Felix Salmon

I’m experimenting with adding a bit of video to this here blog, do you think it’s a good idea? Here’s a couple of bite-sized snacks I recorded this afternoon: the first one’s on why it’s a good idea to get out of the stock market right now, and the second one’s on Greece, and how it’s a harbinger of other sovereign debt crises to come.

Mohamed El-Erian is fast becoming the biggest and most important bear in the world when it comes to the consequences of the Greece crisis:

Since Greece is part of a general phenomenon of bloated public finance and higher systemic risk, we should also expect a generalised and volatile step-increase in risk premia around the world. Capital will thus be more selective in terms of destination, as it opts for liquidity over returns and for safe government bonds over equities…

For the next few days, we should worry about cascading disruptions in the European banking system as interbank activities are undermined by renewed uncertainties about each institution’s exposures to peripheral European names.

Mohamed’s talking his book, to a certain extent, here: the more volatile that the world of investment becomes, the more important it is to have smart professionals like the folks at Pimco running your money. Buy-and-hold is a strategy which worked very well for much of the past 50 years or so, but it’s far from obvious that it will continue to work going forwards. And besides, a lot of the tail-risk hedging that Pimco can do is simply impossible for retail investors: how would you hedge the risk of cascading disruptions in the European banking system?

If we’re about to see people move their savings from equities into bonds as stocks become just too volatile to hold for someone with a normal risk appetite, then it’s worth asking serious questions about the best way to invest in bonds, which always need to be actively managed, if only because they have maturity dates. Given that the biggest risks to the bond market are the ones surrounding sovereign default, El-Erian’s drumbeat of op-eds on Greece might well help his company get mandates from investors who want to park their money with a company thinking seriously and presciently on such matters.

Especially since it looks as though, at least until now, he’s been pretty accurate.

Update: Just to be clear, when I say that El-Erian is talking his book, I don’t mean that he’s short Greece, or anything like that. I don’t think he is. I just mean that he increases his assets under management, and makes money, when the world gets complicated. And so it’s in his interest to point out just how complicated the world is getting.

Bloomberg’s Nina Mehta and Chris Nagi have an excellent explanation of the role of fragmented exchanges in yesterday’s market crash. The upshot is that something which was meant to make trading safer in fact made it more dangerous, just like portfolio insurance in 1987. And the background is the way in which the big two exchanges just aren’t as big as they used to be, at least on a relative basis:

Increasing automation and competition have reduced the NYSE and Nasdaq’s volume in securities they list from as much as 80 percent in the last decade. Now, less than 30 percent of trading in their companies takes place on their networks as orders are dispersed to as many as 50 competing venues, almost all of them fully electronic.

They thought they could turn this bug into a feature, but it turned out to be a real bug after all:

Rapid-fire orders trigger what the NYSE calls liquidity replenishment points, or LRPs, shifting the market into auctions. While the system is designed to restore order on the Big Board, trading is so fast during times of panic that orders routed past the exchange may swamp other venues and exhaust buy orders, said Angel at Georgetown.

Conceptually it’s a bit of a stretch to hope that in extremis, if the NYSE runs out of liquidity, then the smaller electronic exchanges will be able to provide it. But that’s the idea behind LRPs. With any luck, in the wake of yesterday’s chaos, the whole LRP system will be revisited.

Meanwhile, Kid Dynamite is on fire right now, with three posts getting to the real nub of the Crash of 2:45. He started good, pouring cold water on the “fat finger” hypothesis; that skepticism is holding up, even in the face of an anonymous “official” in the NYT talking about “a huge, anomalous, unexplained surge in selling”. He then got better, noting where the big correlations were (think the yen carry trade), and blaming not humans with fat fingers but rather algorithms which break during tail events.

And then this morning he explains why it’s a really bad idea to bail out those algos by rescinding the craziest trades from yesterday:

Merkel’s point is simple and accurate: if buyers who step in later see their trades canceled, it removes all incentive for them to step in – and then you don’t get the bounce back that we saw! Think about how much havoc it causes a trader who astutely bought cheap stock, then sold it out at a profit. He’s now short! …

If anyone wants to defend the decision to cancel the trades, I’m all ears – but your argument needs to be better than “HEY ITS NOT FAIR THE COMPUTERS RIPPED ME OFF AND MY STOP ORDER GOT EXECUTED AT A PENNY WTF OMG *$XYS !^^!@&!*#” If you don’t understand that this can happen with a stop order, don’t use stop orders.

