financial innovation

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation

by Richard Bookstaber  · 5 Apr 2007  · 289pp  · 113,211 words

Page ii ffirs.qxd 3/1/07 3:33 PM Page iii A DEMON OF OUR OWN DESIGN ~ ~ Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation RICHARD BOOKSTABER John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ffirs.qxd 3/1/07 3:33 PM Page iv Copyright © 2007 by Richard Bookstaber. All rights reserved. Published

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.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Bookstaber, Richard M., 1950– A demon of our own design : markets, hedge funds, and the perils of financial innovation / Richard Bookstaber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-471-22727-4 (cloth) 1. Hedge funds. 2. Risk management. I. Title. HG4530

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better

by Andrew Palmer  · 13 Apr 2015  · 280pp  · 79,029 words

e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com. Designed by Cynthia Young Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palmer, Andrew, 1970– Smart money : how high-stakes financial innovation is reshaping our world-for the better / Andrew Palmer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-465-06472-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978

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institution, simple and complex.2 The second misconception concerns the benefits of financial creativity. Few areas of human activity now have a worse image than “financial innovation.” The financial crisis of 2007–2008 brought a host of arcane financial processes and products to wider attention. Paul Volcker, one former chairman of the

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Federal Reserve whose postcrisis reputation remains intact, has implied that no financial innovation of the past twenty-five years matches up to the automatic teller machine in terms of usefulness. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist-cum

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a financial basis.”4 This book is divided into two parts. The first is designed to give the reader a broader framework for thinking about financial innovation than just the 2007–2008 crisis and its aftermath. The natural response to the idea of financial ingenuity is to say, “No, thanks.” But as

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financial breakthroughs. The invention of money, the use of derivative contracts, and the creation of stock exchanges were smart responses to fundamental, real-world problems. Financial innovation helped foster trade, smooth risks, create companies, and build infrastructure. The modern world needed finance to come into being. Without question, the industry did a

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they can say is: ‘But you could be charging more. Why don’t you?’” If the first part of the book makes you doubt that financial innovation is all bad, the second should convince you of its capacity to do good. Despite the crisis—and in some cases because of it—finance

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. PART I: LESSONS BADLY LEARNED 1. Handmaid to History Financial Sector Thinks It’s About Ready to Ruin World Again —The Onion The history of financial innovation is also the story of human advance. The early forms of finance met some very basic needs—trade, safekeeping, credit. As societies and technologies have

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outcome. Large numbers reduce the odds of an unusual average outcome. Example of a Galton Board. Source: Marcin Floryan In thinking about the course of financial innovation, mathematical insights like the law of large numbers have a large part to play. This particular idea was formalized by Jacob Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician

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-ownership rate among US households rose from 43.6 percent in 1940 to 64 percent in 1980.23 *** THIS RAPID TOUR THROUGH the history of financial innovation has one last stop: the age of derivatives. Derivatives are financial instruments whose value is derived from the performance of another, underlying, asset. We have

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of financial breakthroughs? One is that those who think the recent global crisis meant the end of history are dead wrong. The big drivers of financial innovation—needs, theoretical insights, and technology—are still powering the industry. Indeed, as we shall see in the second part, they are providing greater momentum than

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financial distress. Finance may propel us forward, but it is also liable to cause a lot of trouble.2 This book’s contention is that financial innovation is an essential component of attempts to address the world’s big problems. How can that argument be squared with the industry’s destructive tendencies

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finance as the source of all evil, are now keen to encourage securitization rather than rely too much on the banking system. The problem with financial innovation is not that products have original sin, but that the financial system is programmed to change these products in ways that make them more dangerous

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than any other industry, finance evolves through rapid, constant experimentation. The physical constraints on the flow of new products are light. The raw materials of financial innovation are cheap: a fertile mind and a piece of paper will often suffice to dream up new ideas. Demand for fresh ideas has always been

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a study by Nicola Gennaioli of Pompeu Fabra University, Andrei Shleifer of Harvard University, and Robert Vishny of the University of Chicago, called “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility.” It suffers the usual curses of the economic paper: a crushingly formulaic structure and an enormous amount of algebra. In its very

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soon after the 2007–2008 banking crisis, the events of May 2010 also made HFT part of the wider debate about the social value of financial innovation. In the “anti” camp are those who allege that markets are being deliberately manipulated by traders with a speed advantage. A 2012 Credit Suisse research

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are actually part of a rather more glacial process. Reaching a judgment on the costs and benefits of high-­frequency trading, or indeed of any financial innovation, cannot be made in a historical vacuum. Lamenting the flaws of modern finance makes very little sense without asking whether things were so much better

