Desonestidade e finanças

Justin Fox escreve, na sua coluna na Bloomberg (via aqui) sobre o julgamento do fundo soberano da Malásia e o papel de Leissner, ex-funcionário do Goldman Sachs. O processo revelou que Leissner falsificou seus documentos de divórcio, criou contas falsas de e-mail, casou com várias mulheres ao mesmo tempo, além de estar sendo julgado por um dos maiores furtos da história.

Leissner declarou culpado, mas a questão, para Fox, é como Leissner chegou na posição de destaque de uma instituição de "prestígio"? Fox lembra de um artigo publicado no, aqui sim, prestigioso Management Science, com o título de Social Preference of Young Professionals and the Financial Industry. O resultado é muito, mas muito, ruim para a área financeira. Basicamente, os estudantes mais "desonestos" escolhem finanças para trabalhar. 

Em 1995 um jogo de "investimento" foi criado por três professores de contabilidade onde um grupo da sala A decide quanto, de zero a 10, será encaminhado para uma outra sala. Para cada unidade encaminhada, o valor será triplicado quando chegar na sala B. As pessoas da sala B decidem quanto  do dinheiro triplicado irão manter e quanto irão devolver para seus colegas da sala A. 

É um jogo de confiança. Quanto mais dinheiro os jogadores da sala A optarem por mandar para sala B, mais confiante que o dinheiro irá retornar. Se não existe confiança, o jogador da sala A não manda nada. Se existe plena confiança, o jogador da sala A irá enviar todo dinheiro, que chegará como sendo $30 para os jogadores de B. A decisão mais egoísta de B seria não enviar nada para A. Uma possibilidade "justa" seria retornar com $15. Mas no chamado equilíbrio de Nash a solução é não enviar nada. 

Na prática os participantes não fazem isto. Eu uma das aplicações, realizadas em 2013, na Alemanha, os participantes enviaram 38,7% de A para B, que devolveu 20,5% do valor triplicado. Ao final, para cada $10 inicial, a sala A ficou com $6,13 (a diferença entre $10 menos 3,87) mais 2,38 - que corresponde a 3,87 x 3 x 0,205 ou 8,51. Os alunos da sala B ficaram com 9,23. Nesta pesquisa de 2013 os investigadores perguntaram qual seu interesse em termos de profissão. Não observaram muita diferença entre as respostas, exceto em um ponto. Nos participantes da sala B, os alunos que escolheram finanças devolveram somente 15,5% do dinheiro. Algum tempo depois, os pesquisadores olharam onde estavam os alunos. Aqueles que trabalhavam com finanças devolveram, em média, 14,8%. 

Isto pode ser um sintoma do "egoísmo" no campo de finanças. Uma possível explicação é o elevado salário da área, que atrai as pessoas mais egoístas. 

O que podemos aprender sobre isto tudo? Ao ler o artigo de Justin Fox eu pensei imediatamente: não confie nos consultores financeiros (de seu banco ou independentes). 

Previsão de volatilidade via machine learning

Resumo:

The support vector regression (SVR) is a supervised machine learning technique that has been successfully employed to forecast financial volatility. As the SVR is a kernel-based technique, the choice of the kernel has a great impact on its forecasting accuracy. Empirical results show that SVRs with hybrid kernels tend to beat single-kernel models in terms of forecasting accuracy. Nevertheless, no application of hybrid kernel SVR to financial volatility forecasting has been performed in previous researches. Given that the empirical evidence shows that the stock market oscillates between several possible regimes, in which the overall distribution of returns it is a mixture of normals, we attempt to find the optimal number of mixture of Gaussian kernels that improve the one-period-ahead volatility forecasting of SVR based on GARCH(1,1). The forecast performance of a mixture of one, two, three and four Gaussian kernels are evaluated on the daily returns of Nikkei and Ibovespa indexes and compared with SVR–GARCH with Morlet wavelet kernel, standard GARCH, Glosten–Jagannathan–Runkle (GJR) and nonlinear EGARCH models with normal, student-t, skew-student-t and generalized error distribution (GED) innovations by using mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE) and robust Diebold–Mariano test. The results of the out-of-sample forecasts suggest that the SVR–GARCH with a mixture of Gaussian kernels can improve the volatility forecasts and capture the regime-switching behavior.

