G E B W E B

The global financial system is a house built on sand. This is the main argument that the highly acclaimed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot makes in his 2004 book “The Misbehavior of Markets”. And here we are, at the dusk of 2008, having seen global markets plummet an average 50% the last few months. Could he be on to something?

Mandelbrot wastes little time in the introduction and you get the main ideas simply by reading the first part of the book, titled: “The Old Way”. This is nothing less than a full-scale assault on the underlying assumptions of modern finance. He shows how the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), Markowitz Portfolio Theory (MPT) and the Black-Scholes options pricing method – the most important elements of orthodox financial theory – are all based on two shaky assumptions:

1. The magnitude of price moves are distributed according to a Bell curve, with small movements the most likely, and huge movements nearly impossible.

2. Price moves are temporally independent. At any given moment, all available information is priced into all securities, and thus the next price move is completely independent of the previous one. This is the heart of the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

Mandelbrot wastes no time shooting these assumptions down. The first assumption can be discarded fairly fast: Take the daily closing price of your favorite stock, currency or commodity and put them in a spreadsheet. Then take the log of each price to get relative price moves. Calculate all the daily differences and calculate a mean and standard deviation for the price moves. Now look at the largest moves: How many standard deviations are they? For instance, the 29% price move in the Dow Jones on October 19, 1987, has a probability of 1 in 10^50 based on standard financial reckoning. So what, you may say, we recognize these moves as “measurement errors” or “freak acts of God”. But these are the days when fortunes are made or lost. A model which simply discards the risk of such days, will effect a false sense of security.

The second assumption is harder to attack, but statistical tests show that the absolute size of price moves is correlated across days. If yesterday had a huge price move, you are more likely to see a huge price move today. Mandelbrot captures this in the concept of “trading time” – basically that time moves faster on volatile days and slower on dull days.

Of course, the author of this book should be known to anyone with even a slightest interest in popular mathematics, programming or computer graphics. As the founder of fractal theory – the theory of ruggedness – he has lent his name to the Mandelbrot fractal. Mandelbrot argues that price charts exhibit fractal behaviour: They are self-similar. If you remove the axis labels, you cannot tell if you’re looking on a 5-minute intraday chart or a long-time chart spanning decades. He also shows that simple fractal generators can create much more convincing fake charts than convential financial models can.

What are the implications of this? As I write this, my girlfriend is writing her Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam. Her study material places great emphasis on the CAPM, MPT and Black-Scholes. And in the six volumes of study material, there is but one meager warning that these methods may not always work… Great, we have a horde of financial advisors and analysts out there who think they know how to diversify portfolios so that they give the optimal return for a given risk. But they are not even close to being able to quantify risk. Their alphas and betas are calculated with a mathematical distribution that does not fit the data. The map does not match the terrain, but our financial navigators are nevertheless taught that such discrepancies are small and that the current map is better than no map.

Is it better than no map? I would argue no. A man with no map is less likely to fall off a cliff than a man with a map that says there is no cliff.

In the context of banks, the picture gets particularly disturbing. A bank takes deposits and lends the money to others. In most countries there are reserve requirements, which dictates how much of the deposits should be available as cash or deposits in the central bank at all times. A common requirement is 10% (which is the US requirement). (As a side note, Canada has not had any reserve requirements since 1992. I have not been able to find any numbers for Norway, and Sweden also has no reserve requirement. Jordan is perhaps the safest place to have a bank account, with an 80% reserve requirement). The way risk is calculated on the bank’s assets forms the foundation for how much capital the bank will set aside to weather any financial storm. If risk is severly underestimated, the bank may end up having insufficient capital and go into bankruptcy.

Of course, if banks had completely transparent book-keeping and disclosed all their losses continuously, then the bank would declare bankruptcy just as its net value becomes 0 and the effect is that you have assets than can be liquidated to back all its liabilities. Of course, the banks’ book-keeping these days is extremely opaque, and their assets (loans, of which many might go bad) extremely illiquid. It doesn’t help that mark-to-market accounting has been suspended, so that the book values are far from what these assets would fetch in a forced liquidation. The end result is that when your bank finally declares bankruptcy, its assets will be inadequate to satisfy all the depositors demands.

But it says my deposits are insured! Indeed, sporadic bank failures are not a big problem because bank deposits are backed by government deposit guarantees up to a certain amount. However, the funds set aside for the deposit insurance schemes are based on similar risk calculations. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) does not set aside money equal to the full amount of deposits it insures. If even one big bank fails, the FDIC will have to draw on the goverment to do one of the following:

1. Spend more tax money to back the guarantees. You pay more taxes to pay yourself your money back. This is by far the most likely option, since most people will have trouble comprehending the previous sentence and are prone to accept this alternative.

2. Print money. The inflationary effect of this ensures that the money you receive is worth less than the money you had in the failed bank, and whatever money you earn every month is also going to be worth less. The net effect is likely to be that the bank deposit is lost. (This is also the kind of move that can lead to the collapse of currencies or even governments if it’s not carried out with extreme care.)

3. Don’t honor the deposit insurance. The deposit is lost. Prepare for riots in the streets!

Either way, your bank deposit is effectively lost. Anyone who tells you otherwise is saying you can have something for nothing. Depending on what option is chosen, you may or may not get to release your anger on bankers and politicians by going after them with torches and pitchforks. (You can tell that I’m favoring option #3)

The end result, guys, is that wherever risk in securities are measured, a new formula which can account for the sometimes violent swings in securities prices is needed. This is particularly important in banking where the public’s money and the stability of society is at risk. Stronger reserve requirements will follow, and bank failures can be a once every 10^47 years event, instead of once every 20 years.