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the old days. In a 2011 paper, Josh Lerner and Peter Tufano argued that it is virtually impossible to quantify the social impact of a financial innovation because finance involves so many “externalities”—costs or benefits visited upon third parties. For example, it would be almost impossible to measure the aggregate costs

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. “I don’t know, but I know I still want them.” The themes we have touched on in this chapter explain how it is that financial innovations can sour. As markets develop, they attract less specialized investors. These investors rely less on their own analysis, more on heuristics and the analysis of

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tightly or nudging speeds up another notch. This is a stylized process, of course: not every market follows this path. But it suggests that demonizing financial innovations is the wrong lesson to draw from recent failures. Ingenuity is fine; it is the established bits of finance that cause the trouble. In fact

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established, and that a lack of innovation ought to worry people more than its presence. In the next part, we look at the shape of financial innovation today—the entrepreneurs who are now driving finance forward and some of the issues they are trying to solve. PART II: A FORCE FOR GOOD

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body called the Big Lottery Fund will make payments to investors. Young though they are, SIBs are a great response to the question of whether financial innovation can ever be useful. They are one possible answer to the squeeze on government spending in rich countries. They are a way of channeling money

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the continuum of financial returns should you go to attract more of this capital? The Peterborough SIB is typical of a first crack at a financial innovation. It asks investors to take on a lot of risk in order to test the product. If the recidivism rate improves by 7 percent, say

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, then they would start to outweigh the savings that government makes from lower crime rates. So in a pattern that is typical of early-stage financial innovation, each SIB is a slightly different variant on the last, as participants experiment with different balances between social and financial outcomes. The New York City

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the computerization of trading, enabled the rapid pricing of options and paved the way for huge growth in derivatives markets.7 At a time when financial innovation and derivatives have become dirty words, Merton has become practiced at answering the criticisms thrown their way. “When you get asked, ‘What is it like

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Tufano is a former Harvard Business School academic who is now the dean of the Said Business School in Oxford. As well as writing about financial innovation, he is also a practitioner. Tufano’s particular concern has been how to encourage the poor to increase their savings. The low-income consumer is

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19.7 percent of America’s labor force in 2002 was engaged in some form of guarding activity.1 That doesn’t scream social utility. Financial innovation has made enormous contributions to society in the past, and it is primed to do so again. Indeed, the crisis of 2007–2008 has made

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time someone says that finance is good for nothing but enriching bankers, think of them. Acknowledgments This book was born from a special report on financial innovation that was published in the Economist in 2012, as well as from my reporting for the newspaper both before and since. I would like to

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(“Paul Volcker: Think More Boldly,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2009). Krugman’s columns in the New York Times have frequently questioned the utility of financial innovation; see, for example, “Destructive Creativity,” January 18, 2010. 4. “The Great Career Debate: Google Versus Goldman,” October 31, 2013, http://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul

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Policy in France, 1746–1793,” Journal of Economic History (March 1992). 15. For more on the role of technology in propelling financial innovation, see Stelios Michalopoulos, Luc Laeven, and Ross Levine, “Financial Innovation and Endogenous Growth” (NBER Working Paper 51356, September 2009). 16. Richard Sylla, “A Historical Primer on the Business of Credit Ratings

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Odlyzko, “Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s,” SSRN Electronic Journal (2010). 18. Peter Tufano, “Business Failure, Judicial Intervention and Financial Innovation: Restructuring US Railroads in the Nineteenth Century,” Business History Review (1997). 19. Robert Shiller, “The Invention of Inflation-Indexed Bonds in America” (NBER Working Paper

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10183, December 2003). For a more comprehensive history, see Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale, Financial Innovation and Risk Sharing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 20. Sometimes, they are more important. As policy makers try to find a way to avoid bailing

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equity cushion is automatically plumped up. Financial engineering is one answer to a crisis partly caused by financial engineering. 21. Saumitra Jha, “Sharing the Future: Financial Innovation and Innovators in Solving the Political Economy Challenges of Development” (Stanford Graduate School of Business Research Paper 2093, 2011). 22. Alan Morrison and William Wilhelm

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India Trade and the Rise of the Amsterdam Capital Market, 1595–1612,” Journal of Economic History (2004). 4. Peter Tufano, “Financial Innovation and First-Mover Advantages,” Journal of Financial Economics (1989); Peter Tufano, “Financial Innovation,” Handbook of the Economics of Finance (2003). 5. “The Dojima Rice Market and the Origins of Futures Trading” (Harvard