There’s a very sensible idea going around that a simple way to deal with nearly all of these problems, at a single stroke, would be to implement a tiny tax on financial transactions. Historically, people have complained that such a tax harms liquidity, which is true. But the fact is that it harms the bad kind of liquidity — the liquidity which dries up to zero just when you need it most. Liquidity, if it’s spread across multiple electronic exchanges and can disappear in a microsecond, does very little actual good, and in fact does harm during tail events like this. Let’s tax it, and raise some money for the public fisc at the same time as slowing down markets and making them think before doing a trade.

The payrolls report this morning was good: it feels churlish to throw cold water on the news that 290,000 more people are working now than a month ago.

But. Keep an eye on those unemployment rates. The headline figure is back up at 9.9%, the highest it’s been this year. The U-6 underemployment rate is a gruesome 17.1%. And U-4, which is total unemployed plus discouraged workers, has hit a new high of 10.6%.

If we’re going to have sustained GDP growth, it’s going to have to come from those figures falling back to acceptable levels: without that happening, we can have a little bit of a rebound, but none of the long-term consumer demand that’s necessary. And yet they’re all going the wrong way: up, rather than down. That’s devastating for the economy, and not only because rising unemployment is a sure-fire way to increase mortgage delinquencies, with all the ugly financial and fiscal consequences that entails.

Underneath it all, there’s a glimmer of a silver lining to the unemployment figures: they come from an increase in the labor force, which means that people are actually bothering to look for work again. Remember though that 6.7 million people have now been unemployed for more than six months — 46% of the total unemployment figure. We’ll literally never find jobs for all of them: many will never be employed again. Which is the real underlying tragedy of this recession, and of the jobless recovery.

Update on tape revelations of stormy Copenhagen leader smackdown — now with Obama Admin response — NYT

Freddie Asks for $10.6 Billion — WSJ

Were 16 billion E-mini S&P 500 futures really sold in 2 minutes this afternoon? — CNBC

Barry’s looking pretty smart right around now — Ritholtz

“I survived the crash of 2:45 p.m.” t-shirts for sale — Zazzle

Mega Millions Winner is a journalist! — SCPR

Why is the FTC nosing around Apple & not Wall Street? Because the Federal Trade Commission Act explicitly excludes banks — Reich

How can the market go, on a random Thursday afternoon, completely insane? The story which is emerging centers on old, boring Procter & Gamble, as can be seen in the PG chart from this afternoon.

Look at the volume chart: what you see here is a big block of shares trading in P&G at around 2:30, followed by another huge block right before the market crashed. And then, nothing. The two big blocks were probably sell orders, which were big enough to blow through all the bids in the market. As Henry Blodget says, “for a few minutes, buyers just disappeared”.

It’s worth noting here that none of this data is particularly reliable: the Nasdaq is reportedly confirming that there were technical problems with the P&G quote, and there are persistent rumors of a “fat finger” trade as well, which I’m not sure that I believe.

If the market were rational, it could cope without difficulty with such things. There’s no bid on P&G right now? Fine, wait five minutes and see if you can get a bid then. But there were stop-loss orders on P&G, which meant forced selling into a no-bid market, and if these trades really happened, then a couple of people who are surely going to celebrate tonight were in the right place at the right time and bought up a small amount of the stock in the high 40s.

In any case, whether the trades actually happened or not, they were reported to the exchanges, and were immediately reflected in the Dow, which remember is an average and not an index. If P&G is off 14 points, and the Dow’s divisor is 0.132319125, then that one trade in itself wipes 100 points off the Dow in a matter of seconds.

The timing of that 100-point fall could not have been worse: stocks had started selling off about five minutes earlier, and so the 100-point drop came into a market which was already getting jittery and panicked. The velocity and severity of that drop in the Dow immediately triggered stop-loss selling in the market more generally, which then started feeding on itself: even as P&G’s share price was recovering, bids were falling away rapidly in the other 29 Dow components, and at one point the Dow was down just a hair short of 1,000 points on the day.

But the fact is that none of these numbers are all that meaningful: what we were seeing was traders flailing around in a context of limited information and liquidity, trying to get a grip on what was or wasn’t going on. There was always the possibility, after all, that the sellers knew something they didn’t, and that stocks were actually falling for a reason. So it took a few minutes for the market to realize that it was all just market volatility — and therefore a great buying opportunity for any trader.

