Isegoria

The Atlantic has a new business channel, which features an interview with Michael Lewis — author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The Blind Side, and editor of the recent Panic — in which he attacks certain financial innovations as tools for obfuscation:

Well, there’s probably no innovation that’s entirely useless. But there are some innovations whose use value is so trivial — except as a tool for disguising risk and enabling reckless innovation. A really good example of this is credit default swaps, which everyone has seen mentioned. Credit default swaps are not that complicated on the surface. On the surface they’re just bond insurance. If you buy a credit default swap from me, you’re buying insurance against a municipal bond or a corporate bond or a subprime bond or a treasury bond going bust.

The difference, I guess, being that a third party can buy the swap.

That’s right. And that the value of the insurance can be many times the value of the original bond. So let’s say there’s some really dodgy subprime bond out that everybody knows is going to go bust but that the market is still pretending is a triple-A bond. You might have insurance that is 100 times the value of the actual bond. So lets say there’s a million dollars in a bond out there. You might have 100 million dollars in insurance contracts on it. So it’s obviously not insurance at that point. It’s something else. It’s a way to bet on the bond. And it’s a very simple and clean way to bet on the bond.

And one of the really weird things about this instrument is — well, back away from it and think about it for a second. Lets take a bond, let’s say a General Electric bond. A General Electric bond trades at some spread over treasuries. So let’s say you get, I dunno, in normal times, 75 basis points over treasuries, or 100 basis points over Treasuries, over the equivalent maturity in Treasury bonds. So you get paid more investing in GE. And what does that represent? You get paid more because you’re taking the risk that GE is going welsh on its debts. That the GE bond is going to default. So the bond market is already pricing the risk of owning General Electric bonds. So then these credit default swaps come along. Someone will sell you a credit default swap — what enables the market is that it’s cheaper than that 75 basis point spread — and he’s saying that in doing this he knows GE is less likely default than the bond market believes.

Why does he know that? Well, he doesn’t know that. What really happened was that traders on Wall Street have the risk on their books measured by their bosses, by an abstruse formula called Value at Risk. And if you’re a trader on Wall Street you will be paid more if your VaR is lower — if you are supposedly taking less risk for any given level of profit that you generate. The firm will reward you for that.

Well, one way to lower your Value at Risk as a trader is to sell a lot of credit default insurance because the VaR formula doesn’t count it as risk. Because it’s so unlikely to happen, the formula doesn’t grab it. The formula thinks you’re doing business that is essentially riskless. And the formula is screwed up. So this encouraged traders to sell lots and lots of default insurance because, while they get a small premium for it, it doesn’t matter to them because the firm is essentially saying, “Do it, because we’re not going to regard this risk you’re taking as actual risk.”

It’s insane. That market is huge as a result. But if people actually had to have the capital, like a real insurer, to back up the contracts they’re riding, the market would shrink by — who knows? Who knows what would be left of it?

How hard could it be to come up with a million-dollar idea? Sometimes not hard at all:

Two years ago, Noah Weiss, a young programmer who spent the summer working here at Fog Creek Software, came to me with a business idea. Noah, who was still in college, had noticed that a lot of smaller tech-related blogs were running classified ads for job listings. He suggested that we do the same thing on my company’s blog, Joel on Software. The site is read by thousands of programmers a month — the ones who are so good at programming they have spare time at work to read the self-absorbed drivel I publish there.

Building an online classified ad system would be easy, Noah argued. (As any programmer would tell you: “It’s one table!”) And Fog Creek already had systems in place for charging credit cards, printing receipts, and accepting purchase orders, so the whole project wouldn’t take much work.

At first, I resisted. I had never run ads of any sort on the site and liked the idea of keeping it commercial-free.

But Noah kept arguing. “These 37signals guys are getting 50 ads a month,” he said, referring to a well-known software company in Chicago. “At $250 each, that’s — “

Wait, I interrupted. They charge $250 for each ad? I had imagined that the going price to run a job listing would be, oh, I don’t know, $4?

That’s right, Noah said. They charge $250 per ad. “Besides,” he went on, “a job listing is not really an ad — it’s providing a community service.”

By then I had almost stopped listening. Little gears were turning in my head: $250 times 50 ads times 12 months — that revenue would allow me to hire another programmer! So we added classified ads to the site. Noah wrote the first draft of the code in about two weeks, and I spent another two weeks polishing and debugging it. The total time to build the job listing service was roughly a month.