Bezerra, P.C.S. & Albuquerque, P.H.M. Comput Manag Sci (2016). doi:10.1007/s10287-016-0267-0
Computational Management Science

Rir é o melhor remédio

Top 10 palestras TED envolvendo contabilidade e finanças

#1. Chris McKnett: A lógica do investimento para sustentabilidade

A sustentabilidade é claramente um dos objetivos mais importantes do mundo; mas que grupos podem realmente obter progresso ambiental de vento em popa? Chris McKnett diz que são os grandes investidores institucionais. Ele mostra como grandes dados financeiros não são suficientes, e revela por que investidores também precisam olhar para as estruturas ambientais, sociais e de governança.

#2. Loretta Napoleoni: A intrincada economia do terrorismo

Loretta Napoleoni detalha sua rara oportunidade de entrevistar membros do grupo italiano Brigadas Vermelhas, uma experiência que despertou seu interesse pelo terrorismo. Ela mostra os bastidores do complexo sistema econômico por trás do terrorismo e revela uma surpreendente conexão entre lavagem de dinheiro e o Ato Patriótico dos Estados Unidos.

#3. Paul Kemp-Robertson: Bitcoin. Suor. Ace. Conheça o futuro da moeda de marca.

Dinheiro — as notas e moedas que você tem em sua carteira e na sua conta no banco — é baseado no comércio, na crença de que os bancos e o governo são confiáveis. Agora, Paul Kemp-Robertson nos apresenta uma nova geração do dinheiro, sustentada pelo mesmo comércio ... mas em nome de uma marca privada. Dos pontos de suor da Nike até embalagens de Ace (que têm sido usadas inesperadamente em mercados negros), conheça o futuro "sem bancos" do dinheiro.

#4. Cameron Herold: Vamos educar as crianças para serem empreendedoras

Entediado na escola, fracassando nos estudos, descordando com colegas: Essa criança deve ser uma empreendedora, é o que diz Cameron Herold. No TEDxEdmoton, ele estimula a criação e educação que ajudará futuros empreendedores a amadurecerem - como crianças e adultos.

#5. Annette Heuser: As três agências com poder de construir ou destruir economias.

A forma como classificamos economias nacionais está toda errada, diz a reformadora de agências de classificação de risco Annette Heuser. Com misteriosos e obscuros métodos, as três agências de classificação americanas detêm imenso poder sobre economias nacionais em todo o mundo, e as consequências podem ser catastróficas. Mas, e se existisse outro jeito? Nesta audaciosa conversa, Heuser compartilha conosco sua visão de uma agência sem fins lucrativos que traria mais igualdade e justiça ao cenário atual.

#6. Mariana Mazzucato: Governo: investidor, assume os riscos, inovador

Por que o governo simplesmente não sai do caminho e deixa o setor privado, os "verdadeiros revolucionários", inovar? É a retórica que se escuta em todo lugar, e Mariana Mazzucato quer acabar com isso. Em uma palestra enérgica, ela mostra como o Estado, que muitos veem como um gigante lento e antiquado, é realmente um de nossos mais animados assumidores de riscos e formadores de mercado.

#7. Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: Mulheres empresárias, exemplo não exceção

Mulheres não são micro — então por que elas só conseguem microempréstimos? Em TEDxWomen, a repórter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon argumenta que mulheres administrando todos os tipos de empresas — de negócios na própria casa às maiores fábricas — são a solução negligenciada para o desenvolvimento econômico.