It’s been a very impressive day to learn how the stock-market sausage is made: I think we just saw the largest intraday fall, in point terms, that has ever happened. But the bigger lesson is that in the short term, any market can fail temporarily. The question is whether the jitters from this afternoon are going to mean increased volatility and risk aversion going forwards. My feeling is that, yes, they both will and should.

Ah, volatility. Suddenly, at 2:30pm this afternoon, the US stock market decided it was going to fall off a cliff, and the Dow promptly proceeded to drop about 700 points in the space of mere minutes, before bouncing back up. This is pure market craziness: if any journalist tries to blame “worries about Greece” or anything like that, ignore them — insofar as there’s a simple explanation, it’s probably something to do with a dodgy feed on Procter & Gamble’s stock price, which fed directly into the Dow, and caused a brief spell of utter panic.

I suspect that this is only the beginning of a new era of volatility. Markets are a bit like volcanoes, or earthquakes: they’re inherently unpredictable, but if they’re quiet for a while, the magnitude of the next big event is likely to be that much bigger. The trigger for this particular move could have been anything; the lesson to learn is that given the complexity of contemporary financial markets, correlations can pop up anywhere, and a relatively small uptick in something like Portugese CDS spreads can combine with a glitch somewhere in the equity markets to get magnified into an event which wipes out hundreds of billions of dollars in capitalization in the blink of an eye. Or maybe it was the UK election, or a butterfly flapping its wings in Kuala Lumpur: there’s no way of ever knowing.

To take a little bit of a step back, Dow 10,000 is something which most people would have thought absolutely wonderful if you’d asked them at any point in the first half of last year: there’s a lot of room to fall. As the world has been releveraging for the past year, equity valuations have been increasingly predicated on the sustainability of a rapidly-growing debt pile. The stock-market collapse of 2008 was a delayed reaction to the credit crunch of 2007, and similarly now we might see equity valuations be marked down as the world of credit becomes very dicey all over again. Alternatively, the incredible rapidity of this afternoon’s rebound might reassure investors that the market is self-correcting and pretty safe.

But that would be the wrong conclusion to draw from this episode, I think. My feeling is that we’re going to have a turbulent journey into a world where risk assets all price off each other in highly complex and unpredictable ways: a radical change from the old world where credit instruments traded at a spread to governments, while stock investors took solace in the low spreads and high liquidity of commercial paper. In the new world, devastating correlations can appear out of nowhere — and then disappear again just as quickly. And anybody who wants to stay in the market is going to need a very strong stomach.

I can understand the trading-desk mentality which went into the Abacus deal. What puzzles me more is Goldman’s incredible secrecy when it came to disclosure that it had received a Wells notice:

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority also has opened an investigation into Goldman’s failure to report the Wells Notice that it received in September regarding trader Fabrice Tourre, a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Goldman was required to report the notice – which signals the likelihood of SEC charges – within 30 days of receiving it, but did not disclose it to FINRA until this week, the source said.

This seems to me to be a no-brainer of a disclosure, since there’s no way the firm is going to make any more money if it doesn’t disclose the notice. But not only did Goldman fail to make any SEC disclosure of the notice, it didn’t even inform Finra, despite industry requirements. Even after the SEC suit came and the importance of transparency in all dealings was abundantly clear, Goldman’s top lawyer Greg Palm refused to say on the firm’s earnings call whether the bank had received any more of these things.

It seems to me that there are two possibilities here. Either Wells notices are very rare beasts at Goldman, in which case such an unusual event with such large potential repercussions would seem to clearly mandate disclosure. Or otherwise Goldman receives them quite regularly, and they normally amount to nothing, in which case a steady drip of disclosures at the SEC would soon be discounted by the market as business-as-usual.

Either way, Finra and Goldman’s shareholders deserve to know when the bank is being investigated by the SEC. Is there any colorable reason at all for the bank to hide such things from its owners and regulators?

Goldman’s outside directors got an average of $298,000 each in 2008. How much would a non-executive chairman make? — Reuters

Spiral Jedi (Video) — Star Wars Modern

Truly geektastically wonderful: xkcd’s Color Survey Results — xkcd

Me, in the BNN studio, wearing the salmon suit — BNN

BBC announces a goal of doubling monthly ‘click-throughs’ to external sites — Nieman Lab

The Nevermind baby works for Shepard Fairey — Kottke

I’ll buy a ticket to Grant Achatz’s new restaurant — Kottke

Me, interviewing Richard Florida in Toronto — Rotman

I love Eddy Elfenbein’s response to Scott Adams, who thinks that a good simple retirement portfolio can be wholly made up of just two ETFs, one domestic and one emerging-market.

