Taking the human relationship, and human brain, out of investing for others and turning it over to computer formulas has produced stark results: a lost decade of retirement savings for most Americans; a multi-trillion dollar collapse of the financial system; a taxpayer bailout of the most incompetent and negligent firms in finance; the greatest wealth transfer to the top 1 percent in the history of the country -- which has contributed to 43.6 million people in America, including one in every five children, living below the poverty level.
And despite all this, Wall Street's top cop, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), continues to treat Wall Street as an overly rambunctious adolescent that needs merely a little slap on the wrist from time to time.
Consider the recent example of how Citigroup was punished by the SEC for willfully “scripting” announcements to investors to hide $39 billion of its exposure to subprime debt. According to the SEC's order of July 29, 2010, only Gary Crittenden, CFO during the period of the order, and Arthur Tildesley, head of Investor Relations at the time, were singled out and given fines of $100,000 and $80,000 respectively. They were not barred from Wall Street; their collaborators in the debt deception, who were known to the SEC via emails obtained from the firm, were not named in the SEC order or fined. The following is from the SEC order:
In late September and early October 2007, Crittenden, the chief financial officer (“CFO”) of Citigroup Inc. (“Citigroup”) and Tildesley, the head of Citigroup's Investor Relations (“IR”) department, both helped draft and then approved, and Crittenden subsequently made, misstatements about the exposure to sub-prime mortgages of Citigroup's investment bank. Citigroup then included a transcript of the misstatements in a Form 8-K that it filed with the Commission on October 1, 2007. The misstatements were made at a time of heightened investor and analyst interest in public company exposure to sub-prime mortgages and related to disclosures that the Citigroup investment bank had reduced its sub-prime exposure from $24 billion at the end of 2006 to slightly less than $13 billion. In fact, however, in addition to the approximately $13 billion in disclosed sub-prime exposure, the investment bank's sub-prime exposure included more than $39 billion of “super senior” tranches of sub-prime collateralized debt obligations and related instruments called “liquidity puts” and thus exceeded $50 billion. Citigroup did not acknowledge that the investment bank's sub-prime exposure exceeded $50 billion until November 4, 2007, when the company announced that the investment bank then had approximately $55 billion of sub-prime exposure.
There are systemic ramifications to secrets like the above which, still today, proliferate across Wall Street. The SEC has assigned a former rocket physicist, Gregg Berman, to lead the investigation into the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010. On that day the market lost a staggering 998 points intraday, sold off some blue chip stocks at 20 to 40 per cent below their opening price, knocked some S&P 500 stocks to a penny, then turned on a dime and shot upward in a bizarre financial bungee jump, with the Dow closing down 348 points. It apparently hasn't occurred to the SEC that the American people do not want their life savings in a venue that requires a rocket scientist to explain how it works. (A CNBC/Associated Press poll conducted between August 26 and September 8 of this year found that 86 percent of survey respondents view the stock market as unfair to small investors. Half the respondents say they have little or no confidence in the ability of regulators to make the market fair for all investors.)
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One of the most outspoken critics of the risk modeling technique known as VaR is Dr. Nassim Taleb, who holds impressive academic credentials himself: a Wharton M.B.A., a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Management Science from the University of Paris. Dr. Taleb testified as follows on September 10, 2009 before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology. (Despite this testimony, fourteen days later, the SEC hired Dr. Berman.)
“Thirteen years ago, I warned that 'VaR encourages misdirected people to take risks with shareholders,' and ultimately taxpayers' money.' I have since been begging for the suspension of these measurements of tail risks [fat tail or extreme events]. But this came a bit late. For the banking system has lost so far, according to the International Monetary Fund, in excess of 4 trillion dollars directly as a result of faulty risk management… My first encounter with the VaR was as a derivatives trader in the early 1990s when it was first introduced. I saw its underestimation of the risks of a portfolio by a factor of 100 --you set up your book to lose no more than $100,000 and you take a $10,000,000 hit. Worse, there was no way to get a handle on how much its underestimation could be. Using VaR after the crash of 1987 proved strangely gullible. But the fact that its use was not suspended after the many subsequent major events, such as the Long-Term Capital Management blowup in 1998, requires some explanation. [Long Term Capital Management was a hedge fund blown up by a group of Ph.D.s using massive leverage.] Furthermore, regulators started promoting VaR (Basel 2) just as evidence was mounting against it.
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