“Mis-closure” Leads to Risky Business
Chalk two up for the New York Times. Everyone’s favorite “MSM” target in the last few days has done the public service of serving up a pair of terrific articles on how we arrived at a global financial and business crash — one a report on the failures of risk management by business reporter/columnist Joe Nocera, the second an op-ed piece entitled “The End of the Financial World As We Know It” by author Michael Lewis and hedge-fund manager David Einhorn.
Both pieces ring very true to my own experience as a PR advisor to business and financial firms.
Nocera’s piece zeroes in on Wall Street’s overreliance on a valuable but flawed statistical tool known as Value at Risk, or VaR, which because of its focus on the most probable business outcomes missed the outlier risks that ultimately dragged down the entire financial system.
Lewis’s and Einhorn’s opus concentrates on two factors: the failure, due largely to conflicts of interest, of institutions such as rating agencies and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to sniff out weaknesses and even outright fraud, and the pressures for business and financial leaders to chase short-term profits at the expense of common sense.
Both articles should be must reading, especially for PR people (like me) who were more than willing to pass on the swill we were force-fed about the precision of risk-management tools and the necessity of investing more “aggressively” and conservative Republicans (also like me) who have been taught to think that big business and big finance can do no wrong.
This assertion should not be misintepreted as a call for more government involvement and regulation, by the way — I believe, in fact, that many of the contributors to the recent credit collapse, such as the proclivity of private-equity firms to stuff as much debt as possible into their portfolio companies and the explosion of subprime lending — were driven by and even practically mandated by misguided policies.
I don’t have much to add to their analyses, but I do want to make two observations:
1. While Nocera’s article primarily concentrates on the inability of the VaR tool to predict catastrophic risks — especially when firms and Boards essentially employed it as a lullaby — to me the bigger factor is revealed by an observation he makes around midway through his article:
Corporate chieftains like Stanley O’Neal at Merrill Lynch and Charles Prince at Citigroup pushed their divisions to take more risk because they were being left behind in the race for trading profits. All over Wall Street, VaR numbers increased, but it still all seemed manageable — and besides, nothing bad was happening!
Business PR is all about parroting and repeating the latest cliches. In the 1980s, it was “competitiveness,” “excellence” and “synergies.” In the 1990s, it was “partnership,” “exit strategy” and IPO “pops.” In the first decade of the 2000s, it was “risk management.” Even the newly created PR-ish discipline of “corporate social responsibility” is said to be about “managing risks” to a company’s reputation.
It wasn’t just Merrill and Citigroup. All the financial firms’ entire business strategies were focused around “getting better” at taking on and managing risk. Now it’s one — very admirable — thing to take a risk to launch a new company or a new line of business. It’s another thing to build an entire business model around skating as far on the edge as possible. It’s hubris. It’s asking for it. And as the Toyota commercial said, “you asked for it … you got it.”
2. The Lewis and Einhorn article’s focal point is the conflicts of interest at the rating agencies — paid by the bond issuers — and the SEC, for whom the regulated financial firms were a rich source of later employment. But that’s only one side of the SEC’s problem. A far bigger problem is the waste of SEC resources on “disclosure” that discloses nothing and obscures real issues while limiting the free speech rights of companies.
I’m reminded of when I was working on fight ads and other documents for Texaco in its proxy battle with Carl Icahn. I used the term “raider” in one document. The SEC autocrats balked. Prove it, they told me. So I sent a couple of articles from business magazines that in fact identified Icahn using that very term. Oh, Forbes says he’s a raider, eh? That must make him a raider, all right.
A colossal dissipation of taxpayer funds — and a continual muddying of the SEC’s mission — repeated with every annual report, 10K, 10Q, annual report and proxy filing. All of which contain such a complete recitation of every possible risk that could be encountered by a company that the real risks are totally obscured. It’s the complete opposite of disclosure — it’s “misclosure.”
Wanna fix the SEC? I’m not a financial expert, so I don’t have the answers. But I’m certain that one way of helping the agency is to reduce its regulatory burden by simplifying it — and getting it out of the business of regulating speech in favor of clearly disclosing real, known risks so that investors can make informed judgments. Not to mention promoting shareholder democracy, which is the best way of creating debate and discussion about business strategies.
As they say, light is the best disinfectant. Thanks to the NYT for the light they’re shedding on our path to financial doomsday.
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