In the first of three articles we take a look at what happened and how, despite the financial arrangements being characterised as almost immeasurably complicated, it is in fact pretty easy to understand what happened.

According to a great number of articles in the press, one of the most difficult things to understand was the methods used by the financial industry – the phrase “fiendishly complicated” is often used to describe the kinds of trading that went on.  Don’t believe it.  In fact, it’s reasonably easy to understand what they were doing once the jargon is cut out.  It’s the language that’s complicated, and as we’ll see in a later article, deciding what to do now that we’re in such a deep hole is also complicated.  The supposed complexity of the financial markets feels very much like an attempt to camouflage or ignore the simple fact of greed, and the willful ignorance it lead to that generated and perpetuated the crisis.

For example, here are a couple of quick definitions:

Sub-prime mortgages are mortgages that were given to people who, in reality, were very unlikely to be able to afford them.  In The End, Michael Lewis cites the example of a Mexican strawberry picker in Bakersfield, California, who, despite having an income of $14,000 and not being able to speak English was given a mortgage of $720,000.  Some may cry foul at picking the worst possible example, but even if he’d been given a mortgage of $100,000 (more than seven times his salary) it would have been reckless for the lending institution to lead him to believe that he could afford it.  In this case, some may consider that it was up to the strawberry picker to realise that he couldn’t afford it – but who is more likely to know whether a mortgage is sustainable, a bank (who has all the customer’s details) or a customer?  And where does the moral responsibility of banks lie when selling mortgages, if not in lending responsibly?

Mortgage-backed securities are lots of mortgages bundled together (mostly sub-prime) that are sold as an asset.  Basically, this means that someone buys all those mortgages in a single lump, and gets the income from them.  If anyone defaults on their mortgage, the owner of the mortgage can sell the house.  If you believe that house prices are going to rise forever, which was a belief that many of these financial deals were founded on, then this would give a guaranteed and rising income.  If, however, interest rates go up, people start defaulting on their mortgages, and house prices plummet, organisations who own these securities are stuck with something that is also plummeting in value, and no-one wants to buy.

Almost everything that happened is, in fact, that simple.

WHAT HAPPENED?

The End takes in a enormously readable broad sweep of the crisis, from its origins to the endgame.  Written by Michael Lewis, who also wrote an exposé of 1980s Wall Street, Liar’s Poker, he starts by pointing to the fact that this isn’t anything new:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

He goes on to show, through the example of a sceptical investor called Steve Eisman, how a lack of scrutiny was actively enforced in the financial markets:

The second company for which Eisman was given sole responsibility [in his early Wall Street days] was Lomas Financial, which had just emerged from bankruptcy. “I put a sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit,” Eisman says. “I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put a sell rating on companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and you could pick the one you thought you should.” He was pressured generally to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat wasn’t Steve Eisman’s style. Upbeat and Eisman didn’t occupy the same planet. A hedge fund manager who counts Eisman as a friend set out to explain him to me but quit a minute into it. After describing how Eisman exposed various important people as either liars or idiots, the hedge fund manager started to laugh. “He’s sort of a prick in a way, but he’s smart and honest and fearless.”

“A lot of people don’t get Steve,” Whitney says. “But the people who get him love him.” Eisman stuck to his sell rating on Lomas Financial, even after the company announced that investors needn’t worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market risk. “The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst,” says Eisman, “was after Lomas said they were hedged.” He recited the line from memory: “ ‘The Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.” A few months after he’d delivered that line in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.

(Another quick definition: hedging is the same as hedging your bets.  You bet big on one result, e.g. a stock price going up, and less on the opposite outcome, e.g. that a stock price will go down (”shorting”).  This way you cut your losses if the deal doesn’t go as expected.  This is the strategy that “hedge funds” got their name from, although the term is applied to a companies with a wide variety of strategies – if they still exist.)

The End follows Steve Eisman’s path through the industry, where he was doing what everyone should have been doing – scrutinising the viability of these financial models.  The more he investigated, the more he realised that the whole system was rotten – and unlike many analysts who said they’d seen the crisis coming, but funnily enough hadn’t seen it clearly enough to put their money where their mouth was, he made a great deal of money by “shorting” companies who were dealing in that market. (”Shorting” is effectively making a bet that a company’s value will go down.  The more it goes down, the more money you make).

An interesting part of this article is when Eisman and his colleagues realised that they were in some ways actually fuelling the crisis.  Companies who Eisman was shorting were happily taking his bets that they would fail, and using it to prop up their faltering mortgage-backed securities.  Although Eisman is the hero of Lewis’ story, and is presented as someone who was incredibly angry about how these companies were playing fast and loose with other people’s money and homes (his “vindication” is that he made lots of money from them), did they stop when they realised that they were helping to fund it?  Well, no.  But at least they had the decency to feel a bit sheepish about it. Right?