#8. Geoff Mulgan: Pós-colapso, investindo em um mundo melhor

À medida que reiniciamos a economia mundial, Geoff Mulgan levanta uma questão: Ao invés de favorecer financeiramente velhas empresas, por que não usar estes fundos para estimular companhias novas e socialmente responsáveis — e fazer do mundo um lugar melhor?

#9. David S. Rose em: Fazendo Apresentações para um Investidor de Riscos I.R. (Venture Capitalists V.C.)

Pensando em abrir um negócio? Palestra na Universidade TED no estilo fogo cruzado de David S Rose na qual ele fala sobre como fazer a apresentação de seu negócio a um I.R. - Investidor de Risco e sobre as 10 coisas que você precisa saber sobre si — e provar ao investidor de risco — antes de disparar seus slides.

#10. Jessica Jackley: Pobreza, dinheiro — e amor

O que você pensa das pessoas que vivem na pobreza? Talvez o mesmo que Jessica Jackley costumava pensar: que "eles" precisam da "nossa" ajuda, na forma de algumas moedas como doação. A co-fundadora da Kiva.org fala sobre como sua percepção mudou e como seu trabalho com micro-empréstimos deu poder às pessoas que vivem com poucos dólares por dia.

Fontes: Aqui e aqui.

O papel da contabilidade nas finanças comportamentais

Resumo:

This short letter argues that insights from behavioral accounting are highly relevant for studies examining human aspects in finance. This is important because research focusing on the users of financial information and their characteristics often assumes that financial information in itself is neutral, unbiased and value-free. However, the information used by investors and capital markets participants for making economic decisions is prepared by accountants, who use their professional judgments by interpreting and applying accounting standards.

Fonte: Andreas Hellmann, The role of accounting in behavioral finance, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Volume 9, March 2016, Pages 39-42, ISSN 2214-6350.

Big Four no Vaticano

Segundo o Accountancy Age, a PWC será responsável por auditar as contas do Vaticano na tentativa do Papa de excomungar a corrupção na igreja. O Papa afirmou que a empresa começará imediatamente e trabalhará em harmonia com o Cardinal George Pell, o australiano apontado para encabeçar o recém-formado Secretariado para a Economia, com o propósito de supervisionar as finanças papais após uma série de escândalos.

O Papa Francisco repetidamente prometeu limpar a opacidade das finanças do Vaticano onde diversas igrejas deixaram de seguir os padrões internacionais de contabilidade que, em 2013, basicamente, encerrou o relacionamento do Vaticano com os mercados financeiros.

Em junho um ex-Deloitte, Libero Milone, foi contratado como primeiro auditor geral. Há dois anos, a KPMG foi contratada para aconselhar quanto aos procedimentos de contabilidade interna e a EY para verificar e consultar a atividade econômica da cidade estado do Vaticano.

Leia também: Banco do Vaticano

A indústria financeira beneficia a sociedade?

After the Great Recession, finance has gotten a bad rap as a professional calling: A survey last December found that nearly half of Americans think that the financial system hurts the economy. Even among readers of The Economist—where bankers presumably have home-field advantage—a poll found that 57 percent disagreed with the statement that “financial innovation boosts economic growth.”

Luigi Zingales, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, has been studying the public’s post-recession loss of faith in the financial sector. In a speech delivered in early January at the annual meeting of the American Finance Association, Zingales argued that academic economists' views on the financial sector are too rosy in comparison to the public's mistrust.

Entrevista com professor Luigi Zingales continua aqui.

Resumo do artigo publicado no Journal of Finance;

Academics’ view of the benefits of finance vastly exceeds societal perception. This dissonance is at least partly explained by an underappreciation by academia of how, without proper rules, finance can easily degenerate into a rent-seeking activity. I outline what finance academics can do, from a research point of view and from an educational point of view, to promote good finance and minimize the bad.