Elfenbein responds with a great question: why not just invest the whole thing in Treasury bonds? After all, I’m pretty sure that Scott Adams doesn’t have a great degree of certainty about the magnitude of the equity premium over the next decade or three, and the first priority when it comes to retirement funds is that you don’t lose them. Right now, with a eurozone crisis looming, it’s entirely conceivable that we could see a rerun of the stock-market panic we had in 2008 and a return to Dow 7,000 — or even lower, if the U.S. and European authorities find themselves without the fiscal and monetary ammunition that they had last time around. In any case, the point is that we’ve been there before and we can be there again, and if that’s a possibility that’s unacceptable to you, then you shouldn’t invest in a 100%-stocks strategy.

Of course, there are risks to government bonds as well, especially long-dated ones, as Jim Chanos loves to explain. But if Treasuries take a tumble, you need to be a very nimble investor indeed to outperform in some other asset class.

My feeling is that if you’ve got a nest egg which you want to keep safe for retirement, then investing it in the highest-yielding TIPS you can find is probably as good a strategy as any. You won’t get rich that way, but at least you’ll be protected against stock-market losses and against inflation. On the other hand, if you don’t have enough money for retirement and you need serious positive returns on your investment, then you’re going to have to start speculating. Either that or going out and earning more money.

Most people, I think, overestimate their risk appetite, and only realize when it’s too late that they really couldn’t afford to lose that money after all. Which is why right now in many ways is a better time to sell stocks for retirement and put the proceeds in something safe like TIPS, than it is to buy stocks for retirement. If you were sickened when the stock market was at its lows and promised yourself that you would be much more cautious in future, then now’s probably as good a time as any to take advantage of the big run-up that we’ve seen in stocks and rotate into something which allows you to sleep well at night. Unless you enjoy investing — and few of us do — I see no great reason to jump with both feet, Scott Adams style, into this increasingly unpredictable and senseless market.

Ken Layne has by far the funniest and most cutting reaction to the Newsweek news, but it’s Jeff Bercovici who nails the conventional wisdom:

If Allen & Co. can succeed in finding a buyer for Newsweek, it will likely be the sort of transaction in which the Post Co. accepts a nominal sum just to rid itself of the expense of publishing a money-hemorrhaging weekly magazine.

I’m a little bit more optimistic, because at heart the circulation numbers at Newsweek are still extremely impressive, even if they’re well down from their highs. The US rate base is 1.5 million, there’s another 460,000 English-language copies sold each week internationally, and 560,000 foreign-language copies as well. Then of course there’s the website on top, which attracts a respectable 5 million uniques.

Those numbers are more than high enough to sustain a seriously profitable business; the problem is that Newsweek had a much larger rate base — of 3.1 million — as recently as 2008, and it has necessarily suffered as its staff and circulation has shrunk.

There are two big problems facing Newsweek, but neither is insurmountable. The first is that it can’t afford to have a huge newsgathering and editorial staff any more. The occasional fabulous feature about Oprah is wonderful to have, but those things can be bought from freelancers: they don’t need to be written by expensive staffers. Newsweek is not going to break much if any news, and it shouldn’t spend a fortune trying: instead it must aggregate, curate, and add value with a range of expert and reliable voices. Think of it as a more honest, less pretentious, and less anonymous version of the Economist.

The flipside of that problem is that Newsweek has to be able to rise above the rest of the bloggy commentariat. Ezra Klein, one of WPNI’s biggest stars, writes today about the plight of the Economist and other highbrow mags:

Those magazines write reported, analytical (and opinionated) articles for a sophisticated audience. But because their publishing cycles are slow, they’ve not traditionally been major players in the day-to-day conversation. But now you’ve got people who trained at those magazines and adopted their sensibilities writing at internet speed, which is to say, faster than the daily cycle. And that’s working, I think. At the very least, it’s working with elite audiences.

Newsweek is actually in a strong competitive position here: elite audiences are more comfortable making their own judgments about what’s worth reading and what isn’t, and coming to the conclusion that they get better analysis from say Rortybomb than they do from any of their print publications. But most of Newsweek’s readers don’t read blogs, or consider it to be in competition with blogs. They’re comfortable getting their news analysis weekly, in a trustworthy format, rather than multiple times per day in a format which requires active, critical reading.

