PLATFORM:TO PASS THE time on the drive from Hondarriba, in the northwest of Spain, to Alicante, on the southeast, I listened to a couple of audio books, writes Shiela O'Flanagan.
One of them was Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis. I couldn't quite believe that it's been over 20 years since the events outlined in the book and I'm not sure why I decided to revisit it now. Coincidentally, since listening to it, I've seen it mentioned a few times in newspaper articles as analysts try to draw parallels between the financial crisis of 1987 and the mess we find ourselves in today.
The 1980s, while a dark and gloomy period in Ireland's economic history, were a decade of unbridled hubris on Wall Street. It brought us the image of traders as Big Swinging Dicks and turned bankers into "financiers" who developed new products to bring an increased range of options to corporations which wanted to raise capital and an increased potential for enormous profits to those who assisted in the process. Traders, too, were making personal fortunes and vast sums for their firms as they came up with ever more exotic financial instruments which were impossible to accurately price but which were packaged to investors as innovative products to increase yields. Everyone was happy as the market continued on a rise fuelled by arrogance and self-belief.
And then it crashed.
What stunned people most was the fact this wasn't supposed to happen. The financiers had promised there was a new paradigm at play and everyone believed them. On the day after the market peaked in 1987, the Wall Street Journal wrote: "In a market like this, every story is a positive one. Any news is good news. It's pretty much taken for granted now that the market is going to go up." It was uncannily like the proclamation by economist Irving Fisher back in 1929 that: "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." The market crashed shortly after that gem too.
And so it's easy to say the current crisis is just another in a periodic readjustment of the market. A way of reminding us that investing can be a dangerous business (although I've never really known why we accept that must be the case). However, this time it's different.
Back in 1987 and in the mini-crises that followed in 1998 and with the dotcom implosion at the beginning of this decade, the financial authorities assisted the recovery of markets by pumping vast amounts of liquidity into the system, thus enabling the institutions which had taken large hits to recommence trading, investing and lending again. Now, though, even with cash being pumped in, the banks are reluctant to use it for anything other than shoring up their balance sheets. Lending and investing aren't really on their radars at all. They don't trust each other enough to pass the cash around. The system is failing.
Businesses and individuals who have been used to the ready availability of credit are in a quandary. Expansion projects have been cut back because there isn't the funding to initiate them or the consumers to support them. Oil prices are driving costs even higher. We are caught in an inward spiral for which nobody seems to have the solution.
Once again, the stable doors are being locked after the event as the regulators try to ensure that subprime lending stays off the agenda for the foreseeable future. Once again, the financial system is being bailed out by money from the very people that it holds in contempt. Twenty years ago, Lewis commented that working on Wall Street was participating in a game "pushing the boundaries of legality". But it's not a game. The global economy is too fragile in every respect for it to be considered a game. Yet somehow we have allowed people with that mentality to take control of markets they sometimes don't even understand themselves. Everyone knows that for a trader, "long-term" means as far as bonus day. Meanwhile, even as they come to terms with the mess we find ourselves in, bankers are warning the authorities that too much regulation will only hamper the good lenders and won't weed out the bad. If we have learned anything over the past 20 years, it's that the financial services industry doesn't deserve to regulate itself.
The financial institutions are continuing to write down unprecedented levels of losses. But, as the $2 billion net worth of Michael Milken, junk bond king of the 1980s, shows, the markets will always be a profitable place for those who believe that it truly is a game and know how to play it.
