The Problem with the Profit Motive in Finance

Justin Fox is editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group

The Financial Services Roundtable, the lobbying group for the biggest financial companies in the U.S., has a new “white paper” out with the rah rah title, “Financial Services: Safer & Stronger in 2012.” A few of the bullet points:

•Banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have $1.5 trillion in capital — the highest capital levels in the history of American banking.• The largest U.S. banks have increased Tier 1 capital — the core measure of a bank’s financial strength from a regulator’s point of view — by nearly 50 percent over the last four years.
• Executive compensation has been reformed significantly to align with long-term performance.
• Banks have developed fortress balance sheets, improving credit quality by 54 percent, increasing net income and, restoring aggregate lending to pre-crisis levels of nearly $7 trillion.

Why you’re very welcome, Financial Services Roundtable! You see, almost all of the positive indicators above were enabled by or forced on banks by people working for us the taxpayers (by which I mean Congress, the Federal Reserve, and financial regulators). Most of them — increased capital, executive compensation changes, higher credit quality, fortress balance sheets — would have been fought tooth and nail by the Financial Services Roundtable before the financial crisis. (Because Jamie Dimon always gets bent out of shape when people tar all bankers with the same brush, it should be noted that JP Morgan Chase and a few other institutions were improving credit quality and building up capital before 2007. But the industry as a whole was not. If it had been, there wouldn’t have been a financial crisis.)

There’s a lesson here. If you let the financial services industry do exactly what it wants, the financial services industry will eventually get itself — and by extension the economy — into staggering amounts of trouble. If you force it to behave, it might just thrive.

Read the rest here.