Michael Lewis Interview

On Journalism:

When I write a long magazine piece that gets attention I feel like it's more widely read now than it was ten years ago, by a long way. In fact, it feels excessively well read. Twenty years ago I might get a couple of notes in the mail and I'd hear about it maybe at a dinner party. And that would be the end of it, and it would go away very quickly. Ten years ago it would get passed around by email, and it would seem to have a life to me that would go on a little longer. Now the blogosphere picks it up and it becomes almost like a book: it lives for months. I'm getting responses to it for months. And I don't think the journalism has gotten any better.

Focusing on Value at Risk:

Lets take a bond, let's say a General Electric bond. A General Electric bond trades at some spread over treasuries. So let's say you get, I dunno, in normal times, 75 basis points over treasuries, or 100 basis points over Treasuries, over the equivalent maturity in Treasury bonds. So you get paid more investing in GE. And what does that represent? You get paid more because you're taking the risk that GE is going welsh on its debts. That the GE bond is going to default. So the bond market is already pricing the risk of owning General Electric bonds. So then these credit default swaps come along. Someone will sell you a credit default swap -- what enables the market is that it's cheaper than that 75 basis point spread -- and he's saying that in doing this he knows GE is less likely default than the bond market believes.

Why does he know that? Well, he doesn't know that. What really happened was that traders on Wall Street have the risk on their books measured by their bosses, by an abstruse formula called Value at Risk. And if you're a trader on Wall Street you will be paid more if your VaR is lower -- if you are supposedly taking less risk for any given level of profit that you generate. The firm will reward you for that.

And, turns out I don't agree with him on everything:

You know, I have yet to have a financial person persuade me that there's a really useful reason for a credit default swap. I know why they exist and I know why they're used. They're mostly used as speculative instruments. And the people who are selling the insurance are mostly selling it because they don't pay a price for it until everything goes bad. They weren't judged as taking any particular risk. But I have yet to have anybody explain to me why these things are terribly useful. They might have some good use and I just haven't heard it yet, but I'm dubious.

Default Swaps certainly are difficult to understand, and there is definitely risk associated with them. But they are instruments to enable investors to act on information or hedge other risks in their portfolio in a more effective and targeted way. The problems with them come from lack of accounting in risks and leverage/oversight by the people/markets who create them.