Category: Commentary

Two Things That Have Nothing To Do with Each Other

Data from Equilar (methodology), published by The New York Times:

compensation

I know this is simplistic, but I just couldn’t resist.

Some caveats:

  • Stock total return is a poor way to measure CEO performance – yet it’s the one that CEOs and boards commonly point to to justify compensation.
  • A CEO may have been granted a large stock award in 2008 as a reward for “good performance” in 2007. This could explain the combination of high compensation and poor 2008 performance. However, just think about what that means for a second.
  • Most of the large compensation awards are largely restricted stock or stock options. These were valued as of the data of the grant, so if the company’s stock price later fell, the CEO is unlikely to realize the calculated value of the award. But imagine if the stock price had gone up instead: the CEO and the board would be insisting that the award should be valued as of the grant date, not the later exercise date (when it would be worth much more).

Also, I excluded a company called Mosaic, because it’s total return was 257%, so it packed all the other companies into one side of the chart. Mosaic’s CEO earned $6 million.

Continue reading “Two Things That Have Nothing To Do with Each Other” →

Mandelson Moment

If you want an unusual insight into our potential future, take a look at Channel 4’s interview on Thursday with Peter Mandelson (UK’s Business Secretary, very close to Gordon Brown and a key person around the G20 summit).

In this clip, Mandelson comes on around the 12:48 mark (after Peer Steinbruck, the German finance minister, provides some complacent sound bites.)

But the surprising statement comes after the short interview with me (I start at 17:40 approx; Mandelson comes back around 21:38).  I have no idea if Mandelson knew this could happen, but Jon Snow (the anchor) goes back to him and asks if he agrees with me that the UK could borrow from the IMF. Continue reading “Mandelson Moment” →

Ben Bernanke: More Important Than The G20 Summit

It may strike you as extraordinary that the G20 summit barely touched on what is, arguably, the key policy issue going forward – what will central banks do, including the detailed when and how of avoiding falling wages and prices (deflation).  Fiscal stimulus is already almost fully in play around the world, regulatory reform will at best be slow and not relevant to the recovery, and “we promise to avoid an irresponsible protectionist trade war” is nice but more about not making things worse rather than getting our economies going again.  Funding and leadership model change for the IMF can help prevent emerging markets from cratering, but in terms of impact on global growth or unemployment, it’s second order relative to the macro policies of the world’s largest countries.

The real issue is monetary policy, including interest rate cuts where there is still room for these – to me the biggest news of the week was actually that the European Central Bank cut rates by less than expected (its main interest rate stands at 1.25 percent).  This confirms the ECB still does not see deflation as a clear and present danger.  Look at all the downward pressures in the European economy, from East European collapses (and associated West European banking problems) to property market declines in the UK, Ireland and Spain (and what that means for banking) and export industry stress (and they have bankers too).  The ECB is taking an extraordinary and – to my mind – incorrect position.  If they truly wait until deflation is “fully in the data” (central bank jargon), it will be too late.

The dramatic trans-Atlantic, or at least eurozone-dollar, contrast is in terms of monetary policy, not fiscal stimulus or attitudes towards future regulation.  In our piece in the Washinton Post Outlook section on Sunday (already online), we provide an updated back story on how exactly the Fed and its chair got to the point of taking bold and unprecedented moves towards expansionary monetary and credit policy.  Continue reading “Ben Bernanke: More Important Than The G20 Summit” →

Obama Wins At G20: Europeans Lose Control of IMF

The big news at the G20 was obviously about the IMF, with the Americans pulling out an impressive deal on funding (compare with our predictions…). But the money is not the biggest achivement. The big move was in terms of who will run the IMF in the near future – as I explain my NYT.com column this morning, there is an implicit and almost immediate shift towards emerging markets.

President Obama had just the right tone yesterday.  Admittedly, he was helped by the fact that we no longer have anything to be arrogant about, but still the way he reached out to other countries – while also pointing out that they made big mistakes and are currently in trouble – conveyed exactly the right message.  The US will do much better if it lets emerging markets and developing countries have a serious and permanent place at the big table. 

