Felix Salmon

In mid-2009, I went on a search for apologies, from the people who laid the intellectual and regulatory foundations for the financial crisis. I wondered whether and when Larry Summers, in particular, would apologize for what he did at Treasury, and I was heartened when Bill Clinton came out and said that, with hindsight, he was wrong about derivatives regulation.

Then, in 2010, Inside Job came out, and demonstrated the need for the likes of Summers to be asked direct questions about their culpability on the record, on-camera. But Summers refused to be interviewed for that film, despite having known its director, Charles Ferguson, for many years. And when he does sit down for a rare on-the-record video interview, these questions never seem to get asked.

So I was very happy to see that Krishnan Guru-Murthy at least tried to ask Summers these questions earlier this week. Krishnan starts off with standard Summers-interview questions, asking him what he thinks about UK fiscal policy, and Summers gives his standard wise-man answers. But then Krishan gets steadily tougher, asking Summers about the advice he gave the president-elect in 2008, and eventually about his deregulatory tenure at Treasury.

And Summers doesn’t even come close to apologizing, or admitting that he made any kind of mistake at all. Quite the opposite: he starts getting very touchy, telling Krishnan that he’s reducing complex questions to overly simplistic black-and-white narratives. Halfway through the interview, Krishnan asks Summers whether laissez-faire capitalism isn’t working for the middle classes. And Summers pushes back. “I’m a Democrat,” he says, adding that “I’ve long been someone who favored significant interventions to protect the environment.”

“Protect the environment?” responds Krishnan. “Didn’t you advise the president not to sign up to Kyoto?”

“No, no,” replies Summers.

“You didn’t?”

“No. I advised that an agreement be designed in order to protect the American economy, and the United States not take on obligations that would render its businesses uncompetitive.”

Summers never explains how this differs from advice not to sign up to Kyoto, nor does he give an example of any “significant interventions” he pushed for to protect the environment. Because the interview soon moves on to the subject of deregulation, with Summers saying that he “was for moving derivatives to exchanges” — something Krishnan lets stand — and deciding to pick the ground of Glass-Steagal on which to fight, saying that Lehman and Bear Stearns might have survived had they been part of bigger banks.

Well, yes, they might — but then again, they might also have just created another Citigroup, requiring massive bailouts from the government. Personally, I don’t think that repealing Glass-Steagal was in and of itself a major cause of the financial crisis, but Summers goes further, saying that huge financial supermarkets are a good thing (he holds up Canada as a model).

Krishnan continues to push. “Even Bill Clinton says that he was wrong to listen to the wrong advice when it came to derivatives. And that was your advice.” (Has Summers ever been asked questions like this, on camera, by an American reporter?)

Summers responds, again, that “it’s complicated”, and then builds up to attacking Krishnan:

Would it have been better if the whole of the 2010 financial reform legislation had passed in 1999 or 1998 or 1992? Yes, of course it would have been better. But at the time Bill Clinton was president, there essentially were no credit default swaps. So the issue that became a serious problem really wasn’t an issue that was on the horizon… If you want to assign responsibility, If you take a market that essentially didn’t exist in the 1990s, that grew for eight years from 2001 to 2008, and then brought on a major collapse, if you were looking to hold people responsible, you would look to… officials of the Bush Administration. I’m not going to tell you that I foresaw this crisis in all its dimensions, but without sounding like Newt Gingrich here, for you to read two articles that a researcher handed you and sling this stuff is not really to give your viewers a very clear chance.

Summers is absolutely wrong about credit derivatives not existing in the late 1990s. He was Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001; Euromoney Magazine had splashed the words “Credit Derivatives” all over its front cover in March 1996. And Brooksley Born, between 1996 and 1999, was literally losing sleep over those things as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Summers’s response to Born? To make sure she was marginalized, and, eventually, pushed out of her job entirely.

And of course it’s a bit rich for Summers to criticize Krishnan for asking uninformed questions (they’re not uninformed at all, actually), when he has steadfastly refused to answer informed questions from the likes of Charles Ferguson.

Eventually, Krishnan attempts another tack. “It’s not to put all the blame on you,” he says. “But you started on a trajectory that was then continued by the Bush Administration.” The reply is a classic:

“No, no, no, no. That is just not credibly correct.”

Krishnan then brings up Inside Job and the issue of the revolving door, which of course Summers took full advantage of with his $5-million-a-year job working one day a week for DE Shaw.

“Inside Job had essentially all its facts wrong,” replies Summers, unbelievably, resorting to an argument based on timing: because he didn’t work in financial services before he was Treasury secretary, and because he waited a few years before taking that job at DE Shaw, Summers says it’s “absurd” to blame the revolving door for any of his actions.

It’s weird that Summers, who loves debate, generally refuses to sit down in some public forum and answer serious, informed questions about the legacy of his tenure at Treasury; it might well be that this single interview is the closest we’ll ever get. And on the basis of this interview, it’s clear that, far from apologizing for his actions, Summers is going Full Bluster, denying any culpability, and choosing instead to violently reject and belittle any suggestion that he holds any responsibility for the crisis at all.