Fredag 24. oktober vedtok Stortinget enstemmig en plan, som ikke løser finanskrisen, som ikke er i folkets beste interesse og som vil gå inn i historien som den verste sløsingen med fellesskapets midler noensinne. Om ikke neste “redningspakke” blir enda større… Det er den dette innlegget handler om.

De 350 milliardene vi allerede har gamblet vil ikke stanse finanskrisen. Det har vi sett bl.a i form av redningspakken i USA, som tvert i mot førte til en dramatisk forverring av krisen. Bankene vil komme skrikende og forlange mer. Og mer får de, hvis ikke vi stanser dem.

Finanskrisen lar seg løse uten å bruke en krone av skattebetalernes penger. Årsaken til krisen er mangel på tillit mellom selskapene. Tillit skaper man gjennom åpenhet. Krisen er over på en, to, tre hvis vi gjør følgende:

1. Alle finansielle instrumenter (aksjer, opsjoner, obligasjoner osv.) må verdisettes etter markedspris. Hvis ingen er villige til å by på instrumentet, så er verdien null. Det hjelper ikke at banken har et hemmelig dataprogram (en modell) som sier at verdien er hundre milliarder. I så fall får banken legge ut kildekoden til modellen og forberede seg på å forsvare den for omverdenen.

2. Finansielle derivater, sertifikater og obligasjoner som til nå har vært handlet direkte mellom selskaper, må handles gjennom en offentlig godkjent tredjepart (en slags børs) med krav om tilstrekkelig kapitaldekning.

3. Gearing over 12:1 forbys. DnB NOR opererer f.eks med gearing på 25:1, som i praksis betyr at banken er konkurs om eiendelene synker med 4% i verdi. Dette er hasardspill i milliardklassen, og utgjør en uakseptabel risiko for samfunnet forøvrig.

Bankene vil selvfølgelig ikke ha noe av dette, fordi de foretrekker å skyve tapene sine over på staten. Ved hjelp av målrettet skremselspropaganda mot våre stortingsrepresentanter og krav om øyeblikkelig handling har de greid å lempe 350 millarder kroner av sin risiko over på skattebetaleren – 73000 kr på hver av oss.

Dessverre er det for sent å stanse den første redningspakken. Men vi krever at den ovenstående planen blir iverksatt før vi kaster bort en krone til av fellesskapets midler. Utdanning, helse, pensjoner, veier og tog er viktigere enn banksjefenes bonuser!

Geir Kokkvoll Engdahl

In the last months and weeks, we have seen the financial crisis accellerate. But on September 17, something new and ominous happened: The Federal Reserve found that it did not have enough funds for its bailouts. So it got the Treasury to issue new T-bills. Flat-out money printing to the tune of $100 billion. This immediately added $10 to the price of oil and $100 to the price of gold. Sure, it could stop here. But that’s what has been said after every bailout, at every stage of this crisis. Ask yourself, has any of the people in charge told you the truth so far?

If you are an American, and you want the USA to have a future, you need to get up and demand that Congress stop this crap right now. Sign the petition!

These guys are obviously not ok with picking up the tab for the banks’ crappy investments.

The problem is quite simple. If you make an investment, there is risk and there are potential gains. The two are related in an effective market. More risk usually translates to more potential for gains. The expectation value for an investment is usually not that high, because of this. If you effectively elliminate the risk, by bailing out failed investments, you encourage more risky investments. This is because the expectation value of risky investments with huge potential gains gets much much higher when the downside is elliminated.

If you’re living in the USA and pay taxes, you have to ask yourself this question: Are you ok with picking up the tab when risky investments fail, but getting none of the profits when they work out, making private bankers billionaires? If you’re not, go to FedUpUSA and learn what you can do to stop it.

PS. If you’re unsure about the size of the bill, it’s freakin’ huge. Iraq war: $500 billion. Mortgage bailout: $2500 billion. Yeah, I’m glad it’s not my taxes…

Ever heard about Arthur Anderson Accounting? The story of Arthur Anderson is quite ironic, as the founder was a believer in high ethical standards. He, however, passed away in 1947. After auditing Enron, Arthur Anderson collapsed as a company in 2002. The company had 85000 employees worldwide.

The big question is, are the Enron and Arthur Anderson scandals isolated events, or are they typical to the industry? I’d say the latter, and what we’ve seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg. Many accountants have become cover-up specialists and agents of negligent or willfull fraud.

The system is broken because companies pay an accounting firm of their choice to certify their statements. Would you trust someone who is paid by me, to tell you the truth about me? Didn’t think so. But if you’re to trust any public company’s earnings report or financial statement, that’s exactly what’s happening. Accounting students learn that “conflict of interest” is a bad thing during their education, yet their entire industry is based upon it!

What should be done about this atrocity? The companies should pay an accounting tax, which the government should use to pay accountants to verify company book-keeping. A random firm is picked to audit every company. The company cannot choose to ignore the audit results and pick another auditor. No more conflict of interest by design. The fraud must end.

Until such a system is implemented, I hereby add The Accounting Industry to the glorious list of maphackers. Reason: It is based on a system that introduces conflict of interest by design, even though a three-liner fix is available. Failure to embrace such an improvement can only be attributed to maphacker attitude.

A note to investors: Protect your money. Don’t trust statements, even though they are endorsed by reputable accounting companies. Arthur Anderson was once reputable too… Think for yourself! There’s a lot of over-stated earnings and mark-to-model assets out there, and those that are supposed to be watchdogs have joined the maphackers. Nevertheless, companies based on hot air and creative accounting will eventually fail.