Joe Weisenthal asks, provocatively enough, whether I, had I been a banker during the credit boom, might not now be held criminally liable were the crime of bankslaughter on the books:
We wonder if Felix had been a banker whether he’d be guilty of bankslaughter. After all, in his research into the subject, he concluded early on that the issue of mortgage defaults wasn’t likely to be a huge deal. Later he changed his mind and of course, defaults proved to be a gigantic problem.
But if I were a prosecutor, I’d have no problem convincing a jury of 12 that a “reasonable” banker should’ve known that lending money to people of dubious credit risk, with low loan-to-value ratios, in an inflated market would’ve been a recipe for disaster.
Well yes — but that’s kinda the whole point. You don’t want the managers of systemically-important banks being as careless as I was on the subject of default risk. Here’s what I wrote in the piece that Weisenthal links to:
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing: I would have been much better off with a completely naive view than I was with a very basic grounding in mortgage finance.
I did some paddling around in the shallow end of the theory of mortgage bonds, and what I found surprised me: no one seemed to be the slightest bit interested in default rates. The prices of mortgage bonds were entirely a function of prepayment rates, and default rates simply didn’t enter into the equation.
Now I’m a finance blogger who prides himself on being wrong every so often (my slogan is that “if you’re never wrong you’re never interesting”) and who has essentially zero equity in being right. My job is to hold up my end of the conversation, not to be some kind of all-seeing market guru.
The manager of a systemically-important bank, on the other hand, is in a very different position, with vastly more responsibility. If such a manager did no more than do “some paddling around in the shallow end of the theory of mortgage bonds”, and on the basis of that took hundreds of billions of dollars of potentially highly-toxic assets onto his balance sheet, then yes, that’s highly reckless activity. And it’s probably reasonable to assume that if the crime of bankslaughter had been on the books at the time, then maybe such a manager might have thought twice before rushing in to such markets.
The key insight is that “financial innovation” is not the kind of thing you want too much of at too-big-to-fail institutions. Writes John Carney:
Collier doesn’t seem to have given much thought to the costs of over-deterrence. Bank executives faced with the prospect of a criminal investigation and possible conviction would likely be overly cautious. We’d lose a lot of socially beneficially risk taking by criminalizing bank failure.
For me, over-deterrence is a feature, not a bug. We’ve seen where Carney’s “socially beneficially risk taking” has landed us, and frankly I’d rather have rather a lot less of it.
Carney concludes:
Because bankslaughter is backward looking but conducting business is forward looking, it would almost certainly result in wrongful convictions. Lots of activity that looks reckless after the fact can seem perfectly sensible ahead of time. Unless the crime required bankers to know they were being reckless—in which case it would deter almost no-one and result in approximately zero convictions—it would wind up punishing bankers for just being wrong.
In an ideal world, of course, there would be no wrongful convictions simply because there would be no convictions and indeed no prosecutions. And Carney is right that it seems unfair to convict a banker of a crime just because he was heading up a too-big-to-fail institution and made a bad decision.
On the other hand, having the statute on the books would certainly increase incentives not to become too big to fail: it would help keep banks small. A capitalist society works by having private businesses take risks and fail. A capitalist society fails when private businesses are too big and systemically important to be allowed to fail. And so I think there is a case to be made that the managers of those businesses should be held to a significantly higher standard than managers elsewhere.