The disconnection between people dealing in these financial instruments and people outside the financial sector was shown beautifully in a prescient post-Northern-Rock article from January 2008 by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books, Cityphilia, which is also worth reading for a very clear introduction to the kinds of financial deals that were being made.  Lanchester writes about a friend of his, Tony, who works (or perhaps “worked” might be more appropriate now) in the City, London’s financial district:

Not all City types are vile, obviously. My friend Tony isn’t vile. We have many interests in common and chat easily about all sorts of things. But I’m sometimes made aware of a significant gap between us. It’s a philosophical and practical gap, and it is to do with money. Tony will complain about the price of things – about parking permits, or the cost of the Playstation 3 he’s promised his son – but I’ve begun to wonder if this is a purely formal acknowledgment of the value of money to other people. Tony’s ‘basic’ is £120,000 a year; in a good year he earns a bonus of £500,000. In a very good year he is paid a million pounds. He is polite about this but the details slip out nonetheless. He bought a second home on Ibiza and I was commiserating with his complaints about the usual things (builders, local regulations) until the cost of the house was mentioned: £1.4 million.

A fundamental economic gap of that type does open up a distance between people, however many other things you have in common. He happened once to mention what he (as a head of department) pays new recruits, straight out of university: ‘45k a year, with a bonus of between ten and twelve grand guaranteed.’ I pointed out that in many cases that would mean these 22-year-olds would be earning more than the heads of department in the universities they’d just graduated from. He shrugged and laughed. ‘It is what it is,’ he said. Also, the bottom-performing 10 per cent of people in every department at his firm are sacked every year. He expressed surprise at my surprise. ‘That’s standard,’ he said. ‘I thought everyone did that.’ The moments when I realise Tony and I occupy very different spaces always turn on money and the assumptions built into our attitudes to it.

Lanchester goes on to consider quite how huge the scale of the problem might turn out to be, given the sums invested, although he mistakes opacity for complexity:

Derivatives, in their modern form, are the most powerful and the most complicated financial instruments ever devised. The third crucial thing about them is that they are everywhere. In 2003 the total size of the world economy was $49,000,000,000,000. The total size of the derivatives being traded was $85,000,000,000,000. In other words, derivatives today are worth far, far more than the total economic activity of the planet. More than $1,000,000,000,000 of derivatives are bought and sold every day. Every single thing that can be traded through derivatives, is. In the words of Warren Buffett, the greatest living stock market investor,

The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). At Enron, for example, newsprint and broadband derivatives, due to be settled many years in the future, were put on the books. Or say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem – at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.

Many companies which look as if their business is to do other things are in reality in the derivatives business – Enron being the best-known example. Buffett is a derivative-phobe, not least because he prefers to know what’s going on in the companies he invests in, and derivatives make that effectively impossible:

No matter how financially sophisticated you are, you can’t possibly learn from reading the disclosure documents of a derivatives-intensive company what risks lurk in its positions. Indeed, the more you know about derivatives, the less you will feel you can learn from the disclosures normally proffered you. In Darwin’s words, ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’

The mention of Enron is a sobering reminder of how people can get away with what eventually turn out to be stupid ideas – ideas that people fall for because their greed makes them want to believe in them.  The film Enron, The Smartest Guys In The Room, is a fantastic dissection of the rise and fall of what at one point was considered “the most innovative company in the world” and is highly reccommended viewing.  Made in 2005, the film now seems eerily prescient:

Click here to view the embedded video.

For a bit of light relief, and a link into the idea of managing risk, here’s Andy Hamilton on BBC Radio 4’s comedy panel game The News Quiz, talking about why “innovative” and “banking” are two words that shouldn’t really be put together (for non-British readers, Ladbrokes is a large bookmaking and gambling company).

[See the full post to listen to this audio file]

A good way of looking at the laissez-faire attitude to these financial trades was that the risks were not managed properly – the people and organisations who traded in these instruments did not sufficiently understand the risk of these trades (if they did so at all).  The enforced lack of scrutiny in the markets characterised by Steve Eisman’s early days on Wall Street effectively means that they were blinding themselves to the risk.  Even ratings agencies, whose job it is to tell companies how risky an investment is, were giving AAA ratings, the highest possible, to mortgage-backed securities which consisted of sub-prime mortgages.  An interesting article in the Economist, which perhaps unsurprisingly has continued to be a cheerleader for unregulated markets, is the view of an anonymous risk analyst – someone who is employed by an organisation to advise on whether the risks inherent in a deal are too high.  In Confessions of a Risk Manager he or she describes, yet again, the bias against caution in these institutions.  An interesting aspect of this article is the way that it highlights the fact that the willful blindness to risk mentioned many times above is caused by greed:

In their eyes, we were not earning money for the bank. Worse, we had the power to say no and therefore prevent business from being done. Traders saw us as obstructive and a hindrance to their ability to earn higher bonuses. They did not take kindly to this. Sometimes the relationship between the risk department and the business lines ended in arguments. I often had calls from my own risk managers forewarning me that a senior trader was about to call me to complain about a declined transaction. Most of the time the business line would simply not take no for an answer, especially if the profits were big enough. We, of course, were suspicious, because bigger margins usually meant higher risk. Criticisms that we were being “non-commercial”, “unconstructive” and “obstinate” were not uncommon. It has to be said that the risk department did not always help its cause. Our risk managers, although they had strong analytical skills, were not necessarily good communicators and salesmen. Tactfully explaining why we said no was not our forte. Traders were often exasperated as much by how they were told as by what they were told.

At the root of it all, however, was—and still is—a deeply ingrained flaw in the decision-making process. In contrast to the law, where two sides make an equal-and-opposite argument that is fairly judged, in banks there is always a bias towards one side of the argument. The business line was more focused on getting a transaction approved than on identifying the risks in what it was proposing. The risk factors were a small part of the presentation and always “mitigated”. This made it hard to discourage transactions. If a risk manager said no, he was immediately on a collision course with the business line. The risk thinking therefore leaned towards giving the benefit of the doubt to the risk-takers.

(My emphasis)

And what were the business networks doing while this bubble was inflating (and even while it was bursting)?  Asking tough questions?  Yep, just like The Smartest Guys In The Room showed they asked tough questions of Enron:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So what was happening was this.  Banks were giving mortgages to people who shouldn’t have had had mortgages, because they could charge them high interest rates, and even if they defaulted house prices were rocketing so they’d still make money.  Those mortgages were sold on in batches to other companies as investments, and the income they generated was either from the mortgage payments or sales of defaulted houses.  These investments were rated as AAA investments by the ratings agencies, reinforcing the feeling that they were totally safe, which increased the amount that people would pay for them.  This enabled companies to ignore their risk managers, some of whom were having qualms about the sums being invested.  However, as interest rates were raised by central banks trying to control inflation, house prices started to stall, and people started defaulting on their mortgages.  As this happened the value of the investments – i.e. what investors were willing to pay each other for them – started to fall precipitously, and as they did so it started to become clear that they were worth a great deal less than people had paid for them.  This meant that fewer and fewer people wanted to buy them, until the market in them collapsed entirely and they became effectively worthless.  The banks suddenly owned lots of nothing.

And here’s how it affects the people who haven’t got millions of dollars in bonuses to tide them over.

In the next article in this series, we’ll look at how the financial industry reacted to this, and why, unlike something simpler like a steep rise in oil prices, the financial markets simply collapsed in the face of it – they knew not to trust each other.

Foreclosure photo by Joelogon.

Envy is at the root of much racism, against China, against America, against the Jews.

I saw the Chinese spectacle.  The Arabic commentator, in the dress of a sheik, explained to us that the Chinese were using the spectacle to intimidate the world.  It was quite interesting to me how the Chinese adapted the Greek ceremony.  It was as if the far east and the west had joined together and skipped the Arab world.

When the commentators spoke of Arab competitors they spoke of competitors from the “united Arab nation.”  They didn’t speak of them as if they were from individual countries.  The broadcast was from Dubai, of course, and there was no rhetoric of Emirate superiority in sports, the way it was no doubt spoken of in the US.  Again, the key phrase was “Arab unity.”

PanArabism is an interesting movement, often at odds with Islamists, but equally enraged at the existence of Israel.  It is in a spirit of Panarabism that Egyptians would feel personally threatened by Israel and the US, whereas these two countries are doing nothing against Egypt, but rather are giving tons of financial aid.

So actually, all this talk of Arab unity could be read as antisemitic, anti-Chinese (who are trying to intimidate us) and ultimately an expression of one thing: envy.

The Bird's Nest, Beijing

Observing the way that medal tables were displayed in different parts of the world was a microcosm of the differing perspectives on the Beijing Olympics.  The New York Times displayed them in order of total medals, which put the USA at the top.  The official Beijing Olympics website displayed them in order of Golds, then Silvers, then Bronzes, which put the Chinese at the top.  The BBC site could do either, as the strangely-named “Team GB” ended up in fourth whichever way they chose, but opted for the official table layout.  News.com.au also stuck with the official line, even though Australia stood to gain a place by using total medals as the gauge.