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2010). 6. Minos Zombanakis, “The Life and Good Times of Libor,” Financial World (June 2012). 7. Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny, “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility,” Journal of Financial Economics (2012). 8. “Financial Globalisation: Retreat or Reset?” (McKinsey Global Institute, February 2013). 9. Marcin Kasperczyk and Philipp Schnabl

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of George U. Sauter, the Vanguard Group (Securities and Exchange Commission, Market Structure Roundtable, June 2010). 24. Josh Lerner and Peter Tufano, “The Consequences of Financial Innovation: A Counterfactual Research Agenda” (NBER Working Paper 16780, February 2011). 25. The firm’s colorful story is told in a 1999 book called The Predictors

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liberalization and, 34 first securities markets in, 14 maritime trade partnerships in, 7–8 J. C. Flowers, 69, 81 Japan, banking crisis in, 75 Japan, financial innovation in, 27, 29, 39–40 Jha, Saumitra, 27 Jiménez-Martín, Sergi, 73 Job creation, young small firms and, 147–148 Joint-stock firms, 23 JPMorgan

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, 36–37 Mortgage securitization, 47 Multisystemic therapy, 96 Munnell, Alicia, 129 Naked credit-default swaps, 143 Nature Biotechnology, on drug-development megafunds, 118 “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility” (Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny), 42 Network effects, 181 New York, skyscraper craze in, 74–75 New York City, prisoner-rehabilitation program in

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond

by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar  · 19 Oct 2017  · 416pp  · 106,532 words

for the native asset, instead emphasizing the underlying technology. Masters was a well-known and respected figure in financial services, one that people associated with financial innovation. Her choice to join a little-known firm at the time called Digital Asset Holdings, after having been the head of global commodities at JPMorgan

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with most periods of mass speculation, the time was right. With their merchants fueling trade, the Dutch enjoyed the highest salaries of any in Europe, financial innovation was in the air, and money was free-flowing. Shares of the Dutch East India Company had been rewarding shareholders handsomely for their investments.9

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The

by Mariana Mazzucato  · 25 Apr 2018  · 457pp  · 125,329 words

hubs in London and New York City, and were contributing an increasing share of GDP. It was hardly surprising that the public went along with ‘financial innovation'. People spent. From London to Hong Kong the retail and leisure sectors of the world's financial centres were doing a roaring trade. From the

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

by Daniel Markovits  · 14 Sep 2019  · 976pp  · 235,576 words

. As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has observed, “The negative impact of stagnant real incomes and rising income inequality . . . was largely offset by financial innovation . . . and lax monetary policy that increased the ability of households to finance consumption by borrowing. . . . The support for the bubble thus depended on expansionary monetary

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, Stakhanovite workers coming out of America’s newly meritocratic schools and universities. The financial instruments through which corporate raiders accomplish their takeovers, like the other financial innovations just described, required super-skilled finance workers in order to construct, price, and trade them. (It is no coincidence that the takeover boom coincided with

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. N. David, Games, Gods and Gambling (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998). the services they made possible: See generally Dan Awrey, “Toward a Supply-Side Theory of Financial Innovation,” Journal of Comparative Economics 41, no. 2 (2013): 401, and Donald MacKenzie, “Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets,” paper presented

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, and in particular Black-Scholes option pricing, shape financial markets. between just 1970 and 1982: For a list, see William L. Silber, “The Process of Financial Innovation,” American Economic Review 73, no. 2 (1983): 89 (listing thirty-eight innovative financial products developed from 1970 to 1982, ranging from “Debit Cards” and ATMs

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to “Interest Rate Futures”). For more on financial innovation in the period, see Merton Miller, “Financial Innovation: The Last Twenty Years and the Next,” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 21, no. 4 (December 1986): 459 (describing the financial

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“revolution” of the previous twenty years as having occurred largely due to reactions to regulation and taxes), and Peter Tufano, “Financial Innovation,” in The Handbook of Economics of Finance, ed. George Constantinides, Milton Harris, and René Stulz (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2003), 307 (exploring the history of

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financial innovation and the explanations given for the extensive amount of innovation seen in both the past and the present). The number of financial patents awarded annually

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, no. 2 (April 1965): 110. Note that the date of publication comes at the twilight of the Great Compression. incumbent managers: As with the purely financial innovations discussed earlier, the leveraged buyout was conceived in the 1950s but did not become practically consequential until the 1980s, when a sufficient supply of super

