Tag: tunneling

Brazen Tunneling and Inflation

In most societies it is traditional to be somewhat sneaky in squeezing your shareholders or the government.  You might set up a complicated transfer pricing scheme or perhaps you arrange for a family-owned firm to acquire assets on the cheap from the publicly traded corporation that you control.  Or you could always arrange for the Kremlin to provide foreign exchange at a “special” price.

In the New United States, life is much simpler and bank tunneling considerably more brazen. Continue reading “Brazen Tunneling and Inflation” →

Calling All Shareholders

If you cast your mind back to when executive compensation and bonus limits first reached the mainstream debate, you may recall people saying these would be ineffective and the issue is a red herring.

These points do not now seem compelling.  People who work at the big banks are quite irked by what they see as unjustified limits on their bonuses.  Some of the “talent” is jumping ship.  Big bank leadership is lobbying hard to remove the restrictions or, failing that, for the right to pay back government TARP funds in order to escape the bonus cap – leading firms, such as Goldman Sachs, seem poised to raise new capital to that end.

This is a remarkable moment.  Excessive risk taking in large firms was based on inappropriate bonus structures (take risk and get compensated now; face the consequences of that risk down the road), facilitated by a deep failure to understand/control risk inside these organizations and probably made possible by the implicit put option from being too big or too complex to fail (i.e., Wall Street insiders own the upside; taxpayer owns the downside).  We have all focused of late on the costs for taxpayers, which of course are horrible, and going forward – with the implicit option now explicit – who can believe this will lead to anything other than further massive bailouts?

But think about this arrangement from the perspective of shareholders.  Are we looking at the greatest tunneling scheme in the history of organized finance? Continue reading “Calling All Shareholders” →

Confusion, Tunneling, And Looting

Emerging market crises are marked by an increase in tunneling – i.e., borderline legal/illegal smuggling of value out of businesses.  As time horizons become shorter, employees have less incentive to protect shareholder value and are more inclined to help out friends or prepare a soft exit for themselves.

Boris Fyodorov, the late Russian Minister of Finance who struggled for many years against corruption and the abuse of authority, could be blunt.  Confusion helps the powerful, he argued.  When there are complicated government bailout schemes, multiple exchange rates, or high inflation, it is very hard to keep track of market prices and to protect the value of firms.  The result, if taken to an extreme, is looting: the collapse of banks, industrial firms, and other entities because the insiders take the money (or other valuables) and run.

This is the prospect now faced by the United States. Continue reading “Confusion, Tunneling, And Looting” →