Among other things, this will fundamentally change the way the IMF operates.  As a symbol and for its potential impact on the international economy moving forward, yesterday’s final loss of European control over the IMF really matters.

By Simon Johnson

The Mark-to-Market Myth

Today the Financial Accounting Standards Board voted – by one vote – to relax accounting standards for certain types of securities, giving banks greater discretion in determining what price to carry them at on their balance sheets. The new rules were sought by the American Bankers Association, and not surprisingly will allow banks to increase their reported profits and strengthen their balance sheets by allowing them to increase the reported values of their toxic assets.

This makes no sense, for three reasons.

1. Investors and regulators are not idiots. They know what the accounting rules are. If banks claim they were forced to mark their assets down to “fire-sale” prices, investors can look at the facts themselves and apply any upward corrections they want. Now that banks will be able to mark their assets up to prices based solely on their own models, investors will the downward corrections they want. It’s a little like what happened when companies were forced to account for stock option compensation as expenses; nothing happened to stock prices, because anyone who wanted to could already read the footnotes and do the calculations himself.

Continue reading “The Mark-to-Market Myth” →

The New Masters of the Universe

Back in the early days of the Clinton administration, James Carville was credited with saying something like this:

I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 basball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.

The story back then was that bond investors, by buying or selling Treasury bonds, could lower or raise the government’s cost of borrowing and interest rates across the economy, depending on how they felt about government policy.

Today bond investors have discovered a much more direct lever over government policy. I’ve already written about the importance of bondholders in dealing with the financial sector. This week we are seeing their power over the auto industry.

Continue reading “The New Masters of the Universe” →

Obama Against The Odds

The G20 summit is headed for disaster.  The Europeans have circled their wagons and determined that no sensible policy proposal shall pass.  The background briefings indicate (a) the US has given up on global fiscal stimulus (“declare victory and retreat” springs to mind), (b) and the manifest failures of financial regulators will be addressed through, well, a manifest of failed regulators.

None of the important issues are on the table or even allowed in the building: changing the European Central Bank’s monetary policy, persuading European politicians to acknowledge they were and largely still are asleep at the wheel, and the future of big banks everywhere.

The summit will begin with dinner on April Fool’s Day.  The organizers have clearly not thought much about the symbolism. Continue reading “Obama Against The Odds” →

Is The G20 Summit Worth Holding?

We know already much of what the G20 will produce: a communique that looks very much like the last one (dubious reassurances about the great progress being made along vague dimensions), no progress on fiscal stimulus (as we have been projecting for some time), and promises to clamp down on regulation for hedge funds and the like (fine, but how relevant is this to either what caused the crisis or what can sustain a recovery?)

Almost all the important issues are kept off the table by anachronistic diplomatic niceties: monetary policy around the world, Europe’s impending crisis, and how to escape the overweening power of major banks in almost all industrial countries.  The G20 summit has substantially failed even before it begins. Continue reading “Is The G20 Summit Worth Holding?” →

Big and Small

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Geithner presented an outline of his approach to regulating the financial system. The four pillars of that approach seem to be:

  1. Increased power and regulatory centralization to deal with the problem of systemic risk
  2. Increased protections for consumers and investors buying financial products
  3. Closing regulatory gaps by shifting that organizes regulation based on financial functions, not types of financial institutions
  4. International coordination among regulators

This all sounds good to me, and an improvement over where we are today. But reading Geithner’s discussion of systemic risk – the topic he focused on yesterday – I kept thinking it had been too long since he read Frog and Toad to his children.

Continue reading “Big and Small” →

Payback Time

Once upon a time there was a president named George. He liked to do things his own way, which annoyed some of his “friends” in Europe. But then a new president named Barack was elected, who not only promised to be nicer to his friends, but was actually very popular in most parts of the world. And the people of the world thought we would see a new era of international cooperation, at least between the U.S. and Europe.

Not so much.

On this side of the Atlantic, the Obama administration and the Fed have been working night and day in an attempt to turn around the economy: Fed funds rate reduced to zero, $800 billion stimulus package, new plan to aid struggling homeowners, new plan for buying toxic assets, new budget, decision by the Fed to buy long-term Treasury bonds, new domestic regulatory framework outlined this week, etc. We’ve been plenty critical of various aspects of the U.S. response, but at least they’re trying.

