There is roughly a 100 per cent chance that were going to spend much of this year talking about the subprime mortgage crisis, the financial markets and the worsening economy...
The only question is which narrative is going to prevail, the Greed Narrative or the Ecology Narrative.
The Greed Narrative goes something like this: The financial markets are dominated by absurdly overpaid zillionaires. They invent complex financial instruments, like globally securitised subprime mortgages that few really understand. They dump these things onto the unsuspecting, sending destabilisng waves of money sloshing around the globe. Economies melt down. Regular people lose jobs and savings. Meanwhile, the financial insiders still get their obscene bonuses, rain or shine.
The morality of the Greed Narrative is straightforward. A small number of predators destabilise the economy and reap big bonuses. The financial system is fundamentally broken. Government should step in and control the malefactors of great wealth. The Ecology Narrative is different. It starts with the premise that investors and borrowers cooperate and compete in a complex ecosystem. Everyone seeks wealth while minimising risk.
As Jim Manzi, a software entrepreneur who specialises in applied artificial intelligence, has noted, the chief tension in this ecosystem is between innovation and uncertainty. We could live in a safer world, but we'd have to forswear creativity.
The United States has generally opted for financial innovation. This has worked out pretty well. America has enjoyed 25 years of strong economic growth, in part because capital has been efficiently allocated to companies that can use it well.
Financial instruments like adjustable-rate and subprime mortgages have allowed millions of people to get homes they could not otherwise purchase, and research shows that most of these tools have been used intelligently.
Hedge funds have proliferated to help investors manage risk. These things exist precisely because investors want to smooth out volatility. In the old days, a blow to, say, the Texas economy could have dried up lending in Texas, but now funds flow globally, and money from one part of the world can shore up weakness in another.
Time and again hedge funds have dampened market instability. If a currency, a company or a stock market starts to spiral downward, deep-pocketed funds, smelling bargains, will come in and stabilise its assets. If a company’s price is rising to unsustainable levels, contrarian funds bet against the hype.
Blind buying
Most of the time, the complex new instruments diversify risk and serve the public good. When a new instrument enters the market, it takes a while before people understand and institutionalise it. Whether the product is high-yield bonds or mortgage-backed securities, there's a tendency to get carried away.
In the first stage of this adolescence, investors look around and see everybody else making money off some new instrument, they assume they are fine. Individual bankers have a special incentive to get in on the ride because their yearly bonus is determined by how they do in the short term.
Then there’s a moment when people realise how stupid they have been. They’ve bought a pile of subprime mortgages without really knowing what they’ve purchased. The ratings agencies suddenly don't look so reliable. The cycle of overconfidence becomes a cycle of underconfidence because nobody knows who is holding worthless paper. Then, finally, maturity sets in. Those who have lost great amounts of money get fired. People still find the new product useful, but within parameters and with greater safeguards.
The lesson of the Ecology Narrative is that, in most cases, the market corrects itself. Maybe this year banks will change their pay structure so there's not so much emphasis on short-term results. Maybe companies will change their boards to improve scrutiny over complex new instruments. In short, markets adapt.
People who embrace the Ecology Narrative don’t like the offensive bonuses that get handed out on Wall Street. They don't like the periodic crises, but don't see how government can prevent them without clamping down on innovation. The challenge is to give people the means to withstand the perturbations.
The Ecology Narrative is not morally satisfying. I wouldn’t bet on its popularity as a backlash against Wall Street and finance sweeps across a recession-haunted country. But the Ecology Narrative has one thing going for it. It happens to be true.
