April 6, 2010
The big question
This leaves us with the really big question, which Lewis touches on in his epilogue.
All of the heroes made tens of millions when their bets turned out to be right. But as Lewis points out, those who were wrong made tens of millions too. In many cases hundreds of millions. “The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm were also on the wrong end of the gamble. All of them, without exception, either ran their public corporations into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by the United States government. They all got rich, too.”
But this is America, where we don’t mind people getting rich if it enriches us too. Bill Gates is richer than all the guys on Wall Street, and Steve Jobs is richer than almost all of them too. But most people would agree (there are exceptions) that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs haven’t gotten rich on our backs. In fact, we would probably say that what they created enriched us all.
Not so with the Wall Street guys. Most of us would agree (with exceptions) that what gained them their wealth—including even the heroes of Lewis’s story—did not enrich the rest of us. It was a zero-sum game. What they gained, we lost. And it’s even worse when they cause a general collapse of market values on top of it.
So here is my question. From whom, exactly, was extracted the billions that the titans of the financial industry were paid for their failures?
Here’s an example of how the accounting could be done. The mutual fund industry collects $90 billion annually in fees. Vanguard has shown that the number could be $10 billion, yield the same net result for the client on average, and still pay the managers handsome—though not regal—sums, as compared with workers in other industries. Let’s add $5 billion for a few thousand stock-pickers to keep prices honest. (A shrunken industry of stock-pickers would probably keep market prices in aggregate at least as honest as the bloated industry does now.)
So clearly, $75 billion flows every year out of the pockets of mutual fund investors and into the pockets of managers and advisors: a zero-sum game that the high-cost managers always win and their clients, in aggregate, always lose. The accounting is cut and dried.
What about the credit derivatives game? If there was a zero-sum game going on—as I think there was—who, exactly, won it? How much, exactly, did they win? And who lost it to them? I’d like to see the accounting done. It shouldn’t be that hard.
Once we do that, maybe we can find out who the pigeons are, why they are pigeons (perhaps they want to be and are happy to be, like Las Vegas gamblers, but I doubt it), and what should be done about it.
Michael Edesess is an accomplished mathematician and economist with experience in the investment, energy, environment, and sustainable development fields. In 2007, authored a book about the investment services industry titled The Big Investment Lie, published by Berrett-Koehler.
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