As a long-term investment, the demographics of any print product look bad. Newsweek’s audience is old, it’s getting older, and it’s hard to imagine the social-media generation having so much awe and respect for its authority that they will buy it weekly to find out what’s going on in the world. And the economics of distributing a weekly news magazine are extremely painful: it costs a huge amount of money to print and distribute all that paper every week, when you don’t have the luxury that monthly magazines have of long lead times at the printers.

But printing technology is advancing fast, and it’s easier than ever for magazines to print relatively small runs in dozens if not hundreds of non-union locations around the world. A new and nimble network of local ad-sales teams can fashion custom versions of the product to targeted demographics, with a relatively small central publisher’s office handling the big buys across the global franchise. And the editorial product will be a bit like Google search results: universally authoritative, while still looking significantly different depending on where and who you are.

And internationally, where Newsweek has an enviable and demographically very high-end footprint, there’s more respect and hunger for authoritative news analysis. Besides, for the next couple of decades at least there will still be tens of millions of Americans who don’t like consuming such things by reading screens, and are much happier sitting back in the garden or on the couch with a high-res paper product.

Getting from today’s Newsweek to tomorrow’s will be painful, and will involve lay-offs; the buyer will naturally want WPNI to pay for those. So depending on how the deal is accounted for, Bercovici might be right about the headline price. But Newsweek is one of only a handful of highly-respected global news brands, and in a shrinking world that should be more valuable than ever.

Willem Buiter has joined the group of people convinced that Greece will default. I think he’s too optimistic:

A mix of huge debt and no primary deficit – i.e. needs for external funds to pay for ongoing government spending – constitute “ the exact circumstances that makes a default individually rational for the debtor,” he notes…

The later it happens, the larger the haircut will be, says Buiter. He reckons a 30% cut today would have sufficed, but would have wrought havoc on the capital positions of Greek, French and German commercial banks, which would probably need to be recapitalized immediately, provoking major political embarrassment in Berlin and Paris.

Instead, Buiter says, the plan must be to give some time to those banks to recapitalize, or sneak Greek exposure off private balance sheets and on to public ones.

The problem here is that a 30% cut today would not have sufficed, precisely because Greece is not running anything close to a zero primary deficit. Paul Krugman makes the point:

Here’s the thing: Greece is currently running a huge primary deficit — 8.5 percent of GDP in 2009. So even a complete debt default wouldn’t save Greece from the necessity of savage fiscal austerity.

It follows, then, that a debt restructuring wouldn’t help all that much.

In fact, it’s worse still: even if Greece were running a zero primary deficit (and I’d love to know if it’s ever managed that particular feat), a default without devaluation would still keep the country mired in its current uncompetitive state. If you’re going to go through the massive pain of a default, you might as well get the upside of devaluation at the same time, and exit the euro.

At that point, the only question is: do you default and devalue now, or do you wait a couple of years? Germany and France might well want to wait, in the hope that their banks will be better able to cope with such a thing in a couple of years’ time. But from a Greek perspective, if the pain is coming, best to go through it now and bring forward the growth rebound, rather than push off the devaluation stimulus to an indefinite point in the future.

Amidst the sober analysis and the bloody riots, one expected artifact of the chaos in Greece has been notable by its absence: fevered finger-pointing at speculators in the credit default swap market.

And it’s now becoming clear why:

Barclays Capital analysts point out in their most recent European Credit Alpha report that Greek government bonds have been trading substantially wider than credit default swaps on the sovereign. This creates large potential returns on negative basis packages, especially if there is a credit event in the near term.

The negative basis between five-year bonds and five-year credit default swaps has recently been as great as 200 basis points. However, the basis can be even greater for a basis packaging combining short-dated credit default swaps and long dated bonds, says the report. The old-style restructuring used in Greek sovereign credit default swaps means that obligations of any maturity up to 30 years out can be delivered into any credit default swap.

In English, what this means is that the spread on Greek bonds is substantially larger than the spread on Greece CDS. As a result, you can theoretically lock in a risk-free profit by buying Greek bonds and at the same time buying credit protection on them: the cost of the protection is lower than the yield on the bonds, and the rest of your coupon payments is pure profit.

This also means that you can’t blame the CDS market for sending Greek bond spreads gapping outwards — if anything, the opposite is the case, and Greek bond spreads are probably responsible for upward pressure on Greek CDS spreads. Once again, if you own Greek debt, the CDS market is your friend: you’re better off buying protection on that debt than you are simply selling your bonds outright.