(Continental) Europe, by contrast, has decided they’ve done enough and it’s time to sit back and watch.

Continue reading “Payback Time” →

Watch Sternly

Writing in the FT yesterday, Nick Stern made the case for a new international organization to monitor global risks. Drawing on a decade of dealing with governments as board members of such organizations, he is blunt – keep them out of day-to-day oversight, by giving the institution an endowment and a leader appointed for 7 years without possible recall.

Lord Stern is right to be cynical about governments in this context, but his solution feels a bit too much mid-20th century. If the organization got off the ground, governments would compete madly to appoint the leader – trying for someone over whom they have a hold (it has happened). And if the organization really were independent, who would pony up the endowment or be comfortable with the (low) implied level of democratic accountability – it’s hard to see Senate Foreign Relations or Banking (both of which have jurisdiction over the IMF) getting excited about this arrangement.  Without the US there can be no meaningful deal.

And, thinking more about 21st century formats, don’t we already have – albeit in still emergent form – exactly what Professor Stern wants? Continue reading “Watch Sternly” →

Frog, Toad, Cookies, and Financial Regulation

My two-year-old daughter loves Frog and Toad.

There is a Frog and Toad story called “Cookies.” It is the only Frog and Toad story I remember from my childhood. Toad bakes some cookies and takes them to Frog’s house. They are very good. Frog and Toad eat many cookies, one after another. They try very hard to stop eating cookies, but as long as the cookies are in front of them, they cannot help themselves.

So Frog puts the cookies in a box. Toad points out that they can open the box. Frog ties some string around the box. Toad points out that they can cut the string. Frog gets a ladder and puts the box on a high shelf. Toad points out .  . .

Finally Frog takes down the box, cuts the string, opens the box, and gives all the cookies to the birds.

“Read more, Daddy,” my daughter says.

“One moment, I have to tell all the nice people the moral to the story.”

Continue reading “Frog, Toad, Cookies, and Financial Regulation” →

What’s Plan B?

One of the determinants of how you feel about the Geithner Plan is what you think will happen if it fails. By “fails,” I mean that the buyers’ bids are lower than the sellers’ reserve prices, so the toxic assets don’t actually get sold.

Brad Delong, for example, is moderately in favor of the plan, even though he thinks it is insufficient. In his words, “I think Obama has to demonstrate that he has exhausted all other options before he has a prayer of getting Voinovich to vote to close debate on a bank nationalization bill. Paul [Krugman] thinks that the longer Obama delays proposing bank nationalization the lower it’s chances become.” (“Voinovich” is DeLong’s hypothetical 60th senator, whose vote would be needed in the Senate.) In other words, DeLong thinks that if this plan fails, the administration will be more likely and able to go forward with nationalization.

Paul Krugman, by contrast, is strongly against the plan, first because he thinks it has no chance of succeeding, and second because he thinks there is no Plan B. “I’m afraid that this will be the administration’s only shot — that if the first bank plan is an abject failure, it won’t have the political capital for a second.”

Continue reading “What’s Plan B?” →

Room For Debate At The NYT

The NYT is ran an online discussion of the new Geithner Plan yesterday.  The worry I expressed there is whether the Plan is scalable – i.e., it could work at a modest level, but to really have impact it needs to be huge.  And, as it gets larger, I think we’ll see a political backlash.

Looking back over the comments of the day, my position put me closer to Paul Krugman but not too far also from Mark Thoma (look at his response to me, further down the discussion).  Brad DeLong came across as the most positive, but even he is doubtful that the planned purchases are large enough – he makes the point that the Administration couldn’t get Congress to agree on any additional money for this purpose, but this puzzles me. 

The Administration (1) has not really made this case on Capitol Hill (my contacts there tell me), (2) is asking for lots of money to do other things (their strategy was overweight fiscal from the start), (3) hasn’t communicated well a more general sense of priority or urgency – if we don’t fix our banking system how many other good things are possible over the next decade? 

By Simon Johnson