If War Can Have Ethics, Wall Street Can, Too

Then in WW2, aside from even more unrestricted submarine warfare and sinkings of hospital ships [2], we also have the firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and every other major axis city; machine-gunning of shipwreck survivors in the water; the atom bombs; the impressment of Koreans into service as "comfort women" for Japanese servicemen; forced labor at both axis & allied prisoner camps; the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps; and of course the Holocaust.

Modern-day, there's the My Lai massacre and Obama's attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital [3]. Probably more too, but you don't hear about them.

The author cites that war has rules because rules are written down, but rules are written down for Wall Street as well. They're just not enforced. And similarly, the laws of war are only enforced on the losing side, or on scapegoats that the actual decision-makers make available as a token sacrifice. When it comes to actually conducting a war, belligerents usually follow just one rule: win.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike

The military, at the end of the day, is a tool (famously, another tool of diplomacy). Either it's useful or not. Likewise finance is a tool (fundamentally a service industry like gardening or medicine). We support it because it helps finance business, helps people manage their pensions etc. Sometimes sidelines are useful too (DARPA, gun hobbyists, weird financial instruments that increase liquidity for everyone).

Yet lately the ends have been forgotten and the means elevated. The recent US proposed budget suggests increasing expenditures but there is no discussion as to whether that would be useful or not (and thus whether the increase is unnecessary, too big to even too small). The same problem has emerged in Finance: the point of an financial instrument is the instrument itself. HFT that skims a bit out of the transaction (thus is worse for the fundamental buyer and seller) is considered good. etc.

After a few years in drug enforcement the ex drug dealers return to work for their gangs, taking all the knowledge from working in drug enforcement with them, not to mention that they were still receiving dividends and profits from the the drug dealers who previously employed them during their stint in drug enforcement.

I really can't comprehend why any intelligent people can expect this depraved, corrupt farcical system to work. Now you have Trump, unashamedly pro-business (ie leaving the inmates in control of the asylum) and people seriously expect things to get better.

Here are your brave American presidents who can bravely and patriotically authorize the executions (ie murder) of alleged terrorists in Yemen and Afghanistan who have done diddly squat to Americans, but can't/won't a lift a finger against corrupt predatory malign financiers whose actions leave Americans indebted, dying prematurely because they can't afford good housing and good health care. Compare the deaths of Americans due to terrorism by Yemenis or Somalis, and the premature deaths of Americans due to poverty and ill-health which these banksters frauds have worsened, and tell me who Trump should be executing without any meaningful evidence or even a trial.

I am sorry but due to their corrupt financial system the politicians of the Western world are becoming more and more of a joke.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students...

for this study?

http://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-source/TrendTopic/Immigra...

(see bottom of page 1 in particular.)

Sigh.

Considering the size of 'Wall Street' the size of the ethics violations that he uses as an example are miniscule. In addition, due to the increased scrutiny that financial institutions face and the potential damage that scandals can cause, legitimate organizations seem less willing to risk ethics violations.

Also, unlike in war, ethics violations on Wall Street can be reported and prosecuted relatively easily.

As mentioned in many comments above - Wall Street has ethics, one can only hope that the current administration doesn't take steps to weaken threaten these.

The system is broken when corruption and misdirection is not punished with the weight of their crimes.

> When faced with illegal or immoral orders, it is the duty of professional soldiers to refuse such orders. When such a refusal occurs, it is followed by thorough investigations, and potentially courts-martial or war crimes prosecutions for those who issue such orders. In the case of the former Wells Fargo employees, the opposite occurred. Imagine the moral and societal hazard if the military permitted such retaliation against those who reported illegal and immoral behaviors.

Well's Fargo is a bank that makes money by selling financial products to people including bank accounts and credit cards. To do this they employ salespeople. These salespeople are tasked with selling these products, as much as they can. They have a compliance department that explicitly says "don't lie to people when you sell to them". The salespeople broke those rules in order to meet the sales goals, so they were fired. The way the author writes this article, it's as if they think it is immoral to be a salesman and that the executives of Wells Fargo should be court marshaled for requiring them to sell a lot of things. The analogy, and to equate selling things with war crimes on the battlefield is absurd.

> Hedge funds and investment banks utilize high-speed trading to place the individual investor at an insurmountable disadvantage.

It's unclear what the author mean's by "high-speed" trading here, I assume they mean high-frequency market making, but most hedge funds are not in high frequency market making business. Does the author know what they are talking about? Probably not. High frequency market-makers like Virtu and Hudson River are in the high-frequency market making business. And it's unclear how high-frequency market making hurts the individual investor, it's much more concrete how high frequency market makers hurt the banks (old-school market makers) and help the individual investor by closing down the bid-ask spread.

Even if hedge funds were employing techniques to put an individual investor at a disadvantage, isn't that their job? Hedge funds are in the business because they can presumably make better trades than average, and so anyone who is on the other side of the trades they are making is presumably going to be losing out. This would be like challenging an NFL team to a football game and complaining that their wide receivers are too good athletes. And why should we prioritize the "individual investor" over institutional investors? A pension fund handles money for retired pensioners, while an individual investor might be some dentist day-trader - why should we prioritize his well being over the pensioners? He presumably has enough disposable income already.