ZINGALES, L. (2015), Presidential Address: Does Finance Benefit Society?. The Journal of Finance, 70: 1327–1363. doi:10.1111/jofi.12295

Rir é o melhor remédio

O efeito Gordon Gekko: consequencias da cultura na industria financeira

The Gordon Gekko Effect: The Role of Culture in the Financial Industry
Andrew W. Lo
NBER Working Paper No. 21267
June 2015
JEL No. G01,G28,G3,M14,Z1

ABSTRACT

Culture is a potent force in shaping individual and group behavior, yet it has received scant attention in the context of financial risk management and the recent financial crisis. I present a brief overview of the role of culture according to psychologists, sociologists, and economists, and then present a specific
framework for analyzing culture in the context of financial practices and institutions in which three questions are answered: (1) What is culture?; (2) Does it matter?; and (3) Can it be changed? I illustrate the utility of this framework by applying it to five concrete situations—Long Term Capital Management; AIG Financial Products; Lehman Brothers and Repo 105; Société Générale’s rogue trader; and the
SEC and the Madoff Ponzi scheme—and conclude with a proposal to change culture via “behavioralrisk management.

 

Endogeneidade em pesquisas de contabilidade e finanças

This paper provides a discussion of endogeneity as it relates to finance and accounting research. We discuss the textbook solutions: two-stage least squares, instrumental variables, differenced generalized method of moments (GMM) and system GMM and provide a unifying framework showing how they are related. We consider the limitations of these techniques and then detail a state-of-the-art solution, utilizing a natural experiment as a way of mitigating endogeneity and building stronger theory.

Gippel, J., Smith, T. and Zhu, Y. (2015), Endogeneity in Accounting and Finance Research: Natural Experiments as a State-of-the-Art Solution. Abacus, 51: 143–168. doi: 10.1111/abac.12048

José Sheinkman recebe prêmio

 

CME Group-MSRI Prize recognizes individuals who contribute original concepts in mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the markets' behavior and global economics.  Scheinkman, Edwin W. Rickert Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics (emeritus) at Princeton University and a Research Associate at the NBER, has done extensive research on this year's panel topic.  His focus has been on building mathematical models that shed light on a variety of economic and social phenomena.  Phenomena such as: economic fluctuations, the nature of competition, the growth of cities, informal economic activity, the spatial distribution of crime, and the dynamics of price bubbles."

Other recipients of the CME Group-MSRI Prize include:

• 2013 - Dr. Bengt Holmstrom, Professor of Economics, MIT
• 2012 - Robert Shiller, Professor of Economics, Yale University; and 2013 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
• 2011 - Thomas Sargent, Professor of Economics, New York University; and 2011 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

 Fonte: aqui

Econofísica: desafio para econometristas

Abstract

The study contrasts mainstream economics–operating on time scales of hours and days–with behavioural finance, econophysics and high-frequency trading, more applicable to short-term time scales of the order of minutes and seconds. We show how the central theoretical assumption underpinning prevailing economic theories is violated on small time scales. We also demonstrate how an alternative behavioural econophysics can model reactions of market participants to short-term movements in foreign exchange markets and, in a direct contradiction of the orthodox economics, design a rudimentary IsingFX automated trading system.

By replacing costly human forex dealers with banks of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices that implement in hardware high-frequency behavioural trading models of the type described here, brokerages and forex liquidity providers can expect to gain significant reductions in operating costs.

Fonte:
Christopher A. Zapart, Econophysics: A challenge to econometricians, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 419, 1 February 2015, Pages 318-327, ISSN 0378-4371, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2014.10.013. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437114008516)

Keywords: Econophysics; Econometrics; Approximate Entropy; Ising spin model; High-frequency trading; Foreign exchange currency markets

Engenharia financeira pode curar o câncer?

