I Don’t Know What I Like (And I Don’t Know What It’s Worth, Either)

Axiomatic

One of the fundamental axioms of economics is that we know what we like: we have preferences, they're consistent across time and they can be revealed by careful experimentation. This, of course, is utter nonsense. Yet it's not just a guiding principle of economics but is also a rough and ready rule we live our lives by. We make decisions and then we justify them, after the event, because to do otherwise would make a mockery of our choices.

But because we do actually make decisions we must, in a sense, really know what we like, even if we're habitually inconsistent. Unfortunately, outside of our own specialised areas of expertise we don't know how to absolutely value things and all too often we assign a value based on entirely superfluous data intermingled with a bit of relative valuation, reckoning that a Porsche 911 Carrera is worth more than a child's teddy bear. We exhibit coherence but in an arbitrary fashion – a behavior known, rather unoriginally, as coherent arbitrariness.

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On The Corrosion of Moral Leadership

LIBOR Illegality

News that Barclays Bank has been fined for LIBOR manipulation in both the UK and in the US, and that there are likely to be many more similar cases from other banks to come, just adds to the increasing evidence of a lack of moral leadership in our primary institutions.  It’s not just that illegality occurs, but that it appears to occur in a moral vacuum where the participants are happily and openly engaged in behavior which is corrosive to good society.

This isn’t just a problem in the financial industry, we’ve seen plenty of examples in other areas – in the media, in our legislators – where rank and file staffers mindlessly operate in a morally ambivalent bubble, without even attempting to hide their actions.  This doesn’t happen by accident, it comes from the top, and the buck needs to stop with those who permit these festering cultures to survive. 

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Game On: Basel III

Bonfire of the Principles

The next set of banking regulations, aka Basel III, has arrived, albeit it'll be implemented one micro-step at a time. It has, of course, been accompanied by horse-trading of the kind that can only be done behind closed doors by an unelected and unaccountable body. After all, it’s not as though their actions will ever affect the rest of us, is it?

Regardless of what this shadowy group has decided the actual behaviour of the world’s financial community will continue to be cautious while the pain engendered by its latest fiasco remains large in the minds of its officers. Yet these memories will fade and animal spirits will once again take over, when Basel III will become, like its predecessors, an opportunity to be gamed, not a constraint on unethical behaviour. In the end we need less rules, more principles and better regulators.

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Gaming the System

Bankers and Politicians

Using the rules of any system for personal gain is, in the parlance, “Gaming the System”. We’ve seen a lot of this recently. Not only have a variety of financial executives and employees absconded with bonuses for profits that turned out to be illusory but here in the UK the whole political system has been rocked by revelations of the extent to which our elected politicians have been using their expenses system as a personal cash machine.

Charlie Munger states that the people who design easily gameable systems belong in the lowest circle of hell. However, the reason why this happens is rooted very deeply in human psychology and causes all sorts of effects that are bad for us as societies. Those people who invent mechanisms that prevent systems being gamed do us all a favour, and this matters hugely to investors.

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