If you’re Europe, and your struggling people are called “Greeks”, and your rich people are called “Germans”, then the World Economic Forum will spend pretty much limitless amounts of time and effort on attempts to understand the dynamics between the two and (doomed) plans to try to prevent it from turning into a fully-blown crisis.

On the other hand, if you’re a country — the USA, say — and your struggling people call themselves “the 99%” while your rich people are called “Davos delegates”, then your fundamental asymmetries will be studiously ignored — and, indeed, encouraged.

I went to one session on executive compensation yesterday, which was filled with global CEOs of various stripes. And a couple of questions that Lance Knobel would like to ask were, amazingly, raised: should there be some kind of cap on CEO compensation? Maybe in terms of the ratio between the CEO’s pay and that of the average employee? The answer came swiftly and unanimously: no.

The problem of CEO compensation, it turns out, is not really a problem at all: if you look at most companies, the amount they spend on executive compensation is not really a big part of their revenues. Of course there shouldn’t be any kind of regulation. And capping pay only makes sense if you cap corporate size, and no one wants to do that.

That said, there is one outstanding problem with CEO pay: the time when you most need executive talent is not when things are going great, but rather when things are going badly. And often, in that case, compensation structures linked to stock options and the like turn out to be largely worthless. We’re good at paying CEOs in good times, but we should probably come up with ways of paying them more in bad times, too. After all, that’s when they really prove their mettle.

That panel really helped me understand the general Davos attitude towards Occupy. The delegates here don’t feel threatened by it, so much as they just feel a bit indignant at how misguided it is. Obviously, in a big inchoate sense, inequality is a problem. And maybe Occupy is a manifestation of that problem. But the Davos crowd is not even close to listening carefully to what Occupy has to say: they’re evidence of the problem, but they’re not remotely helpful when it comes to solutions.

As Lance says, “an organization that is at heart a grouping of the world’s largest corporations isn’t necessarily in the best position to improve the state of the world, particularly in an era of the Arab Spring and Occupy”. It’s another way in which Davos feels past its prime. It’s not helping to change the big world problems, in Europe: the best it can do is identify them. And it’s utterly divorced from the movements which really might make a difference.

But hey, at least the skiing is good this year.

I got a glimpse this morning of what Lance Knobel calls Davos’s “class distinctions, even if you have a white badge” — I was invited to a breakfast meeting under the auspices of something called the Industry Partnership Meeting for Financial Services. Which reminds me of that great line from In the Loop :

What you have to do is you’ve got to look for the ten dullest-named committees happening out of the executive branch. Because Linton is not going to call it “The Big Horrible War Committee”. He’s gonna hide it behind a name like “Diverse Strategy”, something so dull you’re just gonna want to self-harm.

This morning’s breakfast appears nowhere on the official Davos program, but because it was an exclusive by-invitation-only event, it managed to become by far the most high-powered session I’ve yet seen, with a large number of shiny-hologram badges and more big-name economists and central bank governors than you’d think possible. They came because this really was an interactive session, where they can talk in a serious and structured way with each other at a very high level.

This being the WEF, there was lip service paid towards the idea that a group of smart and powerful people, if you get them all in the same room, could come up with ways for the international community to improve the state of the world. But the actual participants didn’t show any sign of believing that: they were insightful with respect to diagnosing the state of the world, tentative in proposing solutions, and downright skeptical when it came to handicapping the likelihood that any of those solutions might actually be implemented.

And indeed there was a strong strain of thought which basically said that we already have the optimal level of international cooperation, and that more would not necessarily be better. Consider the two major currencies of the world: while the euro/dollar exchange rate has certainly been volatile over the course of the crisis years, it hasn’t moved as much in total as it did before the crisis, and there’s no sense at all in which we have had a currency crisis. To a very large degree, this is a function of successful international cooperation: the world’s major central banks all talk to each other regularly, and when they needed to do so they quietly and efficiently opened up unlimited swap facilities with each other. Those swap facilities didn’t cost money, in terms of government budgets, but they were an incredibly effective crisis-fighting tool.

Effectively, the unlimited swap lines have solved most of the global liquidity problems, and have prevented the otherwise very scary prospect that a liquidity run could become a self-fulfilling insolvency process. But that of course doesn’t mean that the world’s economies are all solvent. And so the question then arises: if you want to attack solvency rather than liquidity, is international cooperation (i.e., giving the IMF a massive fiscal bazooka) the best way to do so? And the answer there seems to be no. The biggest solvency problems are the problems within the Eurozone, and it is ultimately Europe’s job to get the necessary cash together if it wants to avert a series of fiscal crises.

Germany and other big northern European countries are running very large trade surpluses: they can remit cash to the periphery if they have the political will to do so. And if they don’t have the political will to do so, there’s no way in which the US, China, and the rest of the world can or should step in to try to save the likes of Greece and Portugal.

This kind of thinking is very much in line with the realism, or fatalism, which I’ve seen a lot of in Davos this year. If you control your own currency — if you’re the US, or China — then ultimately you control your own fate, and you only have yourself to blame if you go belly-up or suffer a major crisis. Certainly the rest of the world won’t come to your rescue. That’s one reason why China has such enormous foreign reserves: it needs them as insurance against a crisis. And it also explains why the yuan is not convertible, and there’s a waiting list of 800 companies who want to go public on Chinese stock exchanges but aren’t being allowed to do so: the Chinese government is keeping tight control of its economy and the way that its companies are financed, because once you lose that control, it’s impossible to regain.

In Europe, of course, the politics of transfer payments are much more fraught — and also much harder to understand. One very senior economist told me as we exited the meeting this morning that he too was decidedly unclear on the details of how TARGET2 works, even though he’s meant to be an expert on such things and he knew that it was crucially important. Similarly, while it’s surely very germane and important that the Bundesbank has more reserves than the ECB, what that means in practice is not at all obvious.

Politically, we still seem to be very far away from a fiscal solution to Europe’s problems, and the baseline scenario has to be that we’re not going to get one — ever. The result is likely to be a series of countries exiting the euro, and/or the “East Germanification” of much of Europe’s periphery: flows of money and human capital away from countries like Greece and Portugal, and towards the more prosperous countries with healthy economies and substantial trade surpluses. Essentially, those countries would become holiday resorts for the north, with all the real economic activity being concentrated in more prosperous nations. If you’re a smart young Spaniard, it’s much more attractive to seek your fortune in the UK than it is to take your chances in a deflating country with a stratospheric youth-unemployment rate.

Certainly there seems to be no belief at all, even among the well-intentioned technocrats at Davos, that coordinated international action will or should solve this particular crisis. And the inevitable conclusion is that the crisis is not going to be averted: it’s only going to get worse. It’s a very scary prospect — but one which it’s very important for global elites to come to terms with. And that’s exactly what they’re doing in Davos this week.

It’s time to move the World Economic Forum away from the Swiss enclave with which it has become synonymous, at least for one year. A Greek island — Arianna Huffington suggests Patmos, while Andrew Ross Sorkin is more partial to Santorini — would be perfect: a change of climate, a change of scenery, and an opportunity to bring the forces of global plutocracy to bear exactly where they can do the most good. Davos has billionaires, but it doesn’t have any yachts.

Patmos 2013: you know it makes sense.

Update: More recruits!

In the general atmosphere here in Davos of worry and apprehension, it was great to be able to sit down with Esther Dyson this afternoon and get a dose of refreshing optimism — and about Russia, of all places. There’s an elite group of Russian technologists here — Dyson, a lifelong Russophile who’s fluent in the language and on many boards of Russian technology companies, introduced me to both Arkady Volozh of Yandex and Anatoly Karachinsky of IBS. And she’s convinced that the success of the Russian technology sector can not only make for thriving companies but also for a much improved country.

I was skeptical, but Dyson made a number of good points. For one thing, it’s really hard to build a successful software company through corruption and bribery and other dark arts — especially when you’re creating websites which are judged on their broad popularity. And while natural resources can be stolen, human resources really can’t be.

More importantly, a whole generation of Russians is growing up on the internet, freely using Russia-developed websites which are every bit as good as their US counterparts. Their life online is transparent and not controlled by large and oppressive bureaucracies, and Dyson is convinced that once they’ve experienced that much freedom online, they’re going to start demanding it in real life as well.

Not immediately, of course: Putin is going to win the next election, and he’s going to do so legitimately. But at some point a majority of the Russian population will have no memories of the Soviet era. And already that younger generation is both demanding change and driving growth.

They’re fantastic engineers, for one — look at the way, for instance, in which Boeing does a large part of its engineering work in Russia. Or, more generally, at the Israeli technology sector, much of which is powered by Russian emigres. Russia has many problems, but there’s no doubt that its computer-science colleges are churning out a lot of smart graduates, and that the likes of Karachinsky are hiring those people at a rate of thousands per year. And they’re not robots, either: these kids are creative.

Dyson is intimately familiar with projects like Digital October in Moscow, and she’s a huge fan. Meanwhile, of course, there are the much larger phenomena which get a lot of global attention — things like Mikhail Prokhorov’s bid for the presidency, or the massive Skolkovo science park. If these things fail — and there’s a good chance that both of them will — that’s not necessarily a bad thing: free and successful societies have lots of failure. And importantly, when you look at both of them, you see hope and optimism. Which are not what you might call classic Russian traits.

I’m not entirely convinced. The population of Russia has been declining for the past 20 years, and is continuing to shrink: there are 14.2 deaths per 1,000 people per year, and just 12.6 births. And if you look at the weirdly-shaped population pyramid, you can see that the post-Soviet generation is dwarfed by its more conservative elders. It’s going to take a very long time indeed before they can or will effect any real change.

Still, if there’s any hope for Russia, it’s in the idea that democracy will percolate up from youth and the internet, rather than being demanded in some kind of revolution. As Prokhorov says, “every time we have a revolution, it was a very bloody period”. Russian democracy is not going to mean a US-style free-market economy: Russia tried that, in the 1990s, with disastrous results for the broad population. But a wired country is, by its nature, always going to be a little less corrupt. And a little more hopeful.

It’s highly unscientific and anecdotal, but the winner by far of the most-talked-about-person-in-Davos award, at least when it comes to people in my earshot, is George Soros.

