NSE affair: hold board members and regulators accountable

 

My article on the NSE affair in the Hindu. I say that board members and regulators must be held accountable in a way that is not happening today.

 

NSE affair: board lapses

In an earlier post, I had referred to the lapses on the part of the board of NSE. What precisely were these lapses? 

One, the Board was alerted to the irregularities in the appointment of the Anand Subramanian as Chief Strategic Adviser  and, subsequently, as Group Operating Officer. The matter was discussed by the Board and a decision was to taken to remove the person but the discussions were not minuted, citing confidentiality and sensitivity of the matter. This was a shabby attempt at a cover-up.

Two, the board had earlier delegated substantial powers to Subramanian when he was designated consultant and without looking into his suitability for being delegated substantial powers.

Three, the Board came to know that Chitra Ramkrishna, the MD, had shared confidential information with an outsider. They, nevertheless, allowed Ramkrishna to resign citing personal reasons, gave her a generous severance package and recorded a glowing appreciation of her services. 

Four, the Board failed to respond quickly enough to various queries sent by SEBI. 

In short, the Board seemed interested more in protecting Ramkrishna than in protecting the institution.

M Damodaran, former SEBI Chief, documents    some of these lapses. So does Hemindra Hazari  who also provides a list of the board members at the time these decisions were taken.

The NSE board was as distinguished as a board might be. How did such a distinguished board allow such an appalling state of affairs to continue for so long? 

Well, I have long contended that the effectiveness of a board has little to do with the presence of luminaries. Quite the contrary: the effectiveness of a board is inversely proportional to the luminaries present on it. That is because most luminaries think that, having lent their names to the board, they have done their jobs. They cannot be troubled with the nitty-gritty of things, such as going through the agenda papers, raising tough questions and getting matters rigorously minuted.

Better to have competent persons  with the right credentials who fall short of being luminaries. There is a better chance, then, that governance will happen.

NSE affair: question marks over the role of board and SEBI

Corporate shenanigans have failed to surprise. But the National Stock Exchange (NSE) story is in an India-class of its own. Former NSE MD Chitra Ramkrishna, according to a SEBI order, shared confidential information about the exchange and took instructions or guidance from an anonymous email id whom she ascribed to a Himalayan yogi. 

The guru syndrome is all too common in India. As long as this is about one's personal issues, nobody can have a serious quarrel. But the notion that NSE board papers, financial data, performance appraisals and appointments could be shared with a yogi has people shaking their heads in disbelief.

NSE MD Vikram Limaye is set to have met Finance Ministry officials in connection with the SEBI order against NSE, Chitra Ramkrishna and others. This is the surest indication that the Ministry is not convinced that matters can be left to SEBI and the board any more.

The board was made aware of the blatant nepotism implicit in Ramkrishna's appointment of Anand Subramanian as Chief Strategic Officer and, later, as Group Operating Officer, on a stratospheric salary. It was also made aware of her sharing confidential information with somebody who, she claimed, was a Himalayan yogi. Yet, instead of acting against Ramkrishna, the Board allowed Ramkrishna to resign and, that too, with generous payments. This is certainly a serious lapse on the part of the board.

Even earlier, there must have been plenty of talk within NSE about Subramanian's role. It is hard to believe that the board did not pick it up. And if it did, why was there no response? NSE is a public institution. Using NSE to confer pecuniary rewards on an individual, without adequate basis, is abuse of office and misuse of public resources. I am not competent to say so but, perhaps, it could attract the provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act.

Within NSE staff itself, did anybody protest? Did any of the top officers, including the HR head, raise questions? Unlikely. In the authoritarian world of corporates, serious dissent is unthinkable. 

SEBI's role has also left much to be desired. According to media reports, SEBI was alerted to Subramanian's appointment by whistle-blowers. It should have investigated the matter and taken action. It did not. Besides, imposing fines and barring people from the market is just not enough in this situation. 

