>"It's very hard to police a world wide distributed teams, who have many conflicting views, all of who get paid based on what they produce and don't have much long term incentive to see things any other way."
Why is this hard for management to police their own departments? Other industries manage distributed teams just fine. I agree with your other points in that passage.
The real issues is that there exists a culture a criminality with little little fear of consequences. jail. The only way that's going to change is to start holding individuals accountable.
>"I mean, in this case even the risk team singed off on it. What more could a CEO do?"
Verify? These CEOs have insane compensation packages. They make more in a year than most people will in a lifetime. When questions about their insane pay packages arise, the party line always seems to be that they are worth it because they are "that good."
If they are that good then more should be expected of them. They should be conducting independent audits - "trust by verify" or do some innovating in the area of compliance. Their M.O. is always to blame someone else, the buck never stops with them.
Companies don't want to police their own departments. This is how lots of modern companies deal with laws they don't like. They commit to obeying the law, tell everybody not to do anything illegal, but at the same time place requirements and expectations on the peons that force them to break the law. Then the peons get caught, they tell everybody how it's not their fault, they told everyone not to do that. The peons get fired or worse, the company hires replacements, tells them not to break the law, gives them unrealistic expectations, and the cycle repeats.
Wow I was downvoted for saying that management needs to be held accountable for criminality?
The cycle repeats because there is no disincentive to stop it. How many people went to jail after the 2008 crisis? I think you could count them on one hand and still not use all you fingers. Nobody will go to jail for Wells Fargo fraud either.
Downvotes happen. Maybe someone fat fingered. Maybe someone doesn't like you because of a different post. No point in dwelling on it, and in any event often enough it swings back later.
This is the unspoken foundation of the "sharing economy". You get a big pool of individual actors to make exchanges with each other in a marketplace like the ones provided by Uber, TaskRabbit, etc.
The market takes its little cut of every transaction, but takes zero percent of the risk. That's all passed on to the individual participants.
Car break down? Not Uber's fault. Get hit by a drunk driver? Lyft don't care. Have an allergic reaction to your latex gloves? Doesn't have anything to do with TaskRabbit as far as they're concerned.
The core of the challenge is our measuring stick --- money --- is a too-aggressively lossy transaction representation system, yet it is press-ganged into use as such when it really should only ever represent just the money itself instead of all the imputed characteristics ascribed to it by current mainstream economic thought. All sorts of desirable information by involved parties is detached from the money when the transaction completes, and we currently have very incomplete mechanisms and highly fragmented platforms for conveying that information.
Taking this down to a more concrete level, if every transaction and popular properties in a market were recorded and undoxx-ably published blockchain-style, then market actors who try to externalize costs will find those properties they are externalizing upon others added to the system, and their activity shunned more quickly. Much rent-seeking and externalizing behavior today in businesses (especially gig economy-pitch-based businesses) relies upon a great deal of extreme asymmetric information postures between the parties, possible because of the much more complex information ecosystem we operate in as economic actors today.
Trading is an information war where the only edge you can get is through asymmetric information about the deals and the products/services (violence being a special case). I wonder what trade would look like with a complete transparent process.
a good analysis. Would be great to take a look at how much of the cost saving is actually reduced interaction with externalities that are now costed out or left to the final-service-provider instead of the "platform.
How do you incentivize "produce less goods/generate less profit"[1]? That's a genuine question. We can barely de-incentivize flat-out criminal behavior. The line between malice and negligence is a tenuous at best. DA's feel lucky when they get a Grand Jury to indict which almost always results in a plea bargain being offered by the State, accepted by the indicted, and stamped on through by the Judge hearing the case.
Auditors were supposed to make sure books were GAAP-compliant. That was their entire job. Even they can't/won't keep up (RIP Arthur Anderson). And that whole "you have to file an 8-K with teh SECevery 3 months with the SEC" is limited to publicly traded financial institutions within the United States[2].
