Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance QUOTES

1 " In an illuminating comment on the financialisation of business, Jack Welch — now long retired from General Electric — would in 2009 proclaim shareholder value 'the dumbest idea in the world. "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

2 " The great muckraker Upton Sinclair had expressed a deep insight into the relationship between the world of ideas and the world of practical men: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’34 "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

3 " Investors look at economic fundamentals; traders look at each other; ‘quants’ look at the data. Dealing on the basis of historic price series was once described as technical analysis, or chartism (and there are chartists still). These savants identify visual patterns in charts of price data, often favouring them with arresting names such as ‘head and shoulders’ or ‘double bottoms’. This is pseudo-scientific bunk, the financial equivalent of astrology. But more sophisticated quantitative methods have since proved profitable for some since the 1970s’ creation of derivative markets and the related mathematics. Profitable "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

4 " Apple raised $17 billion in a bond offering in 2013. Not to invest in new products or business lines, but to pay a dividend to stockholders. The company is awash with cash, but much of that money is overseas, and there would be a tax charge if it were repatriated to the USA. For many other companies, the tax-favoured status of debt relative to equity encourages financial engineering. Most large multinational companies have corporate and financial structures of mind-blowing complexity. The mechanics of these arrangements, which are mainly directed at tax avoidance or regulatory arbitrage, are understood by only a handful of specialists. Much of the securities issuance undertaken by Goldman Sachs was not ‘helping companies to grow’ but represented financial engineering of the kind undertaken at Apple. What "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

5 " A policy of ‘naming and shaming’ is ineffective if everyone has been named and shamed. "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

6 " Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

7 " Stock markets are not a way of putting money into companies, but a means of taking it out. The "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

8 " He described the securities—called Abacus—to a girlfriend: I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself ‘Well, what if we created a “thing,” which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’).15 "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

9 " It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’35 "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

10 " We all chase the dream, but when taken to excess by individuals or in crowds, the chasing of dreams becomes madness. And chasing the dream with other people’s money is at best irresponsible and often fraudulent. "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

11 " The Thatcherite emphasis on hard work and self-reliance sat alongside a belief that compassion should be a private virtue rather than a social practice. These are attitudes very different from the greedy individualism and sense of personal entitlement characteristic of much of the finance sector today. "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

12 " RoE is a seriously misleading measure of profitability. For businesses that are not very capital-intensive – such as asset management, or other professional service firms such as accountants – high returns on equity are achievable because the capital requirement is so small. Capital-intensive businesses – in the modern economy they are principally banks, utilities and resource companies – can achieve high returns on equity only through extreme leverage, as Deutsche Bank did. "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

13 " Lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services – which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank – amounts to about 3 per cent of that total (see Chapter 6 "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

14 " organisers of weight-guessing competitions and advisers helping people to refine their guesses. "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

15 " The answer to information asymmetry is not always the provision of more information, especially when most of this ‘information’ is simply noise, or boilerplate (standardised documentation bolted on to every report). Companies justifiably complain about the ever-increasing volume of data they are required to produce, while users of accounting find less and less of relevance in them. The notion that all investors have, or could have, identical access to corporate data is a fantasy, but the attempt to make it a reality generates a raft of regulation which inhibits engagement between companies and their investors and impedes the collection of substantive information that is helpful in assessing the fundamental value of securities. In the terms popularised by the American computer scientist Clifford Stoll, ‘data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom’.9 In "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

16 " What is it all for? What is the purpose of this activity? And why is it so profitable? Common sense suggests that if a closed circle of people continuously exchange bits of paper with each other, the total value of these bits of paper will not change much, if at all. If some members of that closed circle make extraordinary profits, these profits can only be made at the expense of other members of the same circle. Common sense suggests that this activity leaves the value of the traded assets little changed, and cannot, taken as a whole, make money. What, exactly, is wrong with this common-sense perspective? "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

17 " A regulator cannot easily challenge the fundamental strategy of a badly run financial services business, such as Lehman or Royal Bank of Scotland. No one within the businesses themselves was willing to challenge Dick Fuld or Fred Goodwin—including the genuinely distinguished figures who sat on the RBS board (that of Lehman was decorated by friends of Fuld). Even the head of an agency may enjoy less access to the powerful than the senior executives of large corporations—if for no other reason than that the latter have considerably more largesse to dispense. Recall Gordon Brown’s fulsome tribute to Fuld and Lehman (see Chapter 1), and note that Goodwin and his (then) wife enjoyed weekend hospitality at Chequers, Prime Minister Brown’s official residence, even as the bank was sliding towards bankruptcy. It is not an accident that both Lehman and RBS were run by unpleasant, domineering individuals with good political connections: these characteristics are common pointers to the combination of personal success and corporate failure. Now "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

18 " Although much of what is written about finance would give a different impression, you are not providing funds for business investment by holding a company’s shares, directly or indirectly. As I have explained, companies large enough to be quoted on a stock exchange are, overwhelmingly, self-financing. The relationship between the long-term investor and Exxon Mobil is one of stewardship. "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

19 " The use of capital markets by large companies today is mainly driven by tax and regulatory arbitrage, and undertaken by corporate treasurers with other people’s money. Financing "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

20 " But the current investment banking model—whether applied in a standalone institution such as Goldman or in a broad financial conglomerate such as Deutsche Bank—is at the heart of the problems the finance sector poses for the real economy. Investment banks today engage in securities issuance, corporate advice and asset management; they make markets in equities and FICC, and trade in these markets on their own account. It is only necessary to list these functions to see that each of these activities conflicts with all the others. Each should be undertaken in distinct institutions. And with lower volumes of inter-bank trading, a diminished role for public equity markets and much more direct investment by asset managers the scale of most of these activities should be much reduced. Among all the actors in the finance sector today, only the asset manager, who typically earns a fee calculated as a percentage of funds under management, is rewarded for idleness. The profits of a segregated deposit-taking bank would similarly depend primarily on the scale of the deposit base, and secondarily on its success in making good loans. Dedicated channels of capital allocation have a more appropriate incentive structure than activities focused on trading and transactions. Whenever "

― , Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance