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If you are in any doubt about how little has changed on Wall Street since 2008, check out yesterday's front page New York Times story about how banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley profited wildly by hoarding and slowing the supply of various commodity metals like aluminum, driving up prices on the global market in the process. It was a truly ingenious profit-making scheme, involving sophisticated arbitrage of complex global regulations, all of which resulted in lots of money for banks, and higher prices for companies and consumers.
This story put me in mind once again of the fact that many of the best minds on Wall Street still spend the majority of their time figuring out new and smarter ways to game the system, rather than how to grease the wheels of the real economy. Just look at the record profits posted by a number of the world's largest banks last week. The six largest are on track to post a 20% earnings increase in the second quarter of this year. But the vast majority of that money came not from lending, but from trading. While the money spigots to the small and new businesses that create most of the jobs in this country are still tight — like last year, small business lending was down again this year, according to the Small Business Administration — trading profits are way up.
Clearly, finance is still disconnected from the real economy, which is one reason that the regulation battle rages on. A new proposal issued jointly a few days back by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency would require some of the country's largest banks to hold double the amount of reserve capital that they currently do. This has prompted all the usual complaints from the industry about too much regulation. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, now the head of bank advocacy group the Financial Services Roundtable, said the new rules would make "it harder for banks to lend and keep the economic recovery going."
(MORE: Gordon Gekko Lives: New Evidence That Greed Is Rampant on Wall Street)
Putting aside the fact that lending in key areas of economic activity hasn't been growing, as I noted above, it's also worth remembering that even before the new rules were proposed, many banks were complaining that they couldn't lend because there weren't enough credit-worthy clients to lend to. "You can't have it both ways," says Susan Ochs, a former Treasury Department advisor and senior fellow at the Aspen Institute who is doing research on best practices in banking. "The arguments have a certain level of disengenousness."
All of this begs the question of whether regulation alone can change the mindset of financier. Five years on from the crisis, with a new set of Dodd-Frank banking regulations, calls for greater capital requirements, and even a proposed return to the Depression-era Glass-Steagall separation between investment and commercial banking (which, of course, banks are fighting against tooth and nail), you still have a finance culture that hasn't changed at all. As Ochs pointed out to me recently, there's no reason to think that regulation would create a change, when the culture of banks still supports profit-making for it's own sake, and doesn't connect the dots between customers, personal behavior, and compensation. According to her, one key reason banking has lost its moorings in the real economy is because it has moved from a relationship culture to one rooted in high-speed technology and trading. In this world, the quantitative mathematicians who build the profit-making trading models for banks are totally disconnected from customers. And the biggest rewards may in fact come from trading against customers.
The point was driven home in a new survey on financial industry ethics released last week by the law firm Labaton Sucharow, one of the first to establish a practice dedicated to defending corporate whistle-blowers. According to the survey of 250 financial industry insiders, including traders, portfolio managers, investment bankers, and hedge fund managers, misbehavior in finance is rife. A quarter of those interviewed felt employees in their own company had engaged in misconduct, including insider trading, breaking securities law, or acting against the interests of their own clients. Twenty-three percent reported that they had observed or had first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace. And 29% believed that financial services professionals may actually need to engage in illegal or unethical behavior to be successful. In fact, many assumed their bosses would look the other way about bad behavior, as long as they were making money for the firm. Is it any wonder, then, that 24% admitted they would engage in insider trading if they could get away with it? And this problem isn't likely to go away anytime soon, if only because younger Wall Street professionals were significantly more likely to be aware of, accept, and engage in illegal or unethical conduct than more senior staffers.
(MORE: 20 Words That Will Make or Break Financial Reform)
So, how can we fix things? Barring a complete split between commercial and investment banking, massively better funding for regulators and white-collar crime prosecutors, or any number of other unlikely legislative overhauls, is there a way back to an old-fashioned, relationship-based lending model for Wall Street biggest firms? It's possible that the answer is no. "The major banks simply don't want to do small lending, even though it would spur the economy," says Ochs. "It's simply a very low profit area for them." Indeed, she and many others in the industry believe that entirely new models of individual and small business lending will come to dominate – witness the increased growth of credit unions, crowd funding, and alternative online lenders like Simple, Moven, and GoBank. In the future, you may even get your next small business loan from Wal-Mart, Apple, or Google rather than from a conventional retail bank.
At the same time, there's a growing push to get financiers to think differently by radically shifting the way they are compensated. A number of large banks like Deutsche, for example, have expanded bonus periods to five years rather than a single year to incentivize longer-term thinking. Others are considering mixing measures of trading volatility into bonus formulas so that performers who take big risks — even if they sometimes pay off — must pay a price. "Money shouldn't be made in just any manner," says Ochs, who would like to see a Hippocratic oath for the investment industry. "You want profit making that's constructive, rather than a 'rape and pillage' system."
Tell that to the people who are busy driving up the price of aluminum.


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Iraq war: Lessons learned?
Ten years have passed since the United States invaded Iraq, a decision that almost everyone now ranks as one of the worst foreign policy blunders of our time. Why "almost"? Former President George W. Bush and his top aides still maintain that the invasion was a good idea, even though the premise on which the war was based — that Saddam Hussein had acquired weapons of mass destruction — proved false, and even though the ensuing war claimed the lives of more than 4,500 Americans and an estimated 127,000 Iraqis.