Soros is out of the investing game, living now as a full-time philanthropist and sage, while still keeping an eye on the fund company which bears his name and which provides him with a ten-digit income each year. Because he doesn’t have a financial book to talk, because he’s happy being brutally honest, and because he’s giving voice to the plutocrats’ darkest fears, Soros seems to encapsulate Davos 2012 like no one else.

Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

No one but Soros will actually say these things, at Davos — but everybody here fears them, which is one reason why we have the slightly ludicrous sight of billionaires bellyaching about the global burdens of inequality.

Security this year is tighter than ever — the first rule of security at these events is that it can only get ratcheted up, rather than loosened at all — and there’s a besieged feeling to this Alpine town I haven’t felt before. The financial crisis concentrated minds and was seen as a big problem to be addressed and even maybe solved. But the current breakdown of trust in global institutions cuts at the heart of the World Economic Forum’s founding principle — that if you get a bunch of important people together in the same place, they can actually make a difference.

There are fewer heads of state here than there normally are; even Bill Clinton is giving Davos a miss this year. And a theme running through many of the discussions so far seems to be the question of how one manages chaos, in a world where the risk of a chaotic breakup of the European Union can be ignored no longer. To take just one example: if you’re a European bank, with loans and funding sources and depositors in many different European countries but just one unified currency, what happens if one or more of those countries decides to go its own way and leave the euro? It’s almost impossible for a bank to prepare for such an eventuality, but it represents a huge legal and financial risk.

The WEF itself, for all its efforts at internationalization, remains a very European organization, and will naturally decline in importance and relevance as Europe fractures and loses its standing on the international stage. Last year, there were crowds around television screens showing live coverage of Tahrir Square in Cairo, as delegates turned into spectators, watching the world change with no regard at all to what the plutocrats might think. This year, the feeling of powerlessness remains. Davos hubris is dissipating, to be replaced by risk management protocols. Europe risks falling apart — and there’s nothing that anybody here can do about it, if it happens. Never have the masters of the universe seemed so very human.

What happens if Greece puts forward an exchange offer which is acceptable to the Troika (the EU, ECB, and IMF), but unacceptable to bondholders — and only say half of them accept? In that event, there wouldn’t be nearly enough acceptances to be able to bail in the holdouts — and as a result, Greece would be paying out on its new bonds and would be forced to default on the old bonds which weren’t tendered.

Narrowly speaking, this would be good for Greece’s fiscal situation. After all, if it’s only making coupon payments on half of its private-sector debt, that saves it a substantial interest expense. But there’s no sense in which Greece actually wants this outcome — for two reasons.

Firstly, even if the ECB encouraged Greece to offer bondholders a very low coupon, it also doesn’t want Greece to be in indefinite default. Some kind of technical default which lasts for a couple of weeks, before the new bonds are accepted? That’s fine. But a protracted legal fight with bondholders trying to attach Greek assets around the world, and waving Greek obligations which are going unpaid? The ECB certainly doesn’t want that. It might be accepting just about anything as collateral these days, but even the ECB might well draw the line at lending against securities issued by a government which is clearly not paying a huge chunk of its debt.

The IMF, too, has rules against lending into arrears: it won’t lend new money to countries which are in default on old loans. This is a self-imposed rule which the IMF has broken many times, and might well break again, if it can say with a straight fact that Greece made a “good-faith effort” to keep current. But still, the bigger the number of holdouts, the harder it becomes for the Fund to continue to lend money to Greece.

The most devastating effect, however, would probably be on Greek banks. The obligations of Greek banks, pretty much by definition, are less safe than the obligations of the Greek government. Deposits in Greek banks are obligations of Greek banks. And so anybody with deposits at a Greek bank would likely move those deposits somewhere much safer, like Germany. That capital flight would weaken the balance sheets of the Greek banks and force the ECB to make a hard decision about lending not to Greece itself but rather to Greece’s banks. And even if the ECB did prevent Greece’s banks from going bust (certainly the Greek government doesn’t have the money to do that), those banks would be much weaker, much smaller, and much less willing to provide credit to Greek businesses. The Greek economy would surely be severely damaged as a result.

So it’s important, before March 20, that Greece puts together an exchange offer which a significant supermajority of bondholders will accept. It doesn’t need everybody to accept — there will be holdouts, especially when it comes to bonds issued under foreign law. But so long as those holdouts are obviously in the minority, that’s probably survivable. But Greece does need to be able to bail in all of the holders of its domestic-law bonds. Otherwise both the legal dynamics and Greece’s broader economy could become very nasty indeed.

The shape of a possible settlement with the banks over mortgage fraud has never been clearer. But neither has the fact that it’s not going to happen any time soon. And without a deal in hand, Barack Obama ended up making a different announcement in his State of the Union address:

Tonight, I’m asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorney general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.

Sam Stein has the details — but suffice to say that this is a new investigation, with no fewer than five co-chairs, which will run in parallel to the existing DoJ investigation:

The unit will not supersede the efforts already underway by the Department of Justice. Instead, it will operate as part of the president’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. In addition to Schneiderman, the unit will be co-chaired by Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general at the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement at the SEC; John Walsh, a U.S. attorney in Colorado, and Tony West, assistant attorney general in the Civil Division at DOJ.