As many have pointed out, after the emails with the yogi became known, SEBI should have made every effort, through the cyber police, to track down the identity of the yogi. Since confidential information involving a public institution was shared with an unauthorised individual, it should have filed a complaint with the police. It should have hauled up the then board members for the lapses pointed out above. There is a case for naming and shaming individuals in such instances and there is also a case for barring individuals from holding board positions. Today, board members can fail to  discharge their fiduciary responsibilities and just get away with it. SEBI needed out to send out a message that this can't go on.

At the time of writing, there are reports of an Income Tax raid on Ramakrishna and Subramaniam. This does suggest that the government does not intend to let matters rest with the SEBI order. Sadly, the government has to intervene because neither the board nor SEBI is seen to have done the needful. This highlights a basic fact of governance: Governments are subject to a modicum of democratic accountability in a way in which boards and regulators are not.

RBI, financial stability and central bank independence

 Viral Acharya, the distinguished academic who served as Deputy Governor of RBI from December 2016 to June 2019,  has been vocal on the subject of financial stability over the past several weeks.  

In several interviews and webinars following the publication of his book, Quest for financial stability in India, Acharya has said that lack of concern for financial stability on the part of successive governments has led to recurring problems in the banking system. This, in turn, has resulted to growth getting stalled time and again. 

The book is a collection of speeches Acharya made as Deputy Governor. The highlight is a lengthy introduction that Acharya has written in which he expatiates on the importance of financial stability. Acharya says that during Urjit Patel's tenure as Governor, the RBI made a valiant attempt to defend financial stability but, ultimately, could not stem pressures in favour of faster credit growth at the expense of stability. He suggests that both Patel and he had to quit as they could not reconcile their stand on financial stability with that of the government.

Acharya contends that the root cause of financial stability is what he calls 'fiscal dominance', that is, the imperative of governments having to spend in order to boost growth, no matter what the implications for the fiscal deficit. After a point this becomes untenable.Governments then lean on the central bank to facilitate faster growth through credit expansion. 

This invariably involves sacrificing financial stability in a number of ways- by not recognising bad loans and the associated losses, not recapitalising public sector banks as required, manipulating the yield curve to keep interest rates low so that governments can borrow cheaply, etc. Compromises on financial stability result in banking crises and weak growth down the road. 

The answer, Acharya suggests, is first to ensure that fiscal discipline is practised. Secondly, to ensure that the RBI enjoys greater independence, preferably conferred by law, so that it can resist pressures to compromise financial stability.

There are problems with the thesis. First, it is not true that credit booms and financial crises result exclusively or mainly from fiscal dominance. The global financial crisis of 2007 as well as multiple bank crises in numerous economies in the past several decades did not flow from fiscal dominance.

Secondly, financial stability can result from excessive concern with financial stability at the expense of growth. If you are too focused on inflation and allow growth to weaken, that itself can cause financial stability. If you are not willing to relax regulations in unusual times, such as the pandemic, and insist that defaults should automatically result in loans being categorised as non-performing assets, you are going to create a major banking crisis here and now- in the cause of financial stability. Find me one banker who thinks that the loan restructuring scheme announced recently by RBI is not desirable and that we should accept Urjit Patel's contention that a restructured standard asset is an oxymoron.

Thirdly, conferring independence on the RBI by law is a bad idea. Matters of monetary policy and regulation cannot be decided by technocrats alone. It is the elected government that is accountable to the people for its decisions that must have the final say. This is because monetary policy and regulation involve choices about trade-offs between growth and stability and they have distributional implications. These choices cannot be made by technocrats sitting in Mint Street. If central bankers are not to accountable to the government, how will make them accountable? We need a vibrant media, swift judicial redress and a culture of peer pressure that will ensure accountability once central banks are given independence by law. Those conditions are not satisfied in India today.

Fourthly, it's extremely naive to think that governments make "political" choices while technocrats are utterly apolitical or detached in their approach to questions of public policy. All public policy choices are overtly or implicitly political in nature and central bankers are political animals in their own ways. We know central bankers are not unworldly in their outlook: many have the happy gift on landing juicy positions with private banks after they have demitted office. 

