why so many people behaved so stupidly or worse. The risk is that the more complex the explanation, the more people feel that it is all too difficult really to do anything about it or that this is something best left to the culture specialists, psychologists and other “ologists“.

Keep it simple might be the motto. In the end, by whatever means the conclusions are reached, what everyone in finance needs to remember is this:-

1. Trust is at the heart of finance.
2. Everyone in a financial institution is, in one way or another, managing risk.  There is no such thing as a risk-free product or institution.  Or, indeed, individual.  Understanding the risk you are running and managing it properly is what every bank, every employee in a bank, every customer of a bank, every shareholder in a bank, every investor in a financial product and every regulator of a bank is doing.  Or ought to be doing.
3. Understanding properly is hard work.  There is no magic bullet, algorithm, theory, process, spreadsheet, AI or killer piece of management information which will do it for you. Thinking is often required.
4. There is no way of eliminating risk.  Mitigating and minimising it: yes.  Eliminating it: no.  If anyone says otherwise (and much of the financial crisis was caused as a result of clever people thinking they had done just this and learning, painfully, that they hadn’t) they’re a charlatan or worse.
5. Human beings, even clever ones (particularly them, it sometimes seems) do not behave rationally around money. Money and emotions are bosom pals. As any decent novelist or lawyer dealing with divorces or wills will tell you.  The “animal spirits” Keynes described do not just apply to market participants but to all of us.
6. Managing people, understanding them, motivating them, inspiring and leading them, teaching them, setting them a good example, setting them high expectations and making it clear what the boundaries are, what behaviour will not be accepted, what crosses the line, helping them get past their frailties, working effectively with them is hard work, the hardest work anyone ever has to do.  And by far the most valuable – and rewarding.
7. Finance is there to serve others, not itself.  It is a means to an end and the moment it (and the people in it) start thinking of themselves as indispensable, as set apart from the society they are part of, as entitled to special consideration and immunity from challenge is the moment when hubris sets in.  Nemesis will surely follow.

Photo by Lesly Derksen on Unsplash

January 21 2019

The best single essay on financial misbehaviour was written not by a journalist, academic or former trader, but by a novelist and 25 years ago: The Deficit Millionaires by Julian Barnes, that most pointillist and French of English writers.  It is about Lloyds of London, the huge losses it suffered in the early 1990’s and how trusting Names slowly realised that their faith in a long-standing and well-established institution was utterly misplaced.  Lloyds had been around for ever.  It was part of the City’s furniture.  And it was insurance, after all.  How boring is that. How could anything possibly go wrong?

Well, with exquisite care and sympathy and the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, Barnes shows us how.  And the story is a surprisingly familiar one.

• A novel but complicated instrument designed to reduce risk but instead increasing it – the London Market Excess, or the spiral of reinsurance.  “Making a turn” – in the spiral – “was the easiest way to make money” one underwriter said.”
• Greed – “If you are making a good living, if you have self-regulation, if you are outside exchange control, it’s human nature to get greedier and greedier and greedier”.
• The market’s rapid expansion in a short period of time.  There was a near-ten-fold increase in the number of Names in 14 years, most of them trusting amateurs and all looking for insurance to underwrite.
• A lack of due diligence, a suspension of critical faculties, a lack of scepticism coupled with an all too human willingness to believe in the promises of a no risk investment, all wrapped up in a flattering appeal to vanity.
• A  deeply cynical – and possibly fraudulent – approach by the professionals to those who joined (“If God had not meant them to be sheared, he would not have made them sheep.”) 
• Relaxation of the rules and lax monitoring of those that existed.
• The undisclosed conflicts of interest – recruiters were paid a fee for each Name who joined.
• A lack of transparency – it was Lloyds insiders rather than external members who got onto the best managed, low risk and least spivvy syndicates, justified by the then Chief Executive thus – “In any activity, the professionals will know more than the others.”
• The breakdown of trust – what Barnes describes as the “tickle of fraud“, the realisation that the belief in “an honourable society, operating on trust, on shared values” was a chimera.  Or as one Name put it more bluntly, “You know, trust, honour, and then to find in such an august body a bunch of craven crooks”.
• The realisation, far too late, that private warnings were given about some of the risks and unacceptable/criminal behaviour but these were ignored or not shared with those who ought to have been told.
• The turning of blind eyes to unacceptable/negligent and/or criminal behaviour by a remarkable cast of shameless rogues during the 1980’s, even when the latter were the subject of legal action.
• The failed institution’s repeated insistence that any problems were only the result of that well-worn old favourite: one or two rotten apples, despite one of those rotten apples being a Chairman of Lloyds.
• The determined focus by new management only on its new procedures and processes and business plans for the future in the hope that a veil would be cast over the past, without any unseemly digging into it.
• The eventual realisation by the institution that, as its deputy Chairman, put it, for the previous twenty years it had lacked “total integrity” and “strong government“.

Even the modern new building housing the salvaged and totemic Lutine Bell and built by a famous “name” architect is part of the story.

