An Ex–Goldman Partner Lets Loose on Wall Street
by ilene - February 2nd, 2010 7:37 pm
An Ex–Goldman Partner Lets Loose on Wall Street
By Stephen Gandel, courtesy of TIME
Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University and a former Goldman Sachs partner, argues in Paper Fortunes, his new history of Wall Street, that decades of financial innovation that seemed like positive evolutions at the time have turned our markets into scary places. In part, Smith says Wall Street is fixing its problems by reining in pay and lowering leverage ratios. But he believes Washington and regulators still need to intervene to make financial markets safer.
You’ve just completed an 80-year history of Wall Street. What did you learn?
There is now about $140 trillion in market capitalization in the word’s financial markets looking for investments. That money can now move around very easily. But even if a relatively small portion of that money goes after something — say, mortgages — it can quickly cause a bubble and a crisis. So all this good work we have done in the past few years to make our capital markets more efficient and open has also made them very hazardous, and we haven’t done anything yet to address that problem.
What should Washington be doing?
We need to do something about firms that are too big to fail. These firms have become loss transmitters and accelerators to the rest of the system. We need to distribute the risk, not concentrate it in a few very large players. There are a number of ways to do that.
Like what?
One approach is to lay on a heavy cost of being big. Too-big-to-fail banks should have a capital cost that will make it a disadvantage to compete in the riskiest parts of the financial-services market. I also like President Obama’s recent proposal, the so-called Volcker Rule, which would limit proprietary trading and investing. Combining these two regulatory changes ought to encourage big banks to figure out new business strategies, and that would involve selling off some of their riskier businesses.
A lot of people are saying that proprietary trading didn’t cause the financial crisis. So why focus on that?
Proprietary investing certainly played a big role in the financial crisis. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, UBS and Citigroup all had large amounts of mortgage bonds or real estate investments that they had parked on or off their balance sheets…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site