To recap: we were meant to have a settlement by now. And instead of a settlement, we’ve got yet another investigation, where the aggressive New York attorney general looks as though he’s in the minority with respect to punishing the banks for their misdeeds.

The settlement as it looks right now has a reasonably large headline figure attached — $25 billion — but most of that is principal reductions which would make a lot of sense for the banks even if there were no settlement at all. In fact, there’s a case to be made that the settlement talks have delayed much-needed principal reductions. If you’re a bank in settlement talks and you want to do across-the-board principal reductions while removing yourself from legal jeopardy, of course you try to connect the former to the latter. After all, principal reductions plus immunity from prosecution looks much more attractive than principal reductions on their own. And the government can’t announce a big settlement figure if the banks have already reduced the principal on a lot of mortgages anyway.

But frankly any settlement now looks just as far away as ever. After all, there’s no point in setting up a new investigation to hold banks accountable, if we’re about to see a settlement which prevents any law-enforcement body from doing that.

So expect the status quo to continue, probably through 2012: banks with huge contingent legal liabilities hanging over their heads and their stock prices, and the government holding back on prosecutions as it attempts to cobble together a global settlement. It’s a recipe for uncertainty and gridlock and banks hoarding their money rather than lending it out. New investigations are all well and good, but I can’t help but think that it’s a bit late to be launching them in 2012. This should clearly have been done in 2008, or 2009 at the latest.

The news out of Greece isn’t good. Remember here that Greece itself is basically just an intermediary, stuck between the Troika (EU, ECB, IMF) on the one hand, which is going to fund its deficits for the foreseeable future and therefore can demand anything it wants, and bondholders, on the other. And the problem is that what’s acceptable to the bondholders — a 4% coupon, basically, on restructured debt — is unacceptable to the Troika:

Euro zone finance ministers on Monday rejected as insufficient an offer made by private bondholders to help restructure Greece’s debts, sending negotiators back to the drawing board and raising the threat of Greek default…

Jean-Claude Juncker, the chairman of the Eurogroup countries, said Greece needed to pursue a deal with private bondholders where the interest rate on the replacement bonds was “clearly” below 4.0 percent.

In a way, this is a good thing, because it only serves to clarify the fact that Greece is defaulting in a way that’s going to make its bondholders very unhappy. All the talk of a “voluntary” restructuring was a way of attempting to paper over that fact, and that paper was always extremely thin. Maybe a bit of honesty will help people face up to reality in a way that they’ve been very reluctant to do until now.

Richard Barley has another idea which might help: the ECB could swap its Greek debt for EFSF debt, and then the EFSF could tender those bonds into the exchange. That, he says, could give Greece some €25 billion of extra debt relief, making the mathematics of a deal easier to work out.

I’m not entirely sure about this. The EU is already helping Greece enormously by funding Greece’s deficits going forwards. If the private sector were willing to do that, then it might not need to take such a big NPV haircut. Barley’s asking for Europe to both provide new money for Greece and take losses on the money it’s already lent, and I don’t see why Europe should have to do that now. Let’s do the private-sector restructuring first. The EU is surely going to take losses on its Greece loans at some point, but there’s no reason to do that at the same time.

No one thinks of this deal as a “one and done” restructuring. Bailing in the ECB or the EFSF at this point would just be denial: it would encourage the EU to think (or at least to say) that the Greek debt problem was solved for perpetuity, when it clearly isn’t. So let’s force the private sector to take its big NPV haircut now. And then the next step can come a few years down the road, when Greece discovers it can’t pay the Troika what it owes.

I’m sorry I missed Devin Riley’s excellent post when I was writing about ETFs on Friday. Here’s his chart:

What you’re seeing here is a y-axis ranking assets under management: the biggest funds are lower down. The x-axis ranks launch date: the earlier the fund launched, the further it is to the left. The correlation could hardly be more obvious. If you want to be a hugely successful ETF, by far the best thing you can do is to launch early.

Here’s Riley:

Launch rank explains up to 81 percent of an ETF’s rank in its segment. More to the point, in 71 percent of all segments, the first-mover had the most assets.

To me, that was surprising.

Given that ETF issuers compete fiercely on expense ratio, index tracking, and marketing materials to win investors, it’s a little disheartening to learn that so much of an ETF’s success is tied to its launch date.

This is surely good for consumers, at least so long as people continue to launch new ETFs. Because when they do so, they’re going to have to compete aggressively on fees, if only because that’s the only way that they’ll ever be able to gain any kind of market share. In turn, the new low-cost competitors will keep fees on the market leaders low and falling.

In theory, eventually, the supply of new ETFs will dry up, and the less successful competitors will drop out of the market. At that point, the market leaders might in theory be able to start raising their fees. But I’m not so worried about that: the best way to increase fee income is to keep your fees low and constant, while increasing your assets under management. Any hint of fees going up is only going to attract new competitors, or incentivize existing competitors to lower their own fees.