 

This may seem an odd question, but can financial engineering cure cancer? No less of an intellectual light than Andrew W. Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the Future of Finance Advisory Council believes financial engineering may be a potent weapon in the quest to find a cure. In fact, this was the topic of Lo’s presentation at the recent Fixed-Income Management Conference in Boston.
Lo’s thesis rests on several key points:

• Applying portfolio theory to finding a cure for cancer helps increase expected returns and lower expected risks for the capital deployed.
• Applying financial engineering through securitization allows for financing a cure for cancer in a smarter way that ensures greater participation from prospective investors.
• Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that human genome mapping allows for the identification of problematic genes that may be targeted by customized medicines to fight specific cancers.

Notorious capital destroyers, biotech investments of more than $400 billion have never generated returns in the aggregate covering their costs of capital. In fact, venture capital firms are so discouraged by their returns that the number and size of biotech investments has steadily declined from their peaks in 2007–2008.
Lo thinks he knows why biotech investments have generated such poor returns: the industry is financed incorrectly. Specifically, he thinks the business models are bad because as biotech gets more knowledgeable, the business gets riskier. Lo believes that cures for cancers are unique to each patient and therefore require unique drug treatments as opposed to massively scalable compounds. Yet, the pharmaceutical industry cannot recoup its massive investment in research unless it has blockbuster drugs that can generate returns to compensate for massive upfront costs.

This is where portfolio management comes in. To find cures for cancer, investors must fund about 150 projects in order to lower the standard deviation of possible returns from cancer cure projects. With such a high number of viable projects, it becomes possible to issue debt. Once it is possible to issue debt, securitization concepts may be layered on top of portfolio theory to find viable cancer cures.
As with traditional securitization, various tranches would be created for different risk appetites and with different guarantees for creditors buying those differently segmented risky tranches. Equity portions of the return stream could then be financed by the traditional risk preference buyers, such as private equity and venture capital. Now the combination of portfolio management and securitization makes for a viable business, according to Lo.

This plan rests on a critical assumption: that researchers can find a cure for cancer. To support his belief that a cure for cancer may be found, Lo pointed to:

• The mapping of the human genome.
• The ability to analyze an individual patient’s genes and compare these genes to known genetic defects that lead to unique cancers.
• Customized drugs that suppress the expression of “bad” genes.

Specifically, Lo offered up the story of Lukas Wartman, a cancer researcher who himself developed a very rare form of cancer with only a 5% survival rate. Wartman’s colleagues were so moved by his personal calamity that they set to finding a cure. After mapping his genes and noticing an overexpressed gene in his RNA, they then used a drug, Sutent, designed specifically to suppress that gene. Though Sutent was originally designed for a different disease, Wartman was almost immediately cured of his cancer.

While this may sound encouraging, as evidence, it strikes me as weak. First, the evidence is anecdotal and based on one person’s very unique circumstances. Yes, genome mapping is widely available and was able to identify an overexpressed gene in Wartman’s RNA that might have been responsible for his cancer; but what a fortunate coincidence that there was an extant drug, Sutent, available to suppress the overexpressed gene. With estimates for the number of genes in the human genome of at least 21,000 there would clearly need to be many more drugs developed. Further, development costs for Sutent, while not precisely available, are known to be in the tens of millions of US dollars.

Lo imagines a $30 billion cancer fund being established and funded by 10 million households investing $3,000 each. According to Lo, this would be relatively easy to procure and to make his point, he queried delegates on how many people would be willing to participate in such a fund. Nearly the entire audience raised their hands. Yet, Lo overlooks one important fact, a room full of investment managers and analysts see the possible marginal loss of $3,000 as small in comparison to their overall net worth. I am not sure that this perception would hold for middle class families, in general.

Financial engineering may have a place in helping to find a cure for cancer, but at what price tag will the niche targeted drugs be developed?