Barnes eloquently shows how an institution believed to be “the highest name of honesty“, seen as part of a certain sort of honourable Englishness, around for three hundred and five years, a stalwart of the City, selling its services around the world, as venerable as the Bank of England and thought to be as safe, came to be seen, harshly but accurately, as “a cesspit of dishonesty“.

If only this had been published more widely than in a US publication and, later, a book of essays.  If only we had paid more attention.  If only we had learnt the lessons that were there to be learnt.

Everything that went wrong in the run up to the near collapse of the Lloyds insurance market happened again two decades later and led to the financial crash 10 years ago, even with the benefit of external regulation and control.  Indeed, pretty much the same things happened in the lead in to most financial scandals going back hundreds of years.

And, human nature being what it is, it’s a pretty safe bet that a version of all or some of these will happen the next time, may indeed be happening now.  The same behaviours will once again come under the spotlight when the the next scandal becomes known, with its inevitable backing chorus.  

Why didn’t anyone see?  

Why did no-one ask the obvious questions?  

Why did no-one listen to the warnings?  

Why, oh why didn’t anyone act?

As Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee put it in a different context, “it has been striking how some the issues which arose in [2005 and 2013] have also been seen as having been a factor in 2017.  We have previously made recommendations in these areas, yet they do not appear to have been acted on.”

Scepticism.  Curiosity.  Asking tough questions.  Learning lessons from previous events.  Their absence is a regular feature of many incidents of misconduct, many crises, both large and small.

But ultimately, in finance, as in other sectors, it is those old-fashioned concepts – trustworthiness, integrity, honourable dealing – which remain as essential in 2019, and years to come, as they have always been.

Photo by Boris Stefanik on Unsplash

December 31 2018

2018 has been a year for anniversaries, September bringing forth a slew of articles about the financial crash 10 years on and a number of books by learned professors (to add to the ones already written about the fall of individual institutions) seeking to make sense of it all.  See, for instance, Adam Tooze’s “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World”.

But despite the colourful characters, scandalous activities and stories aplenty, it is curious that in the last decade novelists and playwrights have largely shied away from writing about the world of finance.  It is an odd omission.  19th century writers were much less shy: see William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair with its wonderfully sardonic and cynical and oh so apposite to our times take on a world where “everyone is striving for what is not worth having“.  Or Balzac with his tales of how money – having it, not having it, wanting more of it – corrodes personal relationships.  And not forgetting our very own Dickens, whose every novel is stuffed with characters for whom debt was an ever-present – and often malign – reality.  Mr Micawber stands as an object lesson to those who think that living beyond your means indefinitely is sustainable.

There have been a few attempts to make a drama out of a crisis: Caryl Churchill’s expletive-ridden “Serious Money”, written in 1987, just after an earlier stock market crash (and featuring the International Tin Council litigation, the very first case I was involved in as a junior solicitor) was one of the earliest.   Not a play likely to feature in the repertoire of amateur dramatic societies, given its colourful language.

A few years later “Capital City” was a TV series based on the lives and loves of City traders in the late 1980’s when Britain learnt to fall in love with making Loadsamoney, as much and as fast as possible and with precious few scruples about how it was done.  This was the era of the Guinness affair and Robert Maxwell and BCCI.  Enough larger than life characters and juicy stories and morality tales there for even the most mathematically challenged writer.  But even that great State of the Nation playwright, David Hare, whose plays in the 1990’s: “Pravda” (journalism), “Racing Demon” (the Church of England), “Murmuring Judges” (the law) and “The Absence of War” (the Labour Party) sought to take the moral temperature of contemporary Britain and its institutions, ignored the tumultuous changes in the world of finance and how they were changing British society more radically than even the most provocative newspaper or campaigning politician.

Lucy Prebble’s “Enron” in 2009 succeeded in London but failed in NY.  More recently, the BBC’s McMafia series focused on Russian money laundering.  John Lanchester’s 2012 novel, “Capital”, was set around the time of the 2008 crash but mainly showed the mysterious alchemy whereby ordinary London homes turned into money-making machines for those lucky enough to acquire them when they were, well, just houses. Sebastian Faulks’s “A Week in December” from 2009 had as one of its main characters someone rumoured to have been based on a well-known – and once successful – trader and featured a naive junior FSA regulator (the resemblance being purely coincidental in the latter case, one assumes).  But whatever the books’ other merits, the characterisation of the bankers, traders and regulators was cartoonish and one-dimensional.

Lanchester’s “Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay” was a better attempt to understand the mysterious world of finance.  As was the US documentary “Inside Job”.  Maybe only Michael Lewis has been able to present the human stories present in the financial world in a way which feels like fiction.  Perhaps the dramatisation of real life events (“The Big Short” and Massini’s “The Lehman Trilogy”) is the only way to make sense of this world.  Perhaps.

It is too easy to think that no-one will understand – or care – about the technicalities and complexities and arcane language of modern finance, let alone about the people whose lives revolve around it.  A pity if so.  It is not the numbers which matter but the instincts, proclivities and emotions – what Keynes called “animal spirits” – which determine what people do.  There is little that is more emotional than people’s behaviour around money.

If the range of human behaviour on show in the run up to, during and after any financial scandal is not a subject for writers, it is hard to know what is.  All human life is there, after all.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash