Michael Lewis Review of Warren Buffett Book

Mike Lewis reviewed a new book about Warren Buffett for Powell's books. The review itself is typically awesome writing but, of course, it helps that the subject is so interesting. Here's a small piece from a quite thoughtful review:

By the time he was sixteen, Buffett had accumulated the equivalent in today's dollars of $53,000, and hardly saw the point of taking the spot he had been offered at the Wharton School. He knew what he wanted to do for a living -- live in Omaha and invest in stocks -- but his parents prevailed and off he went to college. He lasted three years before he returned and finished at the University of Nebraska.

Interesting that he wrote the review for Powell's rather than Amazon. I wonder if they paid him?...

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.

Our Finacial Times

It is oddly fitting that I would choose to write my first post (and link) to a Michael Lewis article. He has been my favorite author for quite some time mostly, I think, because he lives in a space with his material where he knows the fundamental absurdity of the topics he writes about, and yet doesn't shy away from conveying (what seems to be) a genuine feeling their importance all the same.

He is the best writer on money anywhere that I have read and it would be worth you while to read this one too. If you haven't read the SEC report that he refers to about the Madoff mess, you can find it online. It is well worth a read to find out how obtuse the SEC must have been to ignore Madoff for so long.

Welcome to my world.