"No ordinary man could be such a fool"
My daughter Alexandra, an art fanatic, on hearing my explanation about the mistake of the Basel Committee, pointed me to “The forger’s spell”, a book by Edward Dolnick about the falsification of Vermeer paintings. Boy was she right!
In that book Dolnick makes a reference to having heard Francis Fukuyama in a TV program saying that Daniel Moynihan opined “There are some mistakes it takes a Ph.D. to make”. And he also speculates, in the footnotes, that perhaps Fukuyama had in mind George Orwell’s comment, in “Notes on Nationalism”, that “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
And that comprises about the most appropriate explanation I have yet seen so as to understand why our bank regulators were able to commit their huge mistake that got us into this financial and economic crisis that threatens the Western World, namely to base their risk weighted capital requirements on the expected and not on the unexpected.
No “ordinary man” would have told his children to beware about what he knew his children were afraid of, and stimulated them to go more where they already wanted to go as it seemed safe to them… which is precisely what the current risk weighted capital requirements for banks do. They cause too large bank exposures whenever the perceived risk of default of the borrower is low, and too small or even nonexistent exposures whenever the perceived risk of default is high.
No “ordinary man” would have told his children to beware about what he knew his children were afraid of, and stimulated them to go more where they already wanted to go as it seemed safe to them… which is precisely what the current risk weighted capital requirements for banks do. They cause too large bank exposures whenever the perceived risk of default of the borrower is low, and too small or even nonexistent exposures whenever the perceived risk of default is high.
And then, just like to force it down our throats, Dolnick writes “Experts have little choice but to put enormous faith in their own opinions. Inevitably, that opens the way to error, sometimes to spectacular error.”
Dolnick also mentions that the psychologist Leon Festinger once marveled: “A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point”.
All of which also leaves me with the problem that seemingly no ordinary financial reporters, like those in FT, can really come to grips with believing, or even daring to believe, that experts could be such fools.
PS. And of course, John Kenneth Galbraith and Upton Sinclair Jr added explanations
PS. No matter how insightful Francis Fukuyama seems to be, with his "End of History", he shows he did not see the statism introduced in the Western world in 1988 by bank regulators, with their Basel Accord
PS. Alexandra Kurowski 2016, M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Art and the Market, Christie’s Education New York,
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