We have to accept that those elected to office have the right to decide matters of public policy. If they make mistakes, the electorate has the choice of voting them out the next time. Pitting the saintly technocrat against the diabolical politician can only undermine democracy and pave the way for the technocracy known as dictatorship. 

More in my column in BS, Technocrats versus politicians

LIC disinvestment is not a great idea

The FM's announcement in the budget about LIC going in for an IPO was roundly cheered by market analysts. Apart from the fact that it is intended to fetch Rs 90,000 crore in revenues to a cash-strapped government, analysts lauded the move saying it would lead to greater transparency and improved governance.

Now, 'transparency' and 'better governance' are things it's hard to argue with. However, it's worth remembering that these are not ends in themselves. In the context of a commercial institution, they are meant to result in better performance and outcomes.

The case for an IPO at LIC must, therefore, be that it's under-performing at the moment and that an IPO would result in better performance. This is simply not true. LIC is an outstanding performer, judged by any criteria one would like to apply to an insurance company. The entry of private companies into insurance, far from undermining LIC, has led to a surge in sales volumes. LIC still commands 70 per cent of the market for insurance premiums. It offers returns on annuities that hardly anybody in the market can match. And it is financially sound.

LIC has achieved these outcomes while performing a larger social role. It intervenes to support the markets where required. It is a big investor in public sector banks and is now the majority shareholder in IDBI Bank. It has a terrific reach in the yet under-served rural areas. LIC's social role has not   come in the way of commercial performance.

There's no case, therefore, for LIC being listed on the exchanges at this point- you can't seriously say that listing is necessary in order to improve outcomes. What listing would do is call into question the larger social role that LIC performs. We still need an institution that can support the market given the fickleness of foreign investors. Until a measure of stability returns to the banking system, it would not be wise to list LIC as retail and institutional shareholders could challenge its socially-driven actions as inimical to shareholder interest.

The only reason for listing LIC is that it will fetch enormous revenues for the government. That's not a good enough reason for an institution as vital and vibrant as LIC.

The good news is that listing LIC would require parliament to amend the LIC Act. LIC unions are opposing the move. Valuation of LIC and other steps required for listing would take a couple of years, so it's unlikely that the listing will happen in FY 2020-21.

Frontline carries a good article on the subject.

Lehman Brothers should have been saved

One of the biggest controversies around the financial crisis of 2008 is about the decision to let the investment bank Lehman Brothers fail.

The moment that happened, it was as though somebody had dropped a bunker-busting bomb on a shaky and dilapidated building. The money market mutual funds, on whom the banks depended for short-term funds, withdrew their funding raising the prospect of the collapse of the financial system. It required a series of bailouts, including that of insurance giant AIG, and the guaranteeing of money market mutual funds' investment in banks, to rescue the system.

One argument trotted out at the time was that the US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson wanted to send out a clear message on moral hazard to big players: no more rescues. However, since further rescues followed the failure of Lehman, that argument has worn thin. The official position since has been that the Fed simply could not provide liquidity to Lehman because it was not solvent and could not provide the necessary collateral. The Fed would violated the laws applicable to it had it tried to save Lehman.

Larry Ball of Johns Hopkins has done a brilliant analysis of the Lehman failure and he finds that the arguments don't stand up to scrutiny. He believes that Lehman was allowed to fail because the US Treasury and the Fed didn't quite anticipate the disastrous consequences that would follow. He also contends that the Fed has failed to provide the necessary documentation to substantiate its contention that Lehman wasn't solvent at the time.

More in my article in the Hindu, The cost of political interference

Insider trading: crucial decision of US Supreme Court

A recent decision of the US Supreme Court on insider trading, reported in the Economist,  has not received the attention it deserves.

The Court was asked to review a decision of an Appeals court in an insider trading case. The Appeals court had overturned the conviction of two hedge fund managers accused of insider trading. The Supreme Court refused the reivew, which means the Appeals court decision stands.