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet

by Varun Sivaram  · 2 Mar 2018  · 469pp  · 132,438 words

economics could look far less attractive as more of them are deployed (part I). Fueling solar’s continued rise will take three kinds of innovation: financial innovation to recruit massive levels of investment in deploying solar energy (part II); technological innovation to harness the sun’s energy more cheaply and store it

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retain the core definition that innovation means the introduction of something that is adopted in a real-world context for the first time. Examples include: Financial innovation: Popularization of financial instruments, institutions, or markets that are new to a particular sector.b Business model innovation: Introduction of product offerings, revenue models, or

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, Volume 1 (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Science B.V., 2003): 461–516. b. This is based on the Financial Times Lexicon definition of financial innovation, http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=financial-innovation. c. See Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine, “Four Paths to Business Model Innovation,” Harvard Business Review (July/August 2014): https://hbr.org

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clients, who would then pay for the generated power for decades to come. Now SunEdison would pin its strategy for the future on a new financial innovation: the YieldCo. The YieldCo was a seductive idea. Simply put, it is a collection of renewable energy projects packaged into a company that is publicly

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of its overly aggressive growth strategy, questionable governance of its YieldCos, and rash accumulation of debt. But Chatila was not wrong in his conviction that financial innovation could enable the solar industry to rapidly scale up the deployment of existing solar panel technology. SunEdison’s mistakes were its own, but they do

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this suggests that it is only a matter of time before new approaches dramatically expand the pool of capital available to fund solar power. The financial innovation needed to expand this pool of capital does not require reinventing the wheel. Under Schumpeter’s paradigm (see box 3.1 in chapter 3), an

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has been brought to market. So adapting novel financial instruments from other sectors and popularizing them for the first time in the solar sector exemplifies financial innovation. According to New York’s energy czar, Richard Kauffman, there is plenty of inspiration to be drawn from other sectors of the economy to augment

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-and-bust cycle. As it contemplates revising its strategy to tap public markets for equity capital, it now appears to be on track to balance financial innovation with a lower risk appetite, which is promising. But what about debt capital? SunEdison found itself crushed under its mounting debt load. Can the broader

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be cost-competitive before economies of scale kick in at mass production to break into the market in the long run. What’s more, the financial innovation discussed in chapters 4 and 5 could aid this lock-in. Silicon solar projects might soon be able to tap into public capital markets and

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to silicon over emerging technology competitors that public investors, having just gotten comfortable with silicon technology, would be loath to bet on. As a result, financial innovation could act as a barrier, rather than a bridge, to technological innovation. Public policy can exacerbate lock-in as well. In the nuclear case, by

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how to promote the other forms of innovation that solar needs to achieve its potential. For example, tweaking the U.S. tax code could accelerate financial innovation, opening the spigots of capital flow to deploy more solar. And to advance systemic innovation, federal and state governments could work together on improving the

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for emerging technologies to ultimately succeed existing ones. Similarly, U.S. policymakers should undertake policies that spur financial innovation as well. Again, although this approach may benefit only existing technologies in the near term, financial innovation that unlocks vast pools of capital could make it possible to scale up advanced technologies rapidly in the

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exists for several reasons, including learning—the improvement in production efficiency and cost that accompanies repeated performance of tasks—as well as economies of scale. Financial innovation    Popularization of financial instruments, institutions, or markets that are new to a particular sector. Innovation    The introduction of something that is adopted in a real

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, 188 Farms, solar, xiii–xiv, 14 Feed-in tariffs, 36, 50, 57, 240, 281g Feynman, Richard, 157 Fiji, 6 Financial engineering, 85, 89, 114, 118 Financial innovation and capital for new solar projects, 90–92 defined, 289g for expansion of solar energy, 23–24, 85 and future of solar energy, xvi, 2

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, 80f, 83 public policies to encourage, 194, 270 and technology lock-in, 165 Financing new solar projects, 23, 87–114 corporate investment as, 105–110 financial innovation and capital for, 90–92 with Master Limited Partnerships, 92–98 in off-grid solar, 126–128 from public sector, 110–114 securitization for, 98

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in China, 197, 205 institutional investments in, 93 of Donald J. Trump administration, 269 by utilities, 209, 211 Innovation. See also specific types, e.g.: Financial innovation defined, 58b, 90, 289g and future of solar energy, 1–2, 23–25 government inducements for, 260–266 to improve solar energy utilization, 78–83

