Review of Gillian Tett’s book
O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
I've now read no fewer than seven excellent books detailing the financial atrocities of 2007-9. Each takes a different spin.
British broker Philip Augar covers the historical perspective; hedge fund manager and amateur philosopher George Soros looks to epistemology; former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan provides a wide-ranging survey aimed more or less at self-exculpation; former Goldman Sachs chief and US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson breathlessly covers the regulator's perspective; New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin impressively covers the CEO's perspective and Michael Lewis writes from the perspective of those motley few who not only saw the crash coming (as we all did!) with hindsight, but bet on it happening ahead of time.
Now Gillian Tett, an excellent writer for the Financial Times, provides the credit structurer's perspective. Surveying the economic and intellectual environment which lent the tools and opportunity for these sub-prime backed products to get off the ground, Tett tells the story through the prism of the J. P. Morgan structuring desk from whose "BISTRO" transactions ("bank of international settlements total rip-off" indeed!) all of this started, but who still never fell for the mortgage-backed kool-aid which overwhelmed the rest of the market. The house of Morgan (Jean Strouse's reverent tome is well recommended) has a venerable tradition that even Goldman Sachs would envy; its performance over the last three years has burnished that reputation in a way that Goldman certainly ought to.
Tett's curiously titled book is, for the most part excellent, entertaining and novel. She does a better (and certainly more balanced) job of explaining the engineering of a CDO than Lewis (though in fairness, his is the only other entry to even have a go), and the J. P. Morgan angle is a clever narrative to lay over the goings on.
So much so that when Tett loses her focus on Morgan in the closing stages - her attention switches to the much larger field of conflict as the financial world blew up - the book suffers: Tett's treatment Bear, Lehman, AIG, and others is (of necessity) cursory, and those who are interested should seek out Sorkin's extraordinary survey, which is far more thorough.
Tett does pull it all back together again in her epilogue by re-focussing on the Morgan diaspora in a where-are-they-now summary, and she provides a stark and assertive personal perspective. Her background is social anthropology which she says (and I fully agree) provides a valuable perspective on how this could all have happened, and how it might happen again, that you won't find in Hayek or Friedman. But this is added as an afterthought rather than a spoke of the central thesis, which is a pity. For me that's the real story: the herd mentality, the group-think, the social and anthropological hierarchies that persist (and on which our financial and political institutions, frankly, are built) which tend to neuter the checks and balances which classical market theory says ought to be provided by the market. Curiously, George Soros gets closest to this, in his otherwise rather idiosyncratic (and a bit premature) book.
Tett's missed opportunity here is compounded when she misinterprets the metaphor of Plato's cave: The participants who look at only the shadows projected on the wall aren't at fault for failing to look at the "perfect forms" whose outlines create the shadows: Plato's point is they *can't* ever see them: it is the human condition to be stuck with the shadows. That ought to lead, therefore to a different conclusion: not that we should turn around to look at the projector - for that will surely blind us - but that we need at all times to maintain a healthy scepticism for what we are seeing. The fatal mistake is to suppose it is the truth.
If we can devise a way of building that impulse - a will to contingency, if you like - into our institutions, we'll be on the way to fixing this.
Fat chance, I suspect.
Olly Buxton
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