So for the time being it’s fine to just buy whatever the biggest ETF is in any given asset class, and sleep easily at night. There’s a small risk that in future you might end up invested in something suboptimal, but you’ll probably hear about it if that happens. Investing isn’t normally this easy, so let’s just celebrate the idea that this strategy seems to work so well, and concentrate entirely on asset allocation rather than spending lots of time second-guessing which of many ETFs to choose from.

The most exciting (but also, in a small way, slightly depressing) presentation at DLD this year came from Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford and Google. Or formerly of Stanford, anyway.

Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well.

Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.

Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.

And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.

So what I was expecting was an announcement from Thrun that he was helping to reinvent university education: that he was moving all his Stanford courses online, that the physical class would be a space for students to get more personalized help. No more lecturing: instead, the classes would be taken on the students’ own time, and the job of the real-world professor would be to answer questions from kids paying $30,000 for their education.

But that’s not the announcement that Thrun gave. Instead, he said, he concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a search engine — and of course it’s all going to be free.

Udacity looks great, and I can’t wait for it to be a revolutionary success, educating and empowering students around the world, especially in places like Africa and India, and, in those places, especially women.

But I have to say I’m a little sad that it’s happening away from, rather than being part of, Stanford. If any world-class university would embrace this idea, one would hope it would be the one at the heart of Silicon Valley. And surely Udacity would only benefit if it was part of Stanford and carried the Stanford brand name. Instead, Thrun is abandoning Stanford and creating Udacity on its own. (And I’m no great fan of the name, either.)

Stanford was willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building a new physical campus in New York City — but it isn’t willing, it seems, to help Thrun build a free virtual campus which could reach the whole world. That’s a dereliction of its educational duty. But where Stanford has failed, surely some other elite university will step in. Thrun is taking a bold step here. Let’s hope he soon gets the support, if not of Stanford, then of some other college. Like Harvard, or Yale, or Oxford, or Cambridge. They’re exclusive places now. But they don’t have to be, in the future.

Update: Thrun posts, on his personal site:

I did on my own volition resign from my full tenured position, effective April 1, 2011. However, this was primarily to continue my employment with Google, and it predates my online classes.

I’m at DLD in Munich, where David Karp of Tumblr and Samir Arora of Glam Media helped me understand the way that media and publishing are evolving these days, and the way in which creating, editing, and publishing are increasingly separate things which interact with each other in fertile and unpredictable ways.

There are lots of ways of publishing content onto the web, and if you look at the relative popularity of, say, WordPress vs Tumblr vs Twitter, then it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the easier you make it to publish, the more popular you’re going to be. But at Tumblr, at least, there’s something else very interesting going on: according to Karp, there are 9 curators for every creator on his site.

Reblogging, on Tumblr, is so easy that the vast majority of Tumblr sites actually create little or no original content: they just republish content from other people. That’s a wonderful thing, for two reasons. Firstly, it takes people who are shy about (or just not very good at) creating their own content, and gives them a great way to express themselves online. (As Arianna Huffington says, “self-expression is the new entertainment”.) And secondly, it acts as a natural amplifier for the people who do create original content — the average post on Tumblr gets reblogged nine times, and therefore reaches vastly more people than if it just sat on its original site waiting to be discovered by people visiting it directly.

Indeed, you don’t even need original content at all to become a reblogging monster. Pinterest is in many ways Tumblr without the original creators, just the curators, finding stuff online and reblogging it at incredibly high velocity. And it’s huge. Meanwhile, a lot of the impetus behind the way that Twitter is pushing its proprietary retweet functionality is the idea that it too might be able to build a community of retweeters, in much the way that Tumblr and Pinterest have built communities of rebloggers.

Journalists, I find, tend to come quite late to sites like Tumblr and Pinterest. For one thing, those sites are overwhelmingly visual: images nearly always do much better than words. And more generally, journalists are much better at writing than they are at reading — which means that they’re really bad at seeing the value added by curating and reblogging.

Technologists, on the other hand, intuitively understand the idea of “the stack”, which is the nerd version of “the platform” that all entrepreneurs and media gurus love to talk about incessantly. Essentially, they have spent their entire careers building things on other things. That happens in legacy media, too, sometimes: cable channels, for instance, live on a distribution platform owned by someone else. But print media in the US has historically been highly vertically integrated: the same company would create the content, edit it, print it, and distribute it directly to its customers’ front doors. Far from building things on other things, it owns everything from the copyright on the original content to the printing plants and even newspaper carriers.

Facebook and Google have become two of the biggest media companies in the world in extremely short amounts of time, precisely because they don’t have much interest in owning any content. Rupert Murdoch looks at Google and sees a pirate because he does everything: he both creates content (think 20th Century Fox), and also distributes it (think Sky TV). It’s a world of iron-clad contracts and tight control. While the social, digital world is one where the biggest media companies have a much lighter touch, and where the content creators with the broadest reach will be the ones who care the least about protecting their copyrights.

I suspect that we’re only in the very early days of seeing how this is going to disrupt just about every media organization built on the idea of hosting a website and selling ads, including highly socially-attuned ones like the Huffington Post. HuffPo is built on the idea that when stories are shared on Twitter or Facebook, that will drive traffic back to huffingtonpost.com, where it can then monetize that traffic by selling it to advertisers. But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.