Fonte: aqui

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Traditional financing sources such as private and public equity may not be ideal for investment projects with low probabilities of success, long time horizons, and large capital requirements. Nevertheless, such projects, if not too highly correlated, may yield attractive risk-adjusted returns when combined into a single portfolio. Such "megafund" portfolios may be too large to finance through private or public equity alone. But with sufficient diversification and risk analytics, debt financing via securitization may be feasible. Credit enhancements (i.e., derivatives and government guarantees) can also improve megafund economics. We present an analytical framework and illustrative empirical examples involving cancer research.

Fagnan, David E., Jose Maria Fernandez, Andrew W. Lo, and Roger M. Stein. 2013. "Can Financial Engineering Cure Cancer?" American Economic Review,103(3): 406-11.

Grande parte dos achados publicados em Finanças são falsos positivos

Entrevista com Campbell Harvey, PHD em Chicago. Professor da Duke University. Ex-editor do Journal of Finance. Vice-preseidente da American Finance Association

Q: Investors often rely on financial research when developing strategies. Your recent findings suggest they should be wary. What did you find?

Campbell Harvey: My paper is about how we conduct research as both academics and practitioners. I was inspired by a paper published in the biomedical field that argued that most scientific tests that are published in medicine are false. I then gathered information on 315 tests that were conducted in finance. After I corrected the test statistics, I found that about half the tests were false. That is, someone was claiming a discovery when there was no real discovery.

Q: What do you mean “correcting the tests”?

Campbell Harvey: The intuition is really simple. Suppose you are trying to predict something like the returns on a portfolio of stocks. Suppose you try 200 different variables. Just by pure chance, about 10 of these variables will be declared “significant” – yet they aren’t. In my paper, I show this by randomly generating 200 variables. The simulated data is just noise, yet a number of the variables predict the portfolio of stock returns. Again, this is what you expect by chance. The contribution of my paper is to show how to correct the tests. The picture above looks like an attractive and profitable investment. The picture below shows 200 random strategies (i.e. the data are made up). The profitable investment is just the best random strategy (denoted in dark red). Hence, it is not an attractive investment — its profitability is purely by chance!

Q: So you provide a new set of research guidelines?

Campbell Harvey: Exactly. Indeed, we go back in time and detail the false research findings. We then extrapolate our model out to 2032 to give researchers guidelines for the next 18 years.

Q: What are the practical implications of your research?

Campbell Harvey: The implications are provocative. Our data mainly focuses on academic research. However, our paper applies to any financial product that is sold to investors. A financial product is, for example, an investment fund that purports to beat some benchmark such as the S&P 500. Often a new product is proposed and there are claims that it outperformed when it is run on historical data (this is commonly called “backtesting” in the industry). The claim of outperformance is challenged in our paper. You can imagine researchers on Wall Street trying hundreds if not thousands of variables. When you try so many variables, you are bound to find something that looks good. But is it really good – or just luck?

Q: What do you hope people take away from your research?

Campbell Harvey: Investors need to realize that about half of the products they are sold are false – that is, there is expected to be no outperformance in the future; they were just lucky in their analysis of historical data.

Q: What reactions have Wall Street businesses had so far to your findings?

Campbell Harvey: A number of these firms have struggled with this problem. They knew it existed (some of their products “work” just by chance). It is in their own best interest to deliver on promises to their clients. Hence, my work has been embraced by the financial community rather than spurned.

Professor Harvey’s research papers, “Evaluating Trading Strategies“, “…and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns” and “Backtesting” are available at SSRN for free download.

Fonte: aqui

Outra explicação aqui

Mestre das Finanças: Entrevista com Robert C. Merton

Mestre das Finanças: Entrevista com Paul Samuelson

Mestres das Finanças: Entrevista com Gene Fama

O que é risco sistêmico?

O prémio Nobel da Economia de 2013 Lars Peter Hansen diz que o conhecimento sobre o conceito de "risco sistémico" é "fundamentalmente vago". Por isso defende que desenhar políticas com base nesse conceito "torna esse desenho difícil de fazer em termos de transparência" e de comunicação.