Instead of charging the going rate of $250, we decided to charge $350. Why not? I figured we could establish ourselves as having the premium product simply by charging a premium. In the absence of additional information, consumers often use prices to judge products, and I wanted our site to be the Lexus of job listings. A few months later, 37signals raised its price to $300.

By the time you read this, that little four-week project will have made Fog Creek Software $1 million — nearly all of it profit.

The real question though is, Thanks or No Thanks?

That raised a question: How do you properly compensate an employee for a smash-hit, million-dollar idea? On the one hand, you could argue that you don’t have to — a software business is basically an idea factory. We were already paying Noah for his ideas. That was the nature of his employment agreement with us. Why pay twice?

But I felt we needed to do something else to express our gratitude. Should we buy Noah an Xbox 360? Pay him a cash bonus? Maybe present him with a certificate of merit, nicely laser-printed on heavyweight bond paper? Or a T-shirt that said “I Invented a Million-Dollar Business and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt”? We were stumped.

And what about everybody else at Fog Creek? Those people were doing their jobs, too. Simply because one programmer’s idea translated visibly and directly into a lot of money didn’t mean that the other team members weren’t adding just as much value to the business, albeit in a less direct way. At around the same time Noah came up with the classified ads idea, most of my employees were hard at work developing FogBugz 6.0, a smash hit that just about doubled our monthly sales.

Noah’s case was only the most dramatic example of a question that has long intrigued me: How do you pay employees based on performance when performance is so hard to quantify? The very idea that you can rate knowledge workers on their productivity is highly suspect and always problematic. If you mess up, the consequences are very real.
[...]
Throughout my career, I have observed that companies with formal systems that tie cash bonuses to performance end up with far more than half of their staff sulking and unhappy.

You don’t want to replace intrinsic motivation with extrinsic, and you don’t want everyone thinking, Why didn’t I get as much?

His solution:

So, back to Noah, the guy with the million-dollar idea. Though we don’t believe in performance bonuses, we still wanted to recognize his contribution. We decided to give Noah 10,000 shares of stock — conditional on him coming back to work for us full time when he graduated. Because Fog Creek is private and our stock is hard to value, we could say “it’s only fair that you share in the wealth” without assigning an actual dollar amount to it. It wasn’t the perfect solution, but everybody thought it made sense.

Noah seemed pleased, and we hoped the stock would entice him to come back to Fog Creek to take a full-time job. Which…he didn’t. Google made him a better offer.

The Unicru personality test from Kronos Talent Management has apparently spawned a culture of cheating, as potential employees vie for low-end retail jobs:

When Anton Smith applied for hourly work at a Finish Line sneaker store in Charlotte, N.C., his first hurdle was showing he had the temperament for the job.

Finish Line Inc., like many other retailers, makes applicants take a personality test before it will consider interviewing them. The test asks whether they agree or disagree, and how strongly, with 130 statements. But thanks to a little digging on the Internet by a friend, which turned up an unauthorized answer key, when Mr. Smith took the test in late 2007 he had a good idea what the employer wanted to hear.

Statement: “You have to give up on some things that you start.” Suggested response from the cheat sheet: “Strongly disagree.”

Another statement: “Any trouble you have is your own fault.” Suggested response: “Strongly agree.”

The store hired Mr. Smith, 23 years old, for a part-time job, although the parent company later closed that outlet and Mr. Smith has moved on. His view of the pre-employment test: “It isn’t useful. People are hip to it.”

Many retailers have largely automated the hiring process with online personality tests such as Mr. Smith took. The system cuts the time store managers must spend in interviewing applicants. But the test also is creating a culture of cheating and raising questions for applicants about its fairness — even as it becomes a critical determinant of who gets a job and who doesn’t in a stressful era of rising unemployment.