The Appeals court decision is significant. It ruled that the fact that the recipient had benefited from information (which was the case with the two fund managers) and was a friend or family member of the recipient was not sufficient to obtain a conviction. It prescribed two standards:

• Prosecutors must prove that the provider had a 'direct personal benefit'
• Prosecutors must also prove that the recipient was aware that the provider should not have been providing the information and that the provider received a benefit

The two new standards seem to imply that if somebody passes on information that benefits the recipient but not the provider  (in a 'direct' way), then it cannot be said to be insider trading. As the Economist points out, a CEO who passes on information that benefits the recipient without the CEO being compensated may avoid prosecution hereafter.

The interesting question that arises is how the case of Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey head who is serving a jail sentence currently, will come to be viewed. Mr Gupta was not seen to have been compensated directly from the trades that happened consequent to the information he was said to have passed on. Yet, it was held that he had a relationship with fund manager Rajaratnam from which he stood to benefit. Does this constitute insider trading in light of the two criteria now laid down?

Capital markets are no longer about capital

Apple has raised an enormous amount of capital- to hand back cash to shareholders. It is sitting on tonnes of cash, yet resorted to the capital market because repatriating cash to the US from other parts of the world would have been tax inefficient. This, says John Kay in an article in the  FT, "illustrates a paradox in the modern relationship between business and finance. Companies have never had so little need for capital nor so much engagement with capital markets.

The point about listing in the market is not to raise capital- knowledge-based businesses do not need to own a whole lot of assets and hence do not need large amounts of capital. Rather, listing on the exchange has to do with providing an exit route to investors or rewards to managers who own stock options: "corporate governance, not capital allocation, is the principal economic and social function of those capital markets.".

What does this mean for investment banks, one of whose main businesses, was raising capital for firms? It would mean loss of a significant stream of revenue. Another important stream, proprietary trading, is being whittled away by regulation. No wonder investment banks are losing their sheen, as reflected in market value to book value ratios.

UK's 'cash for access' affair

I had to pinch myself in disbelief when I read this. UK's fund managers pay brokers for getting access to the latter's CEO clients. The payment rate is as much as $20,000 an hour and total spending on this account in the sector runs into millions, FT reports.

Ed Harley, head of asset management supervision at the FSA, raised the prospect of multimillion-pound fines for fund managers found to be in breach of its rules......Mr Harley said analysis by the FSA of the use of client commissions by 15 asset managers found large payments that were “hard to justify”. The bulk of them covered payments for corporate access, alongside smaller sums for access to market data.

Why would fund managers pay for access to CEOs? Presumably, they glean information that is not otherwise available? There is public disclosure of information and CEOs take conference calls from analysts and fund managers after results are disclosed. So, what exactly is to be gained by meeting the CEOs in person? And if there is something to be gained, does not that not qualify as insider information?

Incidentally, ending cash payments for access may not solve the problem. There are so many other ways in which fund managers can take care of cooperative brokers and CEOs. 

Guru of microfinance under fire

Mohammed Yunus, the Nobel prize winning founder of Grameen Bank and originator of the idea of microfinance, is facing an investigation over alleged diversion of funds given by a European donor from the Bank to an affiliated organisation. He has now come under fire from his PM, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, FT reports.

Wajed is quoted as saying, "Micro-lenders make the people of this country their guinea pig ... They are sucking blood from the poor in the name of poverty alleviation.”

More ammunition for critics of microfinance in this country. Don't expect anything to move until the RBI's Malegam committee submits its report, expected in mid-January.

Microfinance myths

Now that recoveries of microfinance institutions in AP have virtually ground to a halt, what happens to bank exposure to MFIs of some Rs 27,000 crore? I am surprised that the question has not been posed thus far. Under the agreement between the financial services secretary and MFIs, not only MFIs cap their interest rate at 24%, they will now only have monthly repayment with repayments to be made at an approved panchayat council office. The slightest hint of harassment means the recovery agent could end up in jail.