That was actually the original idea behind Buzzfeed — it would help brands create viral content which would then spread across the web. And then, somehow, buzzfeed.com became a destination site in its own right, which can and will make a lot of money by hosting and selling advertising. The old models still work. But the new, more distributed models are I think much more powerful. They’re great for brands, which just want to reach consumers directly, whatever the best way of doing that might be. But for content creators like Rupert Murdoch, they’re much scarier. Because when something goes viral, you don’t own it any more — it belongs to everyone, and no one.

Jason Zweig has managed to get one of the weirdest quotes ever from a would-be investment guru:

In a news release issued in March 2007, Mr. Grimaldi said one of his newsletters had “been ranked #1 by Hulbert Financial Digest” for the five years through 2006… Mr. Grimaldi’s other newsletters, although not the Money Navigator, have featured the claim “Ranked #1 & Recommended by Hulbert Financial Digest!”

Mark Hulbert, editor of the digest, says his publication “doesn’t make recommendations” and that “no matter how I slice and dice the data, I cannot support [Mr. Grimaldi's] claim of being No. 1 for that five-year period.” According to Mr. Hulbert, Mr. Grimaldi’s highest rank from the digest over that period was 25th out of 110.

Mr. Grimaldi says he ranked No. 1 over that period: “I’ll say that to my grave.”

Memo to Mark Grimaldi: whether or not you were ranked and/or recommended by Mark Hulbert is not a matter of belief, it’s a matter of fact. And Hulbert is on the record saying very clearly that he did neither. If you say that he ranked and/or recommended you, to your grave or in any other context, you are lying.

Which brings me to Grimaldi’s strongest defender:

Ms. Orman declined to address specific questions about the newsletter or Mr. Grimaldi’s background. “Mark Grimaldi is my trusted partner in The Money Navigator,” she said in an emailed statement. “He is ethical, honest and achieves stellar results that consistently outperform the market. I’m proud to be able to provide our newsletter to people who are looking for solid financial advice.”

Lying about being ranked by Hulbert Financial Digest is, needless to say, neither ethical nor honest. Which means, on an unsympathetic reading of Suze Orman, that she’s lying too.

When I spoke to Orman last week, she made it very clear that her relationship with Grimaldi’s newsletter was no different than her relationship with the Approved Card — she’s an owner of both of them, thinks that both of them are very good products, and is proud of them both. (The same goes for her FICO package, too.)

Orman also told me twice that the newsletter was rated number one — she was adamant about that. And now it turns out that it isn’t. I spoke to Orman on Tuesday; maybe Zweig hadn’t contacted her with his questions yet at that point. But at best Orman is extremely incurious about the “fabulous” newsletter that she is so keen to hawk and defend. And at worst she’s happy lying about it being ranked highly by Hulbert.

And that’s not the end of the Grimaldi/Orman sins, either. Check out this table — which is still up on Grimaldi’s website:

It shows that the S&P 500 rose by 19.79% in 2009. Which, as Zweig points out, isn’t true: the S&P 500 actually rose by 26.46% that year. And that’s no isolated mistake, either:

In nine of the 10 years cited, the newsletter understated the performance of the S&P 500. “I’m not perfect,” Mr. Grimaldi says. “We don’t claim to be.”

Getting the performance of the S&P 500 right isn’t something only perfect people do — it’s a basic prerequisite for anybody claiming to beat the index, and it’s pretty easy to find. And given that Grimaldi can’t get the performance of the index right, I have no faith whatsoever in the numbers he’s putting forward for the performance of his portfolios — numbers which are very hard, if not impossible, to check.

This week, the newsletter carried a note saying that the 2009 performance return was a “typographical error”. And indeed the same table on Suze Orman’s site has been fixed:

The 2009 figure has been corrected to the right number. But 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2010 are still too low, while 2006 is too high — 2009 is the only year which is exactly right!

Here’s something else which is weird: check out the total return for the S&P 500 in each of the two tables. While the 2009 return has gone up, the value of a $100,000 investment on 1/1/2001 has gone down! Only by a little bit, of course. But it’s hard to see what calculation could possibly have resulted in that small decrease.

Meanwhile, as Mick Weinstein points out, the portfolio recommended by Grimaldi’s newsletter prominently features Grimaldi’s own Sector Rotation Fund — and Grimaldi’s Sector Rotation Fund is the kind of thing that no sensible long-term investor should touch with a bargepole. When Weinstein wrote his post, the single largest holding of the Sector Rotation Fund was the ProShares Ultra S&P 500 leveraged ETF — and, if you look today, it’s still the top holding.

But levered ETFs, as we all know, are short-term investments, which to a first approximation should never be held for a period of longer than one day. They have no place at all in a long-term retirement fund. And the fact that Grimaldi is investing in a leveraged ETF at all is all the information any investor — including Suze Orman — needs to steer well clear of him.

Orman and Grimaldi defended their newsletter, both to Zweig and to me, by saying that it doesn’t really cost $63 per year: Orman is always out there with offer codes allowing you to get a trial issue for free, without even handing over your credit card information. But a free newsletter is no good at all if it gives bad advice — and any newsletter which thinks you should buy Grimaldi’s Sector Rotation Fund as part of a long-term retirement strategy — or at all, really — is giving bad advice.

