by Tanta on 8/07/2008 12:59:00 PM

I strongly recommend this thought-provoking post at naked capitalism by Steve Waldman. Here's part:

One of the more depressing bits of emerging conventional wisdom is the notion that the financial system took on "too much risk" in recent years. I think it is equally accurate to suggest that the financial system took on too little risk.

Consider the risks that were not taken during the recent credit and "investment" boom. While hundreds of billions of dollars were poured into new suburbs, very little capital was devoted to the alternative energy sector that is suddenly all the rage. Despite a "global savings glut" and record-breaking levels of "investment" in the United States between 2005 and 2007, capital was withdrawn from a variety of industries deemed "uncompetitive" in large part due to obviously unsustainable capital flows. Very few brave capitalists took the risk of mothballing rather than dismantling factories and maintaining critical human capital through the temporary downspike. Under the two to five year time horizon of our most far-sighted managers, whatever is temporarily unprofitable must be permanently destroyed. To gamble on recovery is far too great a risk.

I don't pretend to know where all that capital, that incredible swell of human energy and physical resources, ought to have gone. But it doesn't take an Einstein to know that it probably should not have gone into building Foxboro Court. Sure, hindsight is 20/20. But lack of foresight really wasn't the problem here. In 2005, how many macroeconomists or big-picture thinkers were arguing that the US economy lacked suburban housing stock of sufficient size and luxury? We gave the building boom the benefit of the doubt because it was a "market outcome". But the shape of that outcome was more matter of institutional idiosyncrasies than textbook theories of optimal choice. It resulted as much from people shirking risk as it did from people taking big bets.

The big central banks, whose investment largely drove the credit boom, were (and still are) seeking safety, not risk. The banks and SIVs that bought up "super-senior AAA" tranches of CDOs were looking for safe assets, not risky assets. We had a housing boom, rather than a Pez dispenser bubble, because housing collateral is (well, was) the preferred raw material for fabricating safe paper. Investors were never enthusiastic about cul-de-sacs and McMansions. They wanted safe assets, never mind what backed 'em, and mortgages are what Wall Street knew how to lipstick into safe assets. The housing boom was born less from inordinate risk-taking than from the unwillingness of investors to take and bear considered risks. Agencies, asset-backed securities, it was all just AAA paper. It was "safe", so who cared what it was funding? . . .

We've trained a generation of professionals to forget that investing is precisely the art of taking economic risks, then delivering the goods or eating the losses. The exotica of modern finance is fascinating, and I've nothing against any acronym that you care to name. But until owners of capital stop hiding behind cleverness and diversification and take responsibility for the resources they steward, finance will remain a shell game, a tournament in evading responsibility for poor outcomes.

The final stage in the process is not just demands for bailouts but the actual process of criminalizing losses. If you lost money investing in mortgages or housing, it must be because someone defrauded you. In a mania of insufficient risk-taking, the "business judgment rule" becomes inoperative.