Grokking Finance
Last week,
apenwarr
linked to Havoc Pennington's elementary exposition of a useful tool of
financial analysis,
Return
on Equity, part of Havoc's promising looking series on how
understanding business concepts can be useful for folks trying to organise
things together.
At type other end of the scale, to try to understand the limitations of business
and finance techniques for non-specialists, maybe it is worth trying to
understand why these fields seem to behave strangely. I can't claim to
really understand the pathologies of MBA-driven thought, but I did read an
excellent opinion piece on why finance seems to be attracted to reckless
gambles, Frank Portnoy's FT opinion piece from Monday, A crisis of similar ingredients.
Portnoy's analysis suggests three common factors behind financial crises that
he observed in the last two major crises, from 1994 and over the past year,
and that he suggests these are necessary features of financial markets:
- Informational asymmetry: which arises from the knowledge gaps
in how financiers make sense of data and in modelling risks. For example, he
notes that in 1994 when Askin Capital Management applied mark-to-market
accounting to its assets, it suddenly reported that it was insolvent, "the
financial markets were stunned". and goes on to note that "not very many
people can price complex financial risks accurately, especially those related
to mortgages".
- Moral hazard: he emphasises moral hazards arising from
unforseen consequences of guarantees made by government sponsored
enterprises, but he might also have mentioned the moral hazards arising
from accountancy standards, or the idea that some firms are too big to fail.
- Regulatory arbitrage, "the manipulation of legal rules for
financial advantage". He observes that the special legal status of AAA-rated
instruments have resulted in credit rating agencies being at the centre of
both the 1994 and the current crisis. He notes that "highly rated structured
finance instruments are incomprehensible to most investors", and of course,
the risk implications of highly complex structured instruments are not well
understood by the ratings agencies.
Portnoy ends, noting that "Information asymmetry, moral hazard and
regulatory arbitrage are the basic ingredients of high-margin finance. Soon
the markets will be booming again, and the people who exploit these three
themes will do the best, as they always have".