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, 35–36 Technological innovation and carbon tax, 271 and current silicon PV technology, 141 defined, 58b, 289g–290g for expansion of solar energy, 24 and financial innovation, 165 and future of solar energy, xvi, 2 government support for, 259 overcoming deployment challenges with, 57, 58b preserving economic appeal of solar with, 80

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy

by Dani Rodrik  · 8 Oct 2017  · 322pp  · 87,181 words

should be the role of credit-rating agencies? And so on. A central trade-off here is between financial innovation and financial stability. A light approach to regulation will maximize the scope for financial innovation (the development of new financial products), but at the cost of increasing the likelihood of financial crises and crashes

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that fell short in this instance. Economists (and those who listen to them) became overconfident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation transfers risk to those best able to bear it, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful. They forgot that there were

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-developed institutions are moving toward different models of financial regulation. Along the efficient frontier of financial regulation, one needs to consider the trade-off between financial innovation and financial stability. The more we want of one, the less we can have of the other. Some countries will opt for greater stability, imposing

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything

by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey  · 27 Feb 2018  · 348pp  · 97,277 words

service provider for the financial system’s back-office processing tasks, as CEO in 2014. Masters is best known for one of the most contentious financial innovations of our time, the credit default swap (CDS), a financial derivative contract in which one institution agrees to pay another if a particular bond or

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again

by Nicholas Dunbar  · 11 Jul 2011  · 350pp  · 103,270 words

these people. Add several trillion dollars, and you have a recipe for disaster. It took a final, crucial ingredient—a catalyst, an ingenious and insidious financial innovation that made it all possible. A helpful tool that upended the distinction between banking and markets. An enabler of a massive shift of power toward

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banks to respond to the threat of commercial banks’ breaking into the securities business. But what really rocked both of these worlds was a radical financial innovation: credit derivatives. Imagine a bank looking to make corporate loans or to own bonds—but without the credit risk. How does it strip out the

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way a trader handles risk. Now go back to the problem faced by Gerald Corrigan and the New York Fed in the early 1990s. New financial innovations such as interest rate swaps and securitization had whittled away the Glass-Steagall barrier. Was there a “mattress” that could make Fed regulators comfortable with

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the balance between collective and individual greed, with little prompting by regulators, Goldman managed to get the governance right. If markets didn’t evolve and financial innovation didn’t take place, that might be the end of the story—a happy ending provided by VAR models. But this story does not have

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giving them the confidence to expand their businesses to the scale of trillions of dollars. And the tool that enabled them to do it was financial innovation—in particular the new market in derivatives. The False Apostles of Rationality In April 1998, I traveled from London to the United States to interview

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to get clients outside the circle of finance theory cognoscenti to trade derivatives. That played well with regulators, who were receptive to the idea of financial innovation being deployed in the real economy. However, these new clients did not have the understanding of derivatives that the dealers or hedge funds did. And

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government guarantee that amounted to a subsidy, they had deep pockets.1 And so LB Kiel found itself receiving visitors from London, the hotbed of financial innovation across the North Sea. A former executive at LB Kiel says, “We had capital to invest but didn’t have enough clients. We talked to

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debt on its balance sheet that had the potential to lose the bank money. But the ferociously ambitious Bob Diamond, hired to bring U.S. financial innovation to the stodgy British commercial bank, had a plan.3 He assigned Oka Usi, an equally ambitious trader, to manage what he called the “risk

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was that a grown-up approach to credit derivatives was now possible. J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank were about to push the delusion of financial innovation up another notch. CHAPTER FOUR The Broken Heart Syndrome CDOs got a big push from J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank, which brought their high

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breakthrough took place in Europe. The U.S. bond market was huge, liquid, and sophisticated. Since the early 1990s, it was taken for granted that financial innovation came from America: the bond kings of Wall Street had shown the world how to slice and dice pools of mortgages, credit card debt, municipal

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Adidas.2 What was interesting about that? As traditional European companies that borrowed directly from banks, TF1 and Adidas didn’t issue bonds. Here was financial innovation in action: the AXA bond fund had used credit default swaps to synthesize a bond the market couldn’t provide. Bayerische Landesbank (BLB), a bank

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be the watchdogs of the credit markets, had clearly lost sight of their mission. Default swaps might have been defensible to a limited degree as financial innovations, and the original concept of CDOs, to free up bank lending, also had some justification. However, the boom in synthetic securitization driven by ratings was

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(he retired at the end of 2010) who defended the status quo of balkanized U.S. bank regulation because he believed it was conducive to financial innovation. In conversations, he was careful and precise about defining what was not his responsibility. Today, the New York Fed is shy about allowing Rutledge’s