To make an analogy, the law can barely keep up with tech (see: amorphous definitions of 'data collection', 'meta-data', is your cryptographic keyphrase protected as a fifth amendment right, is PGP a "munition"?[3]). Financial markets are innovating at just as quickly a rate as we are.
So, in a modern day, how do we prevent 'cooking the books'? I assert that the problem is lack of transparency. Here's an idea that probably has many major issues as I haven't ruminated on it at all, but let me give it a shot: require all transaction data[4] to be independently audited by any stakeholder at any time. As a stakeholder who is keeping my retirement money with this institution I'm highly motivated to ensure that whoever is managing my money is doing so in what I deem to be a proper fashion. Access to their books (obviously with the account information/PII scrubbed), maybe after a business week of buffer time (to allow for some padding for any tactical content that may be in the current positions) should be perhaps be made available.
My second assertion is this will not only keeps the institution obligated to be 'honest' with their reporting as obligated to their stakeholders, but has an auxiliary benefit of incentivizing their competitors to act as very motivated auditors as they scrutinize their competitors books to uncover any malfeasance.
Since regulatory bodies can't keep up, _ensure that all actors within the market actively keep each other honest_. Sure, they can collude but collusion is far easier to detect and prosecute than internal book manipulation.
----
[1] Subsidizes to under-produce (big agri. and the like) notwithstanding
[2] There's nothing preventing a pension fund to go take all of GM's money and put it into a private hedge fund, throwing tons of money at a PE firm, becoming a large stake holder in a real estate investment group, or throw their money into any sort of 'unconventional financial entity'. None of these have public reporting obligations, and their federal obligations are limited to tax entities ,co-operating with FINRA, and (if they are using instruments which fall under the regulatory domain of the SEC, then also) the SEC.
>If they are that good then more should be expected of them. They should be conducting independent audits - "trust by verify" or do some innovating in the area of compliance. Their M.O. is always to blame someone else, the buck never stops with them.
Isn't that a little extreme? $500MM sounds like a butt ton of money to you and I, but Deutsche Bank has over $800B aum. To successfully audit $800B in assets a year he'd need to look at almost $2.2B of deals a day, assuming there's 0 fluctuation in earnings per day. Then he'd have to no time for figuring out what units are the most profitable and growing those business. He'd spend 100% of his time assessing risk, kind of like that department he hires to handle risk assessments. Even if he spent an hour a day doing random spot checks of deals, their are so many sour ones to clean ones that it'd almost be a waste of time.
The person bearing overall responsibility to appoint the right people to build a system of internal controls that can audit whatever volume of trade they are doing. In this case it seems that the top people knew all about this trade and it is clear that the accounting treatment of a trade that spreads a loss into the future would be 'fair value'. IE 0. So if the courts find that this actually happened then of course the execs are culpable.
People legitimately disagree about value. Investment horizon is a large factor. Two teams can do the opposite side of a trade and both profit on different horizons. Usually the agreement or disagreement is statistical, executed by a program in small fractions of a second. There is almost always some noise involved at the exchange, sometimes even some intentional randomness. It's not the same as getting people talk to each other about a project.
"Deutsche has paid more than $9 billion in further fines and settlements related to claims of tax evasion; violating sanctions against Iran, Libya, Syria, Myanmar, and Sudan; rigging the $300 trillion Libor market'
None of these are a byproduct of programatic trading.
Why is this hard for management to police their own departments? Other industries manage distributed teams just fine. I agree with your other points in that passage.
The real issues is that there exists a culture a criminality with little little fear of consequences. jail. The only way that's going to change is to start holding individuals accountable.
>"I mean, in this case even the risk team singed off on it. What more could a CEO do?"
Verify? These CEOs have insane compensation packages. They make more in a year than most people will in a lifetime. When questions about their insane pay packages arise, the party line always seems to be that they are worth it because they are "that good."
If they are that good then more should be expected of them. They should be conducting independent audits - "trust by verify" or do some innovating in the area of compliance. Their M.O. is always to blame someone else, the buck never stops with them.