James Saft

Nassim Nicholas Taleb,  the author of  “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, has a simple proposal to as he puts it, “save capitalism and free markets from the banks.”

Nationalise the banks, limit the rewards to those who work in what he calls the “utility” part of the system and have a completely uninsured second leg that can take all the risks it wants and lose its shirt, he said in an interview in Davos at the World Economic Forum.

“They rigged the game. We pay them for their profits, there is no clawback so their incentive is to hide the risk they are taking.”

“Which is why eventually as someone who loves free markets,  a total nationalisation of the part of the business that requires insurance and does clearing and payments needs to happen.”

“I am angry with U.S. policy. What we had is exactly the opposite of socialism, they got TARP to pay their bonuses and to take more risk.”

He describes his plan as Capitalism 2.0. It would have a barbell structure, with the insured utility-like part on one end and the free market bit with privatized risk on the other.

He describes banking bonuses as asymmetric because the banker gets the upside but does not share in the liability which ultimately may be funded by taxpayers, as we have seen.

Taleb, who as you may have noticed doesn’t mince words, is no fan of private equity.

“Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.” He’d have no objection to a system where private equity funds itself via hedge funds, so long as neither party had any recourse to government insurance.

And a bit like an Old Testament prophet, Taleb is angry and wants those he thinks are responsible to suffer.

“I want them poor and they deserve to be poor.You can’t have capitalism without punishment.”

Oh, and another thing, he wants Bob Rubin, who trousered millions while chairman of Citigroup, to cough up.

“I want Bob Rubin to return his $110 million dollars to the American taxpayer.”

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

One of the best things about Davos is the conversations you overhear. It's like no place else.

Sitting minding my own business, typing away I became aware of a central banker from a medium sized emerging market sitting nearby. He was joined by a gentleman from a bank in his home country. After a few muffled preliminaries the central banks said:

"So, how much trouble are you in?"

The banker responded in what sounded like soothing tones but I couldn't make out exactly what he was saying. The only other line that came through clearly was that after a long speech the banker said to the central banker, with an air of exasperation.:

"The prices are very low, but there are no buyers!"

That's it, in a nutshell.

Was letting Lehman go down the biggest mistake of the crisis? Many, including George Soros in the Financial Times, have argued that letting Lehman go down sowed panic to markets, consumers and businesses.

Not so fast, says Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, in an interview in Davos:

"My position is this is a typical error of historical understanding in which a single event is blamed for much more than it can possibly have caused. You can say ‘Hank Paulson is to blame for my troubles' and if you can change one thing in the story it would have a happy ending.

It's like saying if only Princip had not shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 there wouldn't have been a First World War.

If you go through the events of September of last year you will find it incredibly hard to produce a counterfactual scenario in which it could have been possible to save both Merrill Lynch and Lehman. There is one bank which could be bought by Bank of America but there couldn't have been two.

This is a crisis of too much bank leverage which began in August of 2007 and indeed had it roots far before. A bank leveraged 25-1 only needs a 4 percent decline in their assets to have their equity wiped out. And the notion that saving one investment bank could somehow have prevented or mitigated the crisis is a fantasy. The problem would have happened at some point somewhere else. There is a fundamental problem of bank solvency."

Ferguson argues that without another buyer for one of the two, one would have needed to have been taken into a kind of Treasury conservatorship, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were. But those were already quasi-government and such a move would have required Congressional approval, which given that Congress turned down the first version of the TARP, was not likely.

"Historical arguments need to be based on a credible counterfactual, " Ferguson said. "Nobody has been able to tell me a credible story about how both Lehman and Merrill could have been saved. It wasn't possible."

My view is that the "Oh no, they killed Lehman" meme is just part of the denial phase of grieving. Few in financial circles wanted, or indeed want, to believe that things have changed fundamentally and that the good days won't be coming back any time soon. Blaming mom and dad is the last first refuge of the adolescent.

Jim Saft is a Reuters columnist. Any views expressed are his own.