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, diversified package stamped “triple-A” by century-old ratings agencies. The tool that joined cautious Germans and buoyantly optimistic Americans was the ABS CDO, the financial innovation that played a crucial role in stoking the housing bubble. The Home ATM Machine It would require another book to recount the long and tortuous

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observer of Wall Street queasy. And the way Deutsche’s sales force peddled Lippmann’s virtual CDOs to less-sophisticated institutions across the world shows financial innovation at its socially harmful worst. Yet it would be unfair to pin the blame on Lippmann. Well before the crisis broke, Lippmann was open about

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and their ratings agency accomplices. Driven by short-term gains, they found in people like Smith the ultimate twist in a challenge that had spurred financial innovation for centuries. The assurance of liquidity that Extine and Smith craved—the idea that their investments could be redeemed, dollar for dollar, whenever cash was

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needed—was nothing new. It was behind one of the oldest financial innovations of all, the invention of banking. How do banks get away with taking depositors’ cash and lending it out to borrowers who won’t pay

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in turn become new, lucrative clients of Moody’s. Moreover, Partridge-Hicks and Sossidis were handicapped by the fact that it is hard to patent financial innovation. What Moody’s and its staff did was perfectly legal, and McDaniels and his senior executives in New York brushed aside Gordian Knot’s complaints

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that they should be on the bank’s balance sheet. This idea, called consolidation, filled the banks with dread. I got another insight into how financial innovation worked when I spoke to a London-based Morgan Stanley credit derivatives salesman. He pooh-poohed the idea that his competitors were doing that well

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of Bear’s most toxic assets, including New Century’s NCHET mortgage robots and chains of hotels. Just like its favorite bank, Citigroup, which deployed financial innovation to keep things off its balance sheet, the New York Fed created its own robo corporation, called Maiden Lane I, to maintain the official line

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to its balance sheet. That was one of the chilling, fundamental lessons of 2008: when confronted with hair-trigger mechanisms refined during a decade of financial innovation, the market approach to credit—the idea that it was more efficient to connect borrowers and investors via trading desks—couldn’t survive without massive

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the fall of 2008. Regulators initially hoped that they could seize banks and “shoot the hostage”—punish investors for lax governance. But the tricks of financial innovation and regulatory arbitrage meant that these investors held them hostage instead. That’s how they made themselves “too big to fail.” In the United States

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November 2008 onward, the New York Fed’s regulators would start calling for default swaps to be traded on an exchange. The era of unrestricted financial innovation had come crashing to a halt. The men who loved to win had lost—big. Epilogue “During your act you made bank notes float down

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown

by Simon Johnson and James Kwak  · 29 Mar 2010  · 430pp  · 109,064 words

notoriously skeptical academic economist (later to become treasury secretary and eventually President Obama’s chief economic counselor), was won over by the siren song of financial innovation and deregulation. By 1998, it was part of the worldview of the Washington elite that what was good for Wall Street was good for America

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aftermath is well known. Although Born’s concept paper did not cause a financial crisis, the failure to regulate not only derivatives, but many other financial innovations, made possible a decade-long financial frenzy that ultimately created the worst financial crisis and deepest recession the world has endured since World War II

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longer runways, better air-traffic control, and better training for pilots, and not the discouragement of rapid travel, so the right public policy response to financial innovation is to assure a safe framework so that the benefits can be realized, not to stifle the change. —— But in September-October 2008, when Lehman

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doctrine of free capital flows, provided ready ammunition for anyone who wanted to argue that banks should be allowed to do as they pleased, that financial innovations were necessarily good, and that free financial markets would always produce optimal social outcomes. Even so, it might have remained only a cry in the

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closely followed the formation of Margaret Thatcher’s first government in the United Kingdom in 1979; Thatcher’s deregulatory policies helped unleash the forces of financial innovation in London, with similar results.) For the financial sector, Reaganism meant breaking down the rules that constrained the activities of financial institutions. As his first

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regulatory scheme created during the Great Depression. The failures and scandals of the late 1980s and 1990s were closely linked to recent deregulatory policies or financial innovations: expansion of savings and loans into new businesses; junk bonds and leveraged buyouts; quantitative arbitrage trading; and over-the-counter derivatives. Someone familiar with the

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history of the financial system might have expected this record of disaster to lead to greater skepticism of financial innovation and closer oversight of the industry. Instead, the 1990s witnessed the final dismantling of the regulatory system constructed in the 1930s. The Riegle-Neal Act

