Word: interesting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...something bad happening is a centuries-old endeavor--mortality tables have been used to devise insurance premiums since the 18th century. With modern computing power, though, financial engineers captured, packaged and sold risk exposure in startlingly new ways. Buying protection against a bad corn harvest or a spike in interest rates was just the beginning. Over time, as instruments became more complex, a huge shift occurred. Risk itself became the thing to trade--and to make money on. In the process, risk was redistributed to the people who could best handle it, making everyone safer...
When firms did steer clear of what was, in retrospect, excessive risk, the tone typically came from the top. Goldman Sachs, which has a long history of CEO interest in risk management and rotates its traders and risk managers through one another's jobs, pulled back from mortgage-related securities earlier than most after direct orders from...
...when the Canadian bank Toronto-Dominion got out of structured products, including CDOs and interest-rate derivatives, CEO Ed Clark was pilloried for leaving profit on the table. Clark, who has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, made the decision because he couldn't comprehend, to his satisfaction, the credit and equity products that were being traded at the firm. So he decided to quit the business--a move that kept his bank in the black while others suffered. "I'm an old-school banker," he later said. "I don't think you should do something you don't understand...
...financial institution." What exactly that means, though, has been lobbed back to directors. And technically they've always had a duty to step in the way of anything that threatened their company's value. In fact, companies long ago thought they had figured out a way to shepherd individual interest. "Everyone thought risk-based compensation was equity in the firm," says James Wiener, head of the finance and risk practice at the consultancy Oliver Wyman. Employees at Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns owned some 30% of their companies. At the end of the day, that didn't matter. Because altering...
...there is also reason to be skeptical. Take, for instance, the idea of risk-adjusted employee pay as a way to keep people, including rank-and-file traders, from following personal incentives to the exclusion of a company's broader interest. It is a compelling idea. But so far it hasn't happened...