By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. Last week, Yves wrote her perspective on the Goldman-Greece cross currency swaps. Here's a slightly different take. Comments are appreciated.
By now, you know about the much-discussed swaps that Greece used to conceal it's debt load. While the amount of debt concealed is low relative to the total, the mere fact that Greece attempted to conceal its true fiscal position is damning in light of revelations in October that the government's fiscal hole for 2009 is three times the original April estimate.see clip. Goldman is a scapegoat." Yves Smith takes a more negative view of Goldman's culpability.
So I decided to take a different tack and share some thoughts with you on how investment bankers think - and how it may have led to this. I am using this term 'Investment Banker' generically to refer to financial staff at broker-dealers whether they work in a sales & trading or an advisory role. This distinguishes the I-Banker from a commercial banker where incentives are somewhat different.
The first thing you have to realize about investment bankers is that it's all about the money. Now I'm not talking about a greed is good mentality here. I'm referring to money as validation for achievement, success and self-worth.
Corporate hierarchies
In a normal corporate environment, there is a strict hierarchy in which those at the top earn more than those at the bottom. In order to rise to the top (and earn the salary and huge bonus - I might add), one needs to be considered successful. And that means putting in years of effort for which one receives performance reviews.
If you do well on these reviews, you might even receive accolades, awards and so on - the point being you are a rising star with talent. So you get promoted. "The way you're going, you might even rise to CEO one day!" That's the kind of praise you might hear. So the whole hierarchical apparatus is designed to align high achievement with other external signs of success: good evaluations, promotions, more money, more responsibility, more underlings, larger budgets, awards, and accolades and so on. All you need to do is look at an org chart and you get a pretty good sense of who's supposed to…