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crises that marked the 1990s, this was the decade when Wall Street translated its growing economic power into political power and when the ideology of financial innovation and deregulation became conventional wisdom in Washington on both sides of the political aisle. The unprecedented amounts of money flowing through the financial sector, increasingly

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the World Bank. Tim Geithner, assistant secretary and then undersecretary for international affairs, was a career civil servant. But they shared Rubin’s opinion that financial innovation and free markets were generally good for America. Summers opposed derivatives regulation even more strongly than Rubin; in his 2003 memoir, Rubin wrote, “Larry characterized

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York economic consulting firm for nearly thirty years before becoming Fed chairman—there came to be no truer believer in the ideology of free markets, financial innovation, and deregulation. Greenspan was a “lifelong libertarian Republican” and a longtime associate of Ayn Rand, the philosopher and novelist who argued for pure laissez-faire

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only regulating bank holding companies but also enforcing consumer protection laws. But for almost two decades it was led by a man whose faith in financial innovation outweighed any interest he had in regulating the financial sector, and who had entered public life in order to “engage in efforts to advance free

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preferable to government regulation (“the actions of private parties to protect themselves … are generally quite effective. Government regulation risks undermining private regulation and financial stability”); financial innovation reduces risk (“As a consequence of greater diversification of risks and of sources of funds, problems in the financial sector are less likely to intensify

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and low inflation, he became probably the world’s most famous and respected economist. If Greenspan said that derivatives improved the management of risk and financial innovation was always good, that provided cover for anyone in Washington who didn’t know what to think about the issue. With Greenspan at the Federal

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that would supposedly improve life for everyone. The positive image of Wall Street had at least three main components. The first was the idea that financial innovation, like technological innovation, was necessarily good. The second was the idea that complex financial transactions served the noble purpose of helping ordinary Americans buy houses

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in their garage, or Jobs and Wozniak in theirs. And given all the material benefits that technological innovation has given us, it seems logical that financial innovation must be equally beneficial. The language of innovation has been widely used to describe recent changes in the financial sector. In a 1995 paper, Robert

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Merton wrote, “Looking at financial innovations … one sees them as the force driving the global financial system towards its goal of greater economic efficiency. In particular, innovations involving derivatives can improve

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surely improved the efficiency of our financial markets.46 As the financial sector became a bigger part of the U.S. economy, the celebration of financial innovation only increased. In 2006, even as he warned about potential risk management challenges generated by derivatives, Tim Geithner (then New York Fed president) said of

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the current wave of financial innovation, These developments provide substantial benefits to the financial system. Financial institutions are able to measure and manage risk much more effectively. Risks are spread more

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stability in growth outcomes experienced over the past two decades.47 Even in April 2009, after the financial crisis, Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, said, “Financial innovation has improved access to credit, reduced costs, and increased choice. We should not attempt to impose restrictions on credit providers so onerous that they prevent

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development of new products and services in the future.”48 The fact that Bernanke, a brilliant and widely respected academic, would sing the praises of financial innovation even after the financial crisis shows the powerful hold this ideology exerted on both economists and policymakers. Merton and Greenspan’s argument about “risk sharing

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value. Eventually even Greenspan was forced to admit his mistake in a congressional hearing.55 The recent orgy of financial innovation turned out so badly because financial innovation is not like technological innovation. There are financial innovations that do benefit society, such as the debit card. And derivatives, as discussed earlier, can be useful tools to

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help companies hedge their operational risks. But there is no law of physics or economics that dictates that all financial innovations are beneficial, simply because someone can be convinced to buy them. The core function of finance is financial intermediation—moving money from a place where

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it is not currently needed to a place where it is needed. The key questions for any financial innovation are whether it increases financial intermediation and whether that is a good thing. Much recent “innovation” in credit cards, for example, has simply made the

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their mortgages. Investments can be economically value-creating or value-destroying; when financial intermediation increases to the point where value-destroying investments are being funded, financial innovation is doing more harm than good. But in the 1990s and 2000s, the theory of risk unbundling and diversification reigned largely unchallenged in Washington; people

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obtain.”64 Ranieri hitched the mortgage-backed securities market to the cause of expanding homeownership, ensuring its political success. In the 1990s and 2000s, another financial innovation appeared on the scene with the potential to extend the dream of homeownership to millions more households: subprime mortgage lending. (Subprime lending had been around