What sort of recovery is possible in these conditions? Certainly not the 100% claimed by MFIs thus far. I would be very surprised if banks did not end up taking a substantial hit. This should prompt some introspection among banks. How did they fall over each other to lend to entitities that were mostly one-person affairs and whose governance left much to be desired? Did they keep track of cumulative bank exposure to a given MFI?

On a broader note, the MFI model itself will have to be revisited. MFIs should now be brought under stringent regulation, of course, but also on-lending of bank funds through MFIs cannot continue as before. Let MFIs garner their own funds either as equity or as deposits (with deposits being linked to net worth). More on this in my ET column, Five myths about microfinance.

Rating agencies and Indian debt

India has always received a raw deal from rating agencies. This carries a cost to the country. India's present sovereign rating of BBB implies that Indian companies will rate lower and hence pay highs spreads over the risk free rates. Taking into account outstanding ECBs and NRI deposits and assuming that they cost 2 percentage points more than they should, Jaimini Bhagwati estimates that the additional forex outflow to India on this account is $2 bn annually.

Of the rating of BBB for India, Bhagwati writes:

Is it really credible that as of November 2009, the Government of India (GoI) has a higher probability of defaulting, over a five-year horizon, on its external debt obligations as compared to Enron four days before it went bankrupt or Lehman in the second week of September 2008? Currently, the GoI’s BBB– rating is the same as that of Iceland and the UK is rated triple A while China is placed at A+. Are countries rated higher if they impose fewer controls on their capital accounts? Clearly, the answer is that CRAs do not have the answers. One way forward could be for India to push for discussions about perceived anomalies in sovereign ratings in FSB and BCBS forums. Since rating agencies serve a quasi-regulatory function, we could seek the setting up of a multilateral CRA.

UK's financial sector

UK has long prided itself on its competitive financial sector and its comparative advantage in that sector. How did this advantage come about? Because of light regulation. In other words, the UK benefited from regulatory arbitrage. To put it more accurately in light of the ongoing crisis, UK bankers benefited from such arbitrage. So, what's to be done about it?

Martin Wolf reviews an astonishing report prepared by a committee that included UK's chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling. The report recommends “ the financial sector be allowed to recalibrate its activities according to the sentiments and demands of the market”. They must be nuts to recommend this after seeing how the market has worked.

Wolf makes a set of eminently sensible suggestions:

First, the UK needs to make global regulation work. It should discourage regulatory arbitrage even if it expects to gain in the short run.

Second, it must, in particular, help ensure that owners and managers of financial institutions internalise most of the costs of their actions.

Third, it must reject egregious special pleading from the industry. The sector argues that moving derivatives trading on to exchangesmight damage innovation. So what? Maximising innovation is a crazy objective. As in pharmaceuticals, a trade-off exists between innovation and safety. If institutions threaten to take trading activities offshore, banking licences should be revoked.

Fourth, while trying to create a stable and favourable environment for business activities, the UK should try to diversify the economy away from finance, not reinforce its overly strong comparative advantage within it.

Fifth, UK authorities need to ensure that the risks run by institutions they guarantee fall within the financial and regulatory capacity of the British state. They should not let the country be exposed to the risks created by inadequately supported and under-regulated foreign institutions. At the very least, they should not undermine other governments’ efforts to regulate their own institutions.

Since "reforms" are the flavour of the day in India today, let me add that some of the above principles should guide banking sector policy in India as well.

Another scam, another rip-off

Will the bad news for the world's banks never end? As though the losses in the sub-prime crisis was not enough, now comes the news of losses on exposures to an investment fund, rather aptly named Madoff, after its founder Bernard Madoff, former head of Nasdaq.

The investment fund has collapsed reportedly with accumulated losses of $50bn, incurred over several years. Madoff apparently ran a Ponzi scheme in this period, pay off old investors with funds from new investors. The prominent losers mentioned so far:

• HSBC- $ 1bn
• BNP Paribas-$468 mn
• Banco Santander- Euro 17 mn

US opts for nationalisation!

