Hacker News Reader

Comment by ctkrohn | Hacker News Reader

That's already very common practice, and unfortunately it's not very effective. Bear Stearns was 30% employee owned [1], and Lehman was 25% employee owned [2]. All that stock became worthless when the firms blew up.

[1] http://www.nceo.org/main/column.php/id/282 [2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122117966831526067.html

View on HN

Trying to use compensation to reduce the risk that a bank can fail is a fools errand. What we want to prevent is "too big", failure is healthy. My plan would reduce the amount of government intervention required during a failure (clawback), and it would also provide incentive to not be too big.

I have a pet theory that this solution might work if the restricted stock was very long-term--say it vested quickly but you couldn't sell it for a mean time of 15 years. The idea is to get the stock to be longer lived than the bank's liabilities. To my knowledge this has never been tried, and you'd probably need to pay significantly larger amounts of stock to get people to go along, and anyway this is pure speculation from a non-expert.

Then people will trade options on this locked-in stock, as some employees of forever-pre-IPO companies do.

But the price of those options will reflect people's view of the value of them 15 years out.

If investors could make accurate predictions of what securities would be worth 15 years out, then we wouldn’t be seeing financial blowouts every 15 years.

Sure. I never said they'd be accurate; the point is simply that if you want someone to give you money for bank stock that can't actually be sold for 15 years, you'd be unlikely to get a particularly good price for that, especially if it were in a climate where there's a high likelihood that the bank is quite likely to go bust long before that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com