A king not killing another king is moral between kings, but those that followed the loser can suffer greatly. The closer you get to becoming god, the more callous the hands gambled.

The definition of being god here is how effective you are at controlling perceptions, how your followers perceive reality, your personal religion in a way.

So from the peasants view, the kings and gods are corrupt, removed from reality. That is because the god of peasants has always been the god of livelihood, while the elites worship the god of power. The greater god ignores the lesser god.

The amount of moral policing these days is way too much. It seems to have grown significantly these past couple decades.

To believe otherwise one must believe in forces of evil that animate one side and forces of good that animate another, which is a profoundly supernatural view.

Similarly, this article suggests that Wall Street lacks morality and uses as an example a VC considering layoffs that would occur if she fails to fund a round.

If there is a finite amount of money, an investor will invest in the firm that shows the most promise. Many teams of hard working people are seeking investment, but only some will get it. The investor must use the available information to decide where to place her bet.

If the investor is wrong, she will not be able to afford to bet again in the future. Should we all fell sorry if the investor makes a bad decision and a team of people spent several years getting paid to pursue an ill-fated idea? Arguably, the cost to society for this misstep is great, so perhaps we ought to appoint a wise investment minister to make the choices judiciously on behalf of investors? Why not also appoint a hiring minister to direct job-seekers only toward the most promising startups? For that matter, why not also appoint a business strategy minister to help startups make good decisions and avoid bad ones?

While these ministerial posts sound absurd in the context of startups, this is our reality in the world of banking and housing. Ministers tell our banks how much reserve capital they ought to carry, they tell our housing market what a reasonable rate is for a 30 year mortgage, etc.

Fannie and Freddie flew under the radar for years without revealing their balance sheet, drastically altering the US (and world) economy all at the behest of a small number of officials. I think the reason this was allowed to occur was (ironically enough) to avoid financial bad news when our leaders were trying to sell a war.

When you introduce socialized risk the market cannot be counted on to prevent socialized losses. The game is changed. The normal incentives and disincentives do not apply.

After 9/11 for example, the government became the insurer of last resort for terrorism related claims. This came as a relief to anyone building a skyscraper or running an airline, but at what cost? It eliminated much of the incentive that would have existed in the economy to prevent terrorism.

We let our ministers create very bad policy. Rather than just writing poor people a check to help them get a mortgage, they create artificial demand for high risk housing loans, which creates a broad incentive for reckless expansion of a whole sector of the economy. They keep much of this risk on the government's books, making taxpayers accountable not for a simple payment to the poor person to allow him/her to get housing, but for the entire house of cards built upon those loans.

We cannot allow our government to try to address so-called "market failures" by creating infrastructure that distorts and hides information from the market. Not only is it paternalistic, but it also creates a tremendous amount of risk for the whole economy.

This is not an argument against welfare. We have two options for how we can think about giving welfare, either as a cash payment (with or without strings attached, fwiw) or by greasing the core infrastructure of the economy to slip in some subprime loans among the many non-subprime loans, figuring that the risk won't really be discernible by financial markets and all will be well.

When capitalism contains a lot of incentives imposed by various government ministers, "free" economic behavior adapts to exploit those incentives. This is what the author of the article disagrees with. He thinks that we should all act genteel and avoid transactions that have moral consequences. The problem is that such transactions rarely occur, finance creates abstracted transactions that are rarely correlated with a desirable or undesirable social outcome.

In many industries (healthcare, finance, automotive, solar, etc.) government-sponsored incentives dominate free-market incentives. When we allow this to happen, we are effectively saying that we do not want individuals to have free economic choice, we instead want a select group of ministers to create a socially responsible landscape.

Welfare is distortionary, but few would argue that it is unnecessary. What is very harmful is when welfare programs corrupt the infrastructure of markets and lead to widespread behavior that exploits the programs.

The goal of every industry, and of every firm is to become "essential" or "too big to fail"... in other words, to be declared to be worthy of the guaranteed support of taxpayers.

Think about it this way, if issued a credit card with very low interest and a very high limit, most people could easily become billionaires simply by using low risk investment strategies. The problem is that if for even a day, the strategy requires more of a limit than is available, the whole plan comes crashing down. Even with low-risk endeavors, losses must be covered. Without forcing firms to cover their own downside risk, they of course will leverage to the max. This is what has happened in our modern finance industry, the growth since the 1990s has been due to consolidation and increased leveraging.

FWIW I think that what is needed is a new financial statement to be added to GAAP which is a statement of risk, which recursively points to all assets and liabilities whose market risks correlate with solvency risk of other firms, so that a broad, a view of the risk a company faces (market, and systemic) that can be viewed in aggregate, so that we can more easily understand the factors that impact an entire portfolio.

Ironically, such a statement would allow Wall Street to invest most heavily in firms with socialized risk (for those are the lowest risk bets), but at least then, regulators could impose a limit on the amount of socialized risk firms were allowed to invest in, which is one of the few things that can be done to actually stop the cycle of exploitation. Firms should have an incentive not to be classified as "too big to fail" and not to attempt reclassification if things go worse than expected.

The fact that some "rules" are set so idiots follow them doesn't mean everybody does, specially when they are not seen. Abu ghraib anyone?

Wall street has a very clear ethics set on stone, profits no matter the loss.