MEET THE NEW BOSS….Noah Millman on the future of finance:
If there’s a new establishment a-borning, it’s not going to be composed of the smartest guys in the room, but the old-fashioned bankers who are worried about being fleeced by the smartest guys in the room.
Seriously: if you were a regulator in 2004-2005, the best way to identify likely problems would simply be to look at which areas are making too much money on Wall Street. Any profit center showing extraordinary growth, extraordinary margins, and/or an extraordinary Sharpe ratio in its returns was likely to be a place where risk-management was not adequately capturing the tails of the risk distribution. The more evidence that risk management had looked at everything and nothing could be found, the more worrisome that should be for regulators.
Now….let’s say the regulators actually use this rule of thumb going forward: when someone’s making too much money doing something new, our job is to figure out how to stop them. Who rules in that world?
I think he’s right. For about five years. Then it’ll be time to come out of our holes and par-tay!
