RISKY INNOVATION
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1 RISKY INNOVATION: DERIVATIVES
Excerpt from Joseph Stiglitz „Freefall‟ The financial markets were innovative, but not always in ways that led to a more stable and productive economy. They had incentives to create complex and non-transparent products, such as collateralized debt instruments (CDOs), slicing and dicing the mortgages into securities, and then slicing and dicing the securities into ever more complicated products. When gambling –speculating- on corn, gold, oil, or pork bellies didn‟t productive enough opportunities for risk-taking, they invented “synthetic” products, derivatives based on these commodities. Then, in a flurry of metaphysical ingenuity, they invented synthetic products were helping the economy to manage meaningful risk swell, but it was clear that they provided new opportunities for risk-taking and for earning hefty fees. These derivatives are among the innovations that those in financial markets are most proud of. The name says much about their essence: their value is derived from some other asset. A bet that the price of a stock will be greater than ten dollars next Monday is a derivative. A bet that the market value of a bet that a stock will be greater than ten dollars next Monday is a derivative based on a derivative,. There are an infinite number of such products that one could invent. Derivatives are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can be used to manage risk. If southwest Airlines worried about the rising price market, locking in a 2
price today for oil to be delivered in sic months. Using derivatives, Southwest can similarly take out an “insurance policy” against the risk that the price will rise. The transaction costs may be slightly lower than in the ole way of hedging, say, buying or selling oil in futures markets. On the other hand, as Warren Buffet pointed out, derivatives can also be financial weapons f mass destruction, which is what they turned out to be for AIG, as they destroyed it and much of the economy at the same time. AIG sole “insurance” against the collapse of other banks, a particular kind of derivative called a credit default swap. Insurance can be a very profitable business, so long as the insurer doesn‟t have to pay out too often. It can be especially profitable in the short run the insurer rakes in premiums, and so long as the insured event doesn‟t occur, everything looks rosy. AIG thought it as rolling in money. What was the chance that a large form like Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers would ever go bankrupt? Even if there was the potential for them to mismanage their risks, surely the government would bail them out. Life insurance companies know how to estimate their risk accurately. They might not know how long a particular person is going to live, but on average, Americans live, say, seventy-seven years (current life expectancy at birth). If an insurance company insures a large cross-section of Americans, it can be fairly certain that if the average age of death will be close to that number. Additionally, companies can get 3
data on life expectancy by occupation, sex, income, and so forth make an even better prediction of the life expectancy of the person seeking insurance. Moreover, with few exceptions (like wars and epidemics), the risks are “independent,” the likelihood of one person dying is unrelated to that of another. Estimating the risk of a particular firm going bankrupt, however, is not like estimating life expectancy. It doesn‟t happen every day, and as we‟ve seen, the risk of one firm may be highly correlated with that of another. AIG thought that it understood risk management. It did not. It wrote credit default swaps that required it to make huge payments all at the same time- more money than even the world‟s largest insurance company possessed. Because those who bought the “insurance” wanted to be sure that the other side could pay, they required the insured bond fell-suggesting that the market thought there was a higher risk of bankruptcy. It was these collateral payments, which AIG couldn‟t meet, that eventually did it in. Credit default swaps played a nefarious role in the current crisis for several reasons. Without properly assessing whether the seller of the insurance could honor his promise, people weren‟t just buying insurance they were gambling. Some of the gambles were most peculiar and gave rise to perverse incentives. In the United States and most other countries, one person cannot buy insurance on the life of another person unless he