This trade could also help fund the Greek bailout while at the same time providing a solid bid for Greek bonds. I thought in 2009 and I still think now that governments might want to get involved in this trade: they can start buying up large amounts of Greek bonds, and hedging the credit risk in the CDS market. That would reduce Greek bond yields (an obviously positive outcome), while at the same time providing a high-visibility vote of confidence in the European banking system and the counterparty risk that might lie inside it.

Right now people are scared about the high yields on Greek debt, and that’s causing nervousness in financial markets worldwide. There’s not a lot of money going into the Greece basis trade, because it might be quite expensive if you need to fund it, and borrow the money you’re investing in Greek bonds. But that’s not an issue for someone like the German government.

While lending directly to Greece with one hand, Germany could start lending indirectly to Greece by buying its bonds in the secondary market with the other — and thanks to the existence of the CDS market, they don’t even need to take on any extra credit risk when they do so. It wouldn’t be enough to save the country from its fiscal crisis, a permanent solution to which is still remote. But it would surely help at the margin.

(HT: Alea)

Update: A tipster explains the reasons for the negative basis here: there’s forced selling in the bond market, especially from accounts which aren’t allowed to hold debt which has even one junk rating. Greece is also being tossed out of a few bond indices. So that explains the downward pressure on Greek bonds, which doesn’t exist in the CDS market.

Holland Cotter today does a great job of disproving Sotheby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer’s infamous maxim that “the best art is the most expensive, because the market is so smart”.

His subject, of course, is the $106.5 million 1932 Picasso, which now holds the record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. But that doesn’t mean it’s especially good:

It’s an entertaining picture. Picasso was a born entertainer, a comic ham. I think that’s the reason for his immense popularity, though it’s not what’s great, meaning original, in his art. The seed of that is found in early Cubist painting and collage, with their shaking-apart structures, razor-sharp slices into space, and disorienting confusions of art, language, time and accident. Everything about that work was new and not easy, and still is.

“Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” and other paintings from its period are old and easy, art as usual. They keep to the known, the pleasure zone; they keep old orders firm, artist over subject, man over woman, woman as thing, a pink blob with closed eyes.

Carol Vogel speculates, unsurprisingly, that the buyer was one of a select group of alpha males:

Dealers said several prominent collectors were thought to be bidding on it, including Kenneth C. Griffin, chief executive of the Citadel Investment Group in Chicago; Leslie H. Wexner, the Columbus, Ohio, collector; Steven A. Cohen, the Connecticut hedge-fund billionaire; Joseph Lau, a Hong Kong collector; and Roman Abramovich, the Russian financier.

At these levels, buying art becomes trophy-hunting, a silly competition to see who can spend the most money. The main reason for the price is not quality but size: the painting is a good 20 square feet, much larger than any of Picasso’s cubist masterworks. The painting is instantly recognizable as a big Picasso, and it will surely make its buyer feel very rich and powerful every time he sees it. But the price has nothing to do with quality.

Splitting the roles of chairman and CEO at a public company is nearly always a good idea. It makes sense at Goldman Sachs, which is reportedly considering it, but if it were to happen, the decision would be a fraught one.

For one thing, it would look panicked and defensive, rather than a long-term strategic move. But the main reason not to do this, from Goldman’s view, is simpler: it’s incredibly difficult to find a suitable candidate. Just think of all the qualifications which are needed:

• The ability to set the strategic direction for what is still the world’s foremost investment bank and broker-dealer. How big should Goldman be? What kind of balance between banking and trading should it have? How much should it pay?
• The ability to be the risk manager of last resort, keeping an eye on the balance sheet and making sure that nothing is getting out of hand. With David Viniar as CFO, this part of the job is maybe less important right now. But it’s still hugely important.
• The ability to communicate effectively with shareholders, regulators, and politicians — in a way that Lloyd Blankfein is not so great at.
• The ability to represent Goldman’s shareholders, who are to a large degree its partners.
• The ability to restore the credibility of the rest of the board, which has been something of an embarrassment of late.

Is there anybody who can do all this? The WSJ article barely even brings up the names of Hank Paulson and Arthur Levitt before throwing cold water on them. My feeling is that if the job is going to be real, and not a figurehead, it really needs to be a Goldman person of some description doing it: maybe Bob Hormats or Byron Trott? Or bring back Jon Corzine? I wonder whether he’d take the job, since it comes with so much downside and so little obvious upside.