Semyon Dukach, former president of the MIT Blackjack Team, thinks that the real cause of the financial crisis is the ever-present temptation to create new Martingale schemes:

The Martingale system works as follows: suppose you need an extra $100. You go down to your nearest casino, and bet $100 on a hand of blackjack, or on any other almost 50/50 proposition. Should you win right away, you have reached your goal and gotten your money. Now if you lose, you bet $200. If you win the second bet, you’re up $100 over all and once again successful. But a little more than one out of four times you’ll lose both, and end up down $300. In that event you simply bet $400. If you lose again you bet $800, and you just keep doubling your bet until you win once. Clearly you have to win at least once eventually, and with this system you end up with your $100 profit even if you start out losing for a while. If you’re willing to bet up to ten times for instance, your chance of losing all ten bets is close to one in a thousand. That means that with a probability of almost 99.9%, you will win one of those ten bets, and therefore walk away with your $100.

Of course there’s a catch that few people notice. When the unlikely one in a thousand event happens and you do lose ten in a row, the actual amount that you’ve lost is over $100,000, all risked to win a mere hundred bucks. You might not have any way of doubling up again. You might even need some sort of bailout.

Naturally, money managers aren’t doubling their bets every time they lose:

In the world of investments, there are many ways more subtle than the Martingale to guarantee a better return over a period of months, years, and even decades, at the cost of certain ruin way down the road. Let’s say for instance that you’re managing a hedge fund which invests in stocks. Your strategy of sound fundamental analysis is fairly well understood. You have found that you can generate an average return of 6% per year, and so can most of your equally qualified competitors who have access to the same talent pool and knowledge base as you do. But then one of your competitors realizes that he can automatically increase his return to 9% by selling something called “out of the money puts” on the market. This means that the competitor’s fund essentially sells insurance against the market crashing dramatically. In normal times his fund will gain the premium from selling this insurance which boosts his returns. However, in the rare event of an extreme market crash his investors will lose everything. This form of Martingale can be easily tuned to work for various time periods with various chances of collapse.

The key takeaway:

The managers who have the discipline to understand and avoid the Martingale tricks will not be able to compete on the basis of their returns over a few years, and will eventually lose their funds and their jobs.

What is a money-manager of integrity to do?

The solution that they usually flock to is to create such a complex Martingale system that they themselves cannot understand the longer term risk implications. As long as the mathematical analysis of the risk of ruin lies beyond the understanding of the CEOs, the money managing organizations can stay competitive by employing their latest version of a return-boosting Martingale, without admitting to themselves or to others that they have been peer-pressured into the financial equivalent of selling their soul to the Devil.

In the 80′s the emerging Martingales were called junk bonds and LBO’s. In more recent times they are known as mortgage based derivatives and credit default swaps.

Gary Weiss calls John Paulson the man who made too much:

Paulson is smart enough to know that at this particular moment in history, the less he’s heard from, the better. The simple reason: He is not suffering. In an era in which losers are universal and making a profit seems somehow shady, Paulson is the most conspicuous of Wall Street’s winners. Paulson & Co.’s funds (with an estimated $36 billion under management and growing by the day) were up a staggering $15 billion as the markets teetered in 2007; one fund gained 590 percent, another 353 percent. All this reportedly garnered him a personal payday of $3.7 billion, among the biggest in history. In 2008, his funds didn’t climb nearly as much but were still successful enough to put him at the very top of his profession. By scoring returns of this magnitude, Paulson has dwarfed the success of George Soros, whose currency trades in the 1990s made him so much money that he has spent much of the rest of his career atoning for them.

Paulson makes no apologies. During our conversation in his conference room, he describes in detail how he pulled off the greatest financial coup in recent history — a two-year bet that the calamity we are now experiencing would take place. It was a megatrade involving dozens of financial instruments, along with prescient wagers that banks like Lehman Brothers would eventually go under.

Everyone wants to blame the short-sellers, who profit when others lose, when they’re obviously not the cause of the problem.

This anecdote — it involves another short-seller, Chanos, not Paulson — demonstrates what kind of people run things on Wall Street:

The day before the Fed’s rescue of Bear Stearns, Chanos says he was walking to the Post House restaurant in New York City, when, at 6:15 p.m., his cell phone rang. He saw the Bear Stearns exchange come up on his caller I.D. and took the call.

“Jim, hi, it’s Alan Schwartz.”

“Hi, Alan.”

“Well, Jim, we really appreciate your business and your staying with us. I’d like you to think about going on CNBC tomorrow morning, on Squawk Box, and telling everybody you still are a client, you have money on deposit, and everything’s fine.”

“Alan, how do I know everything’s fine? Is everything fine?”

“Jim, we’re going to report record earnings on Monday morning.”?

