Incertidumbre, riesgo, y ciclos financieros

El texto que viene a continuación es de Robert Skidelsky, ("Keynes, The Return of The Master"), y creo que es una síntesis espléndida de la distancia que hay entre el mensaje de Keynes y los clásicos (de Ricardo a Hayek & co), con una gran riqueza de matices y detalles. Resuenan en él ecos de Minsky y otros keynesianos. La época pasada desde 1980 hasta 2008 de liberalismo creciente, han alimentado una supremacía de las finanzas que Skidelsky propone suprimir, creo que con razón. Esta supremacía se debe a que la inversión a largo plazo es sustituida por la especulación a corto. El capitalismo original de emprendedores con proyectos a largo plazo ha sido sustituido por el capitalismo financiero, mecido en la creencia de que los nuevos instrumentos derivados les cubren de todos los riesgos. 2008 demostró que es una creencia falsa. Pero no ha sido desplazada por otra. Por cierto, no creo que Hayek defendiera este capitalismo falso de especulación de unos pocos. 

Uncertainty tends to turn long-term investment into short-term speculation. Denial of the need to guard against uncertainty allows what Keynes called the ‘financial circulation’ to expand exponentially at the expense of the ‘industrial circulation’. This has been happening everywhere –but notably in the UK, where the financial system has become master, not servant, of production, the royal road to paper wealth. 

Any reform of our present system will require restricting the role of finance, and adopting a highly sceptical attitude to the claims made on behalf of financial engineering. Keynes had little specific to say about financial regulation, since the banking system was not at the centre of the storm of the early 1930s; even in the United States it was an induced casualty. So it is not from Keynes that we should seek to learn the specifics of legislation or regulation for financial markets. Nevertheless, use of his theory can show up deficiencies in current thinking on financial reform. What distinguishes Keynes’s theory from today’s mainstream thinking on financial markets is the distinction he makes between risk and uncertainty. If financial markets are merely risky, the important reform is to develop better measures of risk and better techniques of risk management, and, if necessary, enforce them on financial institutions. If on the other hand there is bound to be irreducible uncertainty in financial operations, the state has an additional role, which is to protect the economy as a whole against the consequences of uncertainty. Within the risk-management paradigm there are two main approaches to reform. The first is to allow market forces to create more and better markets for risk –new derivative products, more extensive financial intermediation –in quest of the holy grail of ever more complete markets for contingencies. According to this view, the financial system is like an early aircraft. Just because it is prone to crash, we shouldn’t abandon the attempt to make it reliably airborne. This ignores Keynes’s distinction between risk and uncertainty. We simply cannot fit all the contingencies we face into a Gaussian bell curve, so there will always be a role for state policy to reduce uncertainty arising from finance. 

The alternative approach is to force better risk-management measures and techniques on financial institutions through regulation. This is the standpoint of Britain’s Financial Services Authority’s The Turner Review (March 2009). This identifies an ‘inadequate focus on the analysis of systemic risk and of the sustainability of whole business models: and a failure to design regulatory tools to respond to emerging systemic risks’.The nub of the argument is that risk-management methods did not adequately reflect the new risks created by the spread of derivatives. There are fleeting moments of doubt as to whether even improved risk-management techniques can make financial markets more ‘efficient’ in the sense of being able to price risks correctly. ‘Recent events’, the review notes, ‘have raised fundamental issues about the extent to which different markets are or can be made to be efficient, rational, and self-correcting. They suggest that there may be inherent limits to how far problems of market irrationality can be overcome by measures designed to make those markets more transparent, liquid and technically efficient’; and, in another place, ‘If liquid traded markets are inherently subject to herd/momentum effects, with the potential for irrational overshoots round rational economic levels, then optimal regulation cannot be based on the assumption that increased liquidity is always and in all markets beneficial.’ Except for stigmatizing as irrational all behaviour that doesn’t fit the classical model of rationality, this is the right issue to raise. Having delivered itself of these warnings, the review nevertheless concludes that the challenge to efficient market theory doesn’t require a ‘fundamental shift from the FSA’s current policy stance’. What it does require is regulation of system risk. 