But the fundamental problem with any table which uses absolute numbers of medals is that it ignores the most important factors that go to make up those totals: population and wealth.  Australian economist Bill Mitchell has been compiling medal tables based on GDP, population, GDP per capita, gender and other measures for a few Olympics now, and the results give a much better insight into how impressive various countries’ performances were.  Here are a few of the highlights (listed in order from 1st to 5th):

Top five taking GDP into account:

North Korea, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Jamaica, Georgia

Top five taking population into account:

Jamaica, Bahamas, Iceland, Slovenia, Norway

Top five taking GDP per capita into account:

North Korea, China, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zimbabwe

And here’s where the top five in terms of the official medal table came in the adjusted table (out of the 87 countries that managed to win at least one medal):

Taking GDP into account:

China (44th), USA (72nd), Russia (37th), Great Britain (54th), Germany (61st)

Taking population into account:

China (65th), USA (44th), Russia (36th), Great Britain (22nd), Germany (32nd)

Taking GDP per capita into account:

China (2nd), USA (44th), Russia (36th), Great Britain (22nd), Germany (32nd)

There are full details on Bill’s website, including how he arrived at the calculations (using North Korea’s GDP must have been very close to dividing by zero).  There’s a sense of justice in the fact that, for example, Zimbabwean athletes are up there, given how amazing it is that they managed to make the games at all.

The political atmosphere of the games was bound to linger on and even seeped into national politics – Robert Mugabe awarded a white Zimbabwean swimmer US$100,000 for her four medals and called her “a daughter of Zimbabwe” (she must have been glad it wasn’t in worthless Zimbabwean dollars); the British cyclist Chris Hoy, who won three golds in Beijing, complained of politicians “cashing in” on his success.

But what of Tibet?  What of the Beiing factories closed to clean the air?  What of the promise that by holding the Olympics in China, the Chinese government would start to relax their iron grip on the people and start to be more open?

Shanghai Scrap, a blog written by an American writer living in Shanghai with some interesting coverage of the games, has watched as things start to get back to normal.

Although it is dangerous to draw historical comparisons, as it is easy to take them too far, this is nonetheless eerily reminiscent of the Munich Olympics in 1936, when anti-semitic propaganda, the beating of Jews in the streets and any sign of rubbish, beggars, mangy animals and so on was cleaned from the streets for the duration of the Olympics – and this despite the fact that the Nuremberg Laws, which gave a legal basis for pseudo-scientific discrimination against Jews, had been passed only the year before.  As shown with compelling clarity in the BBC documentary The Thirties in Colour, Germany became the place to go on holiday after the spectacle of the Olympics.  Holidaymakers who went after the games, however, were confronted with the full force of the Nazi’s rabid anti-semitism with Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer on many street corners.  What will travellers to China see in a year’s time?

Image credit: Shajahan Moidin

Essentially Riots, Terrorism etc. is a précis of the entire book, with some observations along the way – and it makes both fascinating and depressing reading. Hyperbole generally disgusts Lanchester, but he starts the review with a bold claim:

‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry.

The idea for the book started with the press coverage of the “millennium bug”, which was supposed to bring the world to its knees as computers failed to cope with the change of year from 1999 to 2000:

Davies chooses to focus on the fact that of the millions of words written about the bug, all of them were written by journalists who had no idea whether what they were writing was true. They simply didn’t know. Flat Earth News makes a great deal of this. The most basic function of journalism, in Davies’s view, is to check facts. Journalists don’t just pass on what they’re told without making an effort to check it first. At least, in theory they don’t. In practice, contemporary journalism has been corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories in a manner so fundamental that it almost defies belief. The consequences of that are pervasive and systemic.

Lanchester goes on to show how Davies’ research team illuminate his claims with some simple but effective research:

The team looked at a fortnight’s production from the posh papers and the Daily Mail, and analysed in the process 2207 UK news pieces. They focused on two things: the number of stories that were derived directly from press releases; and the number that were taken straight from the main British news agency, the Press Association. The results were amazing, and not in a good way.

They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked.

So only 12 per cent of what is in the papers consists of a story that a reporter has found out and pursued on her own initiative; and only 12 per cent of key facts are checked. The rest is all rewritten wire copy and PR. This remaining 88 per cent is, in Davies’s stinging coinage, ‘churnalism’. No wonder the papers feel a bit thin.

This leads to observations on the pervasiveness effect of PR in the news media, the industry-wide use of bent private detectives, the culture of error at the Daily Mail, the ease with which the government co-opted the Observer to make the case for war in Iraq and a reappraisal of the way that Alastair Campbell deliberately distracted the UK media from the lack of WMD in Iraq by the “scandal” of the “sexed-up” dossier. Definitely worth a read – and it’s available for free, along with the other two articles mentioned at the beginning, on the London Review of Books website:

Buy Flat Earth News by Nick Davies on Amazon.co.uk

Riots, Terrorism etc., a review by John Lanchester of Flat Earth News by Nick Davies

Warmer, Warmer by John Lanchester

Cityphilia by John Lanchester