The debate over what went wrong — which is also a debate over who deserves blame — is still under way. Was it bad intelligence? Bad policymaking? A spineless Congress? Insufficiently skeptical media? Or, most likely, all of the above?
But the more important question for the future is this: Have we learned enough from the experience to make a difference the next time? It would be nice if the question were hypothetical, but it's not. The U.S. conflict with Iran is different from the confrontation with Iraq in many ways, but it's the same intelligence services gathering information and the same political system that will make the calls.
At the risk of simplifying a rich and tangled history of failure, three big things went wrong in the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq. The first was hubris: the belief that a U.S. invasion could not only topple Hussein quickly (as it did), but also produce a swift, low-cost transition to democracy (which it didn't). The second failing was flawed intelligence: the assumption, abetted by bad information, that because Hussein had been working on weapons of mass destruction before, he must have been doing it still. The third was misuse of intelligence: the relentless hyping of the case against Hussein by the advocates of war, who took ambiguous information and warned, in the words of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, that "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Let's take the three in turn.
When it comes to hubris, we've been cured — at least for a while. There's nothing like a decade of grinding war to teach that invasions aren't easy and counterinsurgency isn't short. If anything, the Obama administration has overlearned the lesson, hesitating long and hard before backing even indirect military aid to insurgents in Syria.
But no lesson lasts forever. It took only 15 years after the traumatic end of the Vietnam War for the United States to launch another large-scale military expedition, the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.
When it comes to intelligence, the CIA and other agencies have made earnest efforts to ensure that they don't make the same mistakes again. For many analysts, the Iraq episode was a crushing professional failure. "You cannot make excuses for the intelligence," John E. McLaughlin, the CIA's second-in-command at the time, told me last week. "It's constantly in the forefront of your mind.... It's been a decade of real introspection."
Since Iraq, the CIA and other agencies require that top officials personally guarantee the quality of the intelligence they deliver. They're more explicit about the reliability (or unreliability) of their sources. And they subject major judgments to "red teams," adversarial exercises to see if other findings are reasonable.
So can an intelligence failure happen again? "Of course it can," McLaughlin said. "You're dealing with incomplete information, arriving incrementally, under pressure to come to definitive conclusions … and much of the information is laced with deception. You can't ever guarantee that there won't be a mistake."
The third problem is the most difficult: the politicization of intelligence information. In the run-up to the invasion, top Bush administration officials repeatedly exaggerated the case against Hussein in a determined campaign to convince Congress and the public that war was necessary.
Chief among the exaggerators was Vice President Dick Cheney, who told the public that the United States was certain that Hussein had "reconstituted" his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, and that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had met with an Iraqi intelligence official, a claim that was later debunked.
Intelligence officers knew that at least some of that information was wrong, but they hesitated to dissent from their superiors — and those who did had no easy way to correct the public record.
Even when intelligence officials went public with misgivings, it didn't always matter. At one point, McLaughlin told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA didn't think Hussein was likely to use chemical weapons against the United States. "It made no discernible impact" on the debate, he said.
Some intelligence veterans don't think this problem has been solved at all.
"Most of the lessons have not been learned," said Paul R. Pillar, who was one of the CIA's chief Middle East analysts in the lead-up to the war. He contends that even if the intelligence community had reported accurately that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration would still have won congressional approval for a war.
Pillar has proposed making the CIA an independent agency like the Federal Reserve, with a 10-year term for its director to insulate him from political pressure. But he doesn't expect that to happen soon.
So have we learned enough to prevent another ill-advised military adventure?
In the short run, at least, we're not likely to blunder into another land war — in Iran or anywhere else. Intelligence judgments are likely to get more scrutiny from Congress, the media and the public. Intelligence officers will be less hesitant to blow the whistle, too.
But will those lessons be remembered 15 or 20 years from now? If history is a guide, don't count on it.
Follow Doyle McManus on Twitter @DoyleMcManus
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Cow Face Yoga Pose |
go = cow (Sanskrit go is a distant relative of the English word "cow")
mukha = face
Steps :
1. Sit in Dandasana (Staff Pose), then bend your knees and put your feet on the floor. Slide your left foot under the right knee to the outside of the right hip. Then cross your right leg over the left, stacking the right knee on top of the left, and bring the right foot to the outside of the left hip. Try to bring the heels equidistant from the hips: with the right leg on top you'll have to tug the right heel in closer to the left hip. Sit evenly on the sitting bones.
2. Inhale and stretch your right arm straight out to the right, parallel to the floor. Rotate your arm inwardly; the thumb will turn first toward the floor, then point toward the wall behind you, with the palm facing the ceiling. This movement will roll your right shoulder slightly up and forward, and round your upper back. With a full exhalation, sweep the arm behind your torso and tuck the forearm in the hollow of your lower back, parallel to your waist, with the right elbow against the right side of your torso. Roll the shoulder back and down, then work the forearm up your back until it is parallel to your spine. The back of your hand will be between your shoulder blades. See that your right elbow doesn't slip away from the right side of your torso.
3. Now inhale and stretch your left arm straight forward, pointing toward the opposite wall, parallel to the floor. Turn the palm up and, with another inhalation, stretch the arm straight up toward the ceiling, palm turned back. Lift actively through your left arm, then with an exhalation, bend the elbow and reach down for the right hand. If possible, hook the right and left fingers.
4. Lift the left elbow toward the ceiling and, from the back armpit, descend the right elbow toward the floor. Firm your shoulder blades against