The previous assumption was that if individual banks were safe, the financial system would be stable. But, in trying to make themselves safe under stress, banks can act in ways which undermine collective stability. The review emphasizes the need for increased flow and accuracy of information (‘transparency’) to be made available to market participants. External ‘stress tests’ should replace internal assessments of banks’ capital adequacy, to reduce banks’ vulnerability to solvency crises. ‘Dynamic’ accounting conventions should replace the static ones agreed at Basel II (2004), so that agents can anticipate future losses before they become evident in trading-book values or loan repayments. As part of its proposal for ‘dynamic’ accounting, the review suggests that banks create a non-distributable economic-cycle reserve, which would set aside profit in good years to anticipate losses arising in bad years. Bonuses should be based on distributable profit after the deduction of this reserve, thus ensuring that ‘such systems reflect a reasonable estimate of future possible credit losses and impairments, rather than a point-in-time calculation of profit which may subsequently prove illusory’. 

This proposal –similar to ‘balancing the budget over the cycle’ –of course assumes that cycles follow a Gaussian pattern. The Turner Review consistently rejects the radical option of reducing the scope of financial intermediation. This is because it continues to believe that the world of derivative instruments has, by diversifying risk, made the economy less shock-prone. It ignores the evidence from the present crisis that the diversification of risk can increase the danger of cumulative and self-reinforcing price movements. In sum, the review proposes a modest increase in regulation, chiefly by imposing higher information and capital-adequacy requirements on banks and other financial institutions, which should be made internationally effective. The review is worth special attention because it is by far the most able of the conventional responses to the slump, with reforms closely linked to diagnosis. It does not of course exhaust the proposals for taming finance. Other types of reform proposal are aimed at improving ‘corporate governance’. A familiar litany includes strengthening shareholder rights, increased disclosure and transparency requirements, better selection of board members, and so on. It is hard to be against measures to make the financial system less opaque. 

But, just as it is wrong to believe that asymmetric information was at the root of the financial breakdown, so it is a delusion to believer that more ‘transparency’ will prevent future breakdowns. For behind this thought lies the belief that all risk is calculable and that it's better directors, better regulation. Keynes’s distinction between risk and uncertainty led him in a different direction. Risk could be left to look after itself; the government’s job was to reduce the impact of uncertainty. Risky activities, Keynes implies, should be left to the market, with entrepreneurs being allowed to profit from good bets and to suffer the consequences of bad bets. On the other hand, uncertain activities with large impacts should be controlled by the state in the public interest. How to make this distinction operationally significant should be the major object of the reform of financial services in the aftermath of the crisis. One obvious application of this distinction is to banking reform. Here, the radical approach to reform is to reinstate the Glass–Steagall philosophy of separating ‘utility’ from ‘investment banking’, with retail banks –those which serve the public –allowed to take only moderate risks, leaving high-risk lending to the investment banks. The clear principle is that banks enjoying deposit insurance and access to lender-of-last-resort facilities should not indulge in gambling with depositors’ or taxpayers’ money; investment banks, which would be free to gamble with their investors’ money, should be debarred from accepting retail deposits, and excluded from any public bailouts. The logic is impeccable, but it would mean ensuring that no investment banks become ‘too large to fail’. This implies that, apart from Glass–Steagall, there needs to be some restriction on multinational banking. The alternative approach would allow retail and investment banking to be combined, as now, but would impose higher capital and liquidity requirements, which could be varied over the cycle. My own scepticism about the ability of the authorities successfully to carry out such ‘macro-prudential’ regulation leads me to favour a return to the Glass–Steagall philosophy of ‘narrow’ banking, which I would argue is desirable anyway on general social grounds. However, retail banking has also succumbed to the financial virus by abandoning prudent limits for lending. Both sellers and buyers of mortgages would be protected by limiting home loans to, say, 75% of the value of the property and three times the income of the borrower. This would reduce reliance on credit agencies. Except for the last, the reforms above would require international agreement to be effective.