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, the only thing that could keep the homeownership boom going was expanded availability of credit. Alan Greenspan became an eloquent spokesman for the synergy between financial innovation and homeownership. In a 2005 speech discussing the impact of new financial technology, he said, Improved access to credit for consumers, and especially these more

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was that the increase in credit availability made it more important to ensure widespread financial education. For anyone who had doubts about the value of financial innovation and the importance of Wall Street, the ideology of homeownership provided easy assurance. The idea that complex securities could help low- and middle-income families

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to two economists who had helped launch the derivatives revolution and were now partners at the hottest hedge fund in the world. The dogma of financial innovation had few doubters in Washington. Vibrant, profitable banks were assuming the status of national champions in a country that saw the transition from manufacturing to

…

taxpayer-funded bailout. THE GOLDEN GOOSE The boom in real estate and finance in the 2000s resulted from the explosive combination of a handful of financial “innovations” that were invented or greatly expanded in the 1990s: structured finance, credit default swaps, and subprime lending. Most financial regulators looked on the creation of

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there was more demand for the riskier junior tranches and they couldn’t find enough buyers for the senior tranches. Here again, they depended on financial innovation in the form of structured investment vehicles (SIVs)—special-purpose entities that raise money by issuing commercial paper and invest it in longer-term, higher

…

paper with detailed examples of how banks could engage in regulatory capital arbitrage (RCA). “[R]egulatory capital standards seem destined to become increasingly distorted by financial innovation and improved methods of RCA,” he wrote, “at least for those large, sophisticated banks having the resources to exploit such opportunities.” Jones argued that this

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of bank holding companies. His proposal, like all the others, was shot down by Greenspan, who believed that subprime lending was an example of healthy financial innovation.66 (Conforming to the usual practice of not airing disagreements among governors, Gramlich did not go public with his concerns while at the Fed. Shortly

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declining real household incomes.* Even before the financial crisis of 2007–2009, politicians and officials in Washington had opportunities to witness the potential consequences of financial innovation run riot. But they drew the wrong lessons each time, allowing the banks to take more risks and make more money. The derivatives scandals of

…

, CIBC, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Lehman Brothers as its enablers.90 Enron and WorldCom showed both the consequences of hyperactive financial innovation and the failure of “self-regulation” by the free market. Enron’s creditors, who should have been lending money carefully, instead were helping it create

…

from the business community for being too stringent). It did not occur to anyone in power that some of the ingredients that made Enron possible—financial innovations dreamed up by Wall Street banks hungry for large transaction fees, off-balance-sheet accounting, weak credit rating agencies, credulous investors, a largely fawning media

…

all these things—everybody, that is, in the New York and Washington elite. Over thirty years, Wall Street had plied Washington with tantalizing tales of financial innovation and efficient markets while pouring rivers of money into politicians’ campaign funds and lobbyists’ expense accounts. In 2008 and 2009, it all paid off. As

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the past few decades. Real change will take years, and it will only happen when the conventional wisdom in Washington changes—from the idea that financial innovation and free financial markets are necessarily good, to the idea that concentrated economic and political power can have devastating effects on society. There are many

…

, legislation can play a significant role in changing the mainstream consensus. Wall Street’s apologists still sing the praises of free market fundamentalism and unfettered financial innovation, but their accustomed air of inevitability and triumphalism is gone. The American public has become deeply skeptical of financial machinations they cannot understand, and many

…

Leader in American Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930). 39. Stephen Haber, “Financial Markets and Industrial Development: A Comparative Study of Governmental Regulation, Financial Innovation, and Industrial Structure in Brazil and Mexico, 1840–1930,” in Stephen Haber, ed., How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil

…

) and Economics of Contempt (http://economicsofcontempt.blogspot.com/2008/03/cutting-through-red-tape-with-chainsaw.html) for tracking down the photograph. 45. Robert Merton, “Financial Innovation and the Management and Regulation of Financial Institutions,” Journal of Banking and Finance 19 (1995): 461–81. 46. Alan Greenspan, “Technological Change and the Design

…

Management Convention and Exhibition, New York), February 26, 2008, available at http://www.ny.frb.org/newsevents/speeches/2006/gei060228.html. 48. Ben S. Bernanke, “Financial Innovation and Consumer Protection” (lecture, Federal Reserve System’s Sixth Biennial Community Affairs Research Conference, Washington, D.C., April 17, 2009), available at http://www.federalreserve

…

://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2009/speech406 .pdf. 62. John Kay, Narrow Banking: The Reform of Banking Regulation (London: Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, 2009). 63. Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Jimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the World’s Financial Plague Before It Strikes Again (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010). 64. Richard

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