I’m disappointed in Orman for telling her readers that they can beat the market. I’m disappointed in Orman for implying to readers that if they spend $63 per year on her newsletter, then they are likely to beat the market. And I’m extremely disappointed in Orman for getting into bed with Grimaldi in particular, who charges a management fee of 1.65% for investing in his Sector Rotation Fund, despite the fact that all he’s doing is buying ETFs.

And of course all of this rubs off onto Orman’s other products, too: the tar of the Money Navigator newsletter is going to wind up getting brushed onto the Approved Card, whether it deserves it or not. Which is yet another reason why we need a new personal-finance guru — someone who can replace Orman and judge her products impartially.

Conceptually, it makes sense that ETFs would be a winner-takes-all phenomenon. Expenses rise much more slowly than assets, which means that the bigger a fund gets, the cheaper it can be. And given that ETFs compete first and foremost on expense ratio, money is likely to pour into the cheapest-and-biggest funds, which allows them to get even cheaper. And so on.

So this chart, from Lipper, comes as little surprise.

In many ETF categories, it turns out, one ETF has the lion’s share of the market — Vanguard in total stock market ETFs, Market Vectors in precious metals, iShares in TIPS and investment-grade bonds.

So one would expect that those big dominant funds would be significantly cheaper than their competition — that would explain their dominance. And, one would be right — if you just look at precious metals. But elsewhere, that’s not the case.

Among total stock market ETFs, the Vanguard VTI fund is extremely cheap, charging just 0.06%, but the Schwab US Broad Market ETF charges exactly the same, and has just 0.46% of the assets in the class.

The cheapest investment-grade bond ETF is the Vanguard Long-Term Corporate Bond ETF, with an expense ratio of 0.14% — but it has only 2.3% of the purple pie. The iShares is only 1bp more, but has 90% of the assets.

And when it comes to TIPS funds, all of the big ETFs — iShares, Pimco, and SPDR — charge the exact same 0.20%. But iShares gets nearly all the business.

Now we’re not talking, here, about the kind of small, illiquid ETFs which can easily underperform. All of these funds are big enough that, to a first approximation, they’re all as safe as each other.

But still, at the margin, a big ETF is always going to be safer than a smaller one. And I suspect that most of these funds have a first-mover advantage, and that their competitors might well be losing money in their attempt to stay competitive with the giants in the space.

Is there any reason, for an individual investor, to choose one of the smaller ETFs rather than the big ones here? I don’t think so. Big mutual funds can be lumbering and dangerous, but big ETFs just have that much more clout in things like the repo market. And all ETFs get front-run by algorithmic high-frequency traders in exactly the same way: I don’t think big ones suffer more on that front.

My feeling is that if you choose the big fund, the fees might come down as it gets bigger; if you choose something small like the Schwab broad market fund, by contrast, the fees might well go up if its managers give up trying to compete with Vanguard. So if you’re going to buy one of these ETFs, you might as well follow the crowd. This is one area where contrarian investing will likely get you nowhere.

Remember the sharp rise in taxi medallion prices over the past few years? I thought that the price was pretty justifiable back then, in October, although I did have my concerns:

Any time you see a chart like the ones above, you have to worry that there’s a bubble. Plus, there’s political risk: the mayor can print new medallions, making the existing ones worth a little less (but not a lot less, given that the income from medallions is largely fixed).

Since then, however, two things have happened. First, New York City agreed to print 2,000 new medallions — that’s a very large increase. And secondly, Charles Komanoff — you remember him — has done the hard math of what this means for congestion and taxi incomes.

The first thing to understand is that while 2,000 cars might not seem very much in the context of a city which sees 800,000 cars per day, in fact it’s huge. Taxis spend 40 times as much time driving in congested areas as private cars do, so 2,000 medallions is the equivalent of 80,000 private cars. And when you impact the amount of traffic that much in an area which is already highly congested, the effects can be enormous:

The bottom line, here, is not just significantly more congestion, with travel speeds dropping on average from 9.5 mph to 8.4 mph. That inconveniences everybody, of course, not least the cab drivers themselves, who will take a whole extra minute, on average, to get to where their passenger wants to go. That decreases the number of fares they can pick up per day, and hurts their income.

And at the same time, the number of people wanting to take a taxi is likely to go down, when traffic speeds fall, rather than up. If you have fewer people hailing a greater number of cabs, then it’s simple math that the number of fares per cab shift is likely to fall. According to Charles’s calculations, it will fall in total a good 19%.

If taxi fares stay constant, that means a 19% drop in taxi-fare income, per cab. Fares won’t rise enough to cover that fall. And of course the income for the driver is going to fall more than 19%, because the medallion owners are going to be very reluctant to drop the amount they charge the drivers per shift.

All of which implies to me that if there’s a medallion-price bubble, then the introduction of 2,000 new medallions is likely to prick that bubble. And conversely, if medallions keep on changing hands for a million dollars a pop even after those 2,000 new cars are on the road, then we can be pretty sure that there’s no bubble here at all.