Os economistas ainda têm pouco conhecimento sobre o conceito de “risco sistémico”. Quem o diz é o prémio Nobel da Economia Lars Peter Hansen. O professor da Universidade de Chicago foi um dos oradores do V Congresso da Distribuição Moderna.

“O que é risco sistémico? Essa é uma boa questão. Os economistas não têm boas respostas sobre o que é exactamente isso”, afirmou o economista no seu discurso.

Hansen defende que este conceito surgiu com a crise financeira e foi “muito usado nas discussões de políticaeconómica” mas em termos de modelos formais “há conhecimento limitado sobre o que é”.

O conceito é “fundamentalmente vago”, garante, por isso usá-lo como base para desenhar políticas “torna esse desenho difícil de fazer em termos de transparência” e de comunicação.

Fonte: Jornal de Negócios - Portugal

Os verdadeiros titãs das finanças não são mais os bancos

[...]
What is really striking is the volume of non-bank financing that is quietly being supplied to western economies with minimal regulatory scrutiny – a trend on which my colleague Henny Sender has reported extensively. The “non-bankers” who provide it now matter as much as the bankers, and they appear to be having more fun. Results released in the past two weeks by asset management groups illustrate the point. Last decade, Goldman Sachs’ return on equity peaked at 40 per cent. Last year it was just 11 per cent. Meanwhile, KKR’s return on equity was 27.4 per cent in 2013 - a margin that the banks can only dream of.

These groups’ recent profits were boosted by sales of companies they acquired several years ago. But today they are branching out beyond turnround activity, partly because there are fewer new deals around, and jumping into areas that were the terrain of banks: credit and property.
The only reason non-banks can turn a profit by extending credit is that banks are no longer supplying credit to risky endeavours, such as small companies

Only a quarter of Apollo’s $160bn-odd business is now focused on private equity. It has recently gobbled up so many corporate loans and bonds that its credit portfolio has exploded to more than $100bn, compared to just $4bn seven years ago. At Blackstone and KKR the switch is less dramatic: according to Bloomberg’s calculations, credit is just a quarter of their portfolios. But they are shifting focus too. Just last week, Blackstone announced plans to start extending mortgage credit as part of its property business.

Of course, a $100bn credit book is still smaller than that of JPMorgan. It is bigger than many midsized American banks, however. And the asset managers’ economic footprint is expanding in other ways too. Blackstone’s portfolio companies, for example, now have 600,000 employees and $79bn of revenue. “The private equity houses today look like merchant banks were 100 years ago,” observes Jes Staley, formerly head of JPMorgan’s investment bank (who now works at BlueMountain Capital, an investment group). “They are very big and powerful.”

This may not be entirely desirable. Non-banks are swelling in size because they do not face the same regulatory burdens as banks, allowing them to turn a profit on business that banks now find uneconomic. This worries regulators. The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recently warned that the activities of non-banks has fuelled a boom in risky corporate loans – and warned banks not to “skirt rules” by teaming up with non-banks to create more credit.

But the good news about non-banks is that they are not plagued with the maturity mismatches of real banks; they do not take retail deposits but attract long-term funding instead. That reduces systemic risk; or so regulators hope. And what nobody can deny – even those who dislike this regulatory arbitrage – is that non-banks’ business has swelled due to unmet demand. After all, the only reason that non-banks can turn a profit by extending credit is that banks are no longer supplying enough credit to risky endeavours, such as small companies.

The great irony of the post-2008 regulatory clampdown is that by forcing established banks to become safer, regulators have given wings to a gaggle of new financial players – with potentially unpredictable consequences. Call it, if you like, a triumph of Wall Street’s entrepreneurial spirit; or testament to its unseemly ability to run rings around rules. Either way, financial arbitrage is once again the theme of the day, and it is producing the kind of profits that J Pierpont Morgan would have savoured.

Fonte: aqui

gillian.tett@ft.com

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