Nationalisation and government ownership may be dirty words in the US but this is not time to fuss about ideology- the crisis in the financial markets required drastic action. So the two secondary mortgage institutions - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac- will go under "conservatorship" which, for all practical purposes, means government owernship.

The government will infuse equity as required and it will also provide debt finance by subscribing to the mortgage backed securities floated by the two institutions. Banks and financial institutions are holding paper issued by the two, so a collapse would have had serious consequences for the already troubled financial sector. The housing market would have seen another fall. Hence the government is stepping in.

FT estimates the cost of the rescue at around $200 bn - or nearly 1.5% of GDP. S& P places the cost at 2.5% of GDP. That's smaller than the $300 bn (in today's terms) that it cost to save savings and loans institutions in the US in the eighties. Still, the amount is not exactly small change. In India, the government has spent a total of $7.5 bn to recapitalise the banking system- or under 2% of GDP. But this was roundly condemned at the time. The same editorial writers (in India) are lauding the US government for its rescue act today- what's good for the US is evidently not good enough for us Indians.

The rescue should calm frayed nerves in the US banking system and elsewhere. It should also help put a floor on housing prices for the US. So it's good news for the world economy. The US economy has grown against all odds in the first two quarters and it increasingly appears that it's the UK economy that stands to suffer most in the present crisis, not the US.

Raghuram Rajan Committee

The Raghuram Rajan committee on financial sector reforms, constituted by the Planning Commission, submitted its draft report sometime ago. I have a critique of the banking sector reforms proposals contained in the report in EPW (Aug 9-15, 2008).

A few things I would like to highlight:

• The report does not recommend privatisation on all public sector banks. It is rather more cautious than, say, the Percy Mistry report. It urges experimenting with sale of a few under-performing PSBs to foreign banks.
• On opening up to foreign banks, the committee does not favour a level playing field with domestic banks right away. It wants abolition of branch licenses for domestic banks, followed by extension of the same to foreign banks with a lag of a couple of years or so.
• It prefers reform of PSBs through overhaul of governance. But some of its proposals, such as the government not appointing top management and leaving this to an independent board, are unlikely to fly. With good reason. 'Leave it to an independent board' sounds very lofty but it risks creating a dangerous governance vacuum where we can least afford it- the banking sector. And now is the not the time to be singing the praise of independent boards in the financial sector-see what has happened to some of the best known names worldwide in the sub-prime crisis.
  

Rating agencies - only a light rap?

Moody's confession of a botched $1 bn securities rating, thanks to a computer bug, is only latest in a series of woes for the ratings industry. Let's face it- rating agencies are not the most popular species in the financial sector today. They had eggs on their face after the East Asian crisis; they seem to have gone and blown it again in the sub-prime crisis.

But it appears the agencies will get away with a mild rap or two. The Economist reported last month that despite half a dozen agencies looking into their role in the recent crisis, the outcomes will be inconsequential: a commitment not permit 'ratings shopping' among clients; more transparency; more disclosure of the collateral; and the like. No fines, no crippling prohibitions.

I guess part of the reason is that it's hard to find an alternative- an independent rating agency promoted by government and funded by investors through the exchanges is a non-starter because governments getting into financial markets is the last thing people want.

The role of rating agencies is poised to get bigger with the implementation of Basel II because, for starters, most banks will rely on the ratings approach- this requires capital to set aside based on ratings assigned to borrowers by rating agencies. Basel II itself is under discussion now. I think there is a case for allowing the better banks to go with their own internal ratings instead of requiring them to go by rating agencies' ratings.

In India, I can't see that the better banks' rating of borrowers is likely to be of lower quality than that of the agencies- most banks, in any case, use the rating models supplied by the agencies and superimpose their own judgement. This probably makes more sense than banks relying entirely on the rating agencies.