“Alan, you just made me an insider. I didn’t ask for that information, and I don’t think that’s going to be relevant anyway. Based on what I understand, people are reducing their margin balances with you, and that’s resulting in a funding squeeze.”

“Well, yes, to some extent, but we should be fine.”

“This is now 6:15 on Thursday night, the night before the collapse,” Chanos says. “It was after a meeting with Molinaro”—Bear Stearns C.F.O. Sam Molinaro—“who basically told him at that meeting, ‘We’re done. We’re gone. We need money overnight we don’t have.’? So here he is, calling one of his biggest clients to go on CNBC the next morning to say everything’s fine when clearly it’s not. And he knew it wasn’t.”

Chanos refused to go on CNBC. By 6:30 the next morning, word was out that the Fed was engineering the rescue of Bear Stearns. Chanos realized that he could have been on CNBC while that was announced. “I thought, That fucker was going to throw me under the bus no matter what.”

“So here it is,” Chanos says. “Alan Schwartz takes the position ‘Short-sellers were our problem,’ and who did he try to get to vouch for him on the morning of the collapse? The largest short-seller in the world. You want to talk about ethics and who’s telling the truth on these things? It’s unbelievable.”

Anyway, here’s how Paulson made his recent fortune:

Long before the financial crisis hit, Paulson, according to one person briefed on the trade, invested $22 million in a credit default swap that eventually paid $1 billion when the federal government opted not to rescue Lehman Brothers. That amounts to a staggering $45.45 for each dollar invested.
[...]
Paulson got wind of the coming storm in the credit markets through the infallible barometer of prices. By 2005, the amount of money he could make on the riskiest securities was not enough to justify the risk he was taking. Pricing, in his view, made no sense. Paulson concluded that he could do better on the short side — wagering that prices of risky securities would fall.

“We felt that housing was in a bubble; housing prices had appreciated too much and were likely to come down,” he says. “We couldn’t short a house, so we focused on mortgages.” He began taking short positions in securities that he believed would collapse along with the housing market.

The best opportunities were in the junkiest portion of the housing market: subprime. Pricing of subprime securities “was absurd,” Paulson says. “It didn’t make sense.” Subprime securities graded triple-B — in other words, those that the credit-rating agencies thought were just a tad better than junk — were trading for only one percentage point over risk-free Treasury bills. This absurdity appealed to Paulson as easy money.

While Paulson was hardly the only fund manager to bet against subprime, he seems to have made the most money, most consistently, from the banking industry’s troubles. One reason for this is that Paulson was able to recognize and act on the unimaginable — that the banks, which took on most of the subprime risk, had no clue what they were holding or how much it was worth. Big banks like Merrill Lynch, UBS, and Citigroup held triple-A-rated securities, but these were backed by collateral that was subprime at best, making the rating of the securities almost irrelevant. “They felt,” Paulson explains, “that by having 100 different tranches of triple-B bonds, they had diversification to minimize the risk of any particular bond. But all these bonds were homogeneous.” It was like having 100 different pieces of the same poisoned apple pie. “They all moved down together.”

What separated Paulson from the rest of the hedge fund crowd was his realization that nobody was able to value these complex securities. His advantage came when he was willing to admit that. Other traders refused to short the big banks because they couldn’t believe that such huge institutions would be so unaware of their own risks.

A cute analogy:

Since all that toxic waste on the balance sheet imperiled the survival of the banks, Paulson wanted to be sure he was prepared. So he bought credit default swaps, like the $22 million he bet against Lehman — essentially an insurance policy that paid off when Lehman’s bonds defaulted.

Even though Paulson didn’t actually own any Lehman bonds, he made more than $1 billion on that bet. It’s as though he’d bought insurance policies on houses he didn’t own along the Indian Ocean just moments before the tsunami hit.

At McDonald’s, the happiest meal is hot profits, says Andrew Martin of the New York Times, as customers are “lured back by new menu items, longer hours and a sparkling new building that includes flat-screen televisions and video games for children”:

Mr. Ward says he’s a regular again because his McDonald’s is open until 1 a.m. Ms. Fillian and Ms. Milano, now moms, say they often bring their children to the playroom and feel no guilt serving them apple slices and white-meat Chicken McNuggets. Mr. Green was drawn back in — grudgingly — because McDonald’s lattes are cheaper and more convenient than those at Starbucks.