Regulatory lessons from sub prime crisis

What are the regulatory lessons from the sub-prime crisis? In the barrage of comment, I flagged the following:

• Liquidity risk needs more attention than hitherto
• Rating of securitisation tranches needs to be put under the scanner
• How much of securitisation is permissible- and how much of the loans should remain with the originator- may need thinking through
• We need better pricing of risk although where the models have gone wrong is not clear
• Greater transparency is required in respect of derviatives exposures- in credit default swaps, for instance, the total volume of contracts written on an underlying credit must be known

Fair enough but let me mention two others that I think require even closer attention. One is higher capital at banking. In my ET column, Revisiting bank regulation, I argue that this is required not so much for the conventional reason, as a first line of defence against risk, but for containing incentives in banking. High leverage is creating incentives for managers to take undue risks and one way to rein this in is to impose a higher capital requirement.

But this is not enough. We need a more direct attack on incentives- and this may require regulatory action because I doubt that the banking industry will want to do anything about it once the crisis blows over. I have written about this in earlier posts but, very briefly, three steps are in order:

• the magnitude of bonuses needs to be contained
• bonuses at the top must be in the form of stock options that vest over a period of at least five years
• bonuses must not be paid out in full for a given year of performance; a big percentage must be held over for, say, five years and it must be used for adjustment against any losses that a manager inflicts on the bank.
  

Reining in bankers's incentives

Martin Wolf weighs in on the side of those believe that incentives in banking are flawed and need to be reined in:

By paying huge bonuses on the basis of short-term performance in a system in which negative bonuses are impossible, banks create gigantic incentives to disguise risk-taking as value-creation.

We would be better off with Jupiter’s 12-year “year”, since it takes about that long to know how profitable strategies have been. The point is that a year is an astronomical, not an economic, phenomenon (as it once was, when harvests were decisive). So we must ensure that a substantial part of pay is better aligned to the realities of the business: that is, is made in restricted stock redeemable over a run of years (ideally, as many as 10).

Yet individual institutions cannot change their systems of remuneration on their own, without losing talented staff to the competition. So regulators may have to step in. The idea of such official intervention is horrible, but the alternative of endlessly repeated crises is even worse.

.....all bonuses and a portion of salary for top managers should be paid in restricted stock, redeemable in instalments over, say, 10 years or, if regulators are feeling generous, five.

Yes, locking in rewards over a long period will help as will payment in stock. If rewards are to be in made in cash, only a portion of the rewards announced for a year should be paid out; the rest should be held back over the business cycle and adjusted for losses bankers' run up. When one bank poaches people from another, the vesting period of options assumed by the hiring bank should remain unchanged.

Bankers' pay

I have written in an earlier post and in other posts about how the incentive system at banks and investment banks needs to be overhauled if recurring financial crises are to be avoided.

The problem I have been highlighting is the heads-I-win-tails- the- firms- loses syndrome. Bankers rake in bonuses when they do well. When they run up losses, it is for the firm to pick up the pieces. At the most, bankers may lose their jobs and a portion of stock options that have not vested. But they would still have the accumulated bonuses of the past to enjoy life.

I have argued that only a portion of bonuses due should be paid out in a given year; the rest should be credited to an account in which there will be entries for bonuses for profits and negative bonuses for losses. At the end of, say, five years, the balance would be paid out to managers.

I note with satisfaction that my view finds endorsement from Raghuram Rajan, former Chief Economist of the IMF. Writing in the FT, Rajan says:

Compensation structures that reward managers annually for profits, but do not claw these rewards back when losses materialise, encourage the creation of fake alpha. Significant portions of compensation should be held in escrow to be paid only long after the activities that generated that compensation occur.

Rajan also makes the point that excess returns- that is, returns in excess of that warranted by a given level of risk- are rarely achieved. What a manager claims as excess return is actually a level of return for which the appropriate risk has not been factored in. Very often, the risk shows up much later in the form of a loss, not in the year in which performance is being measured. That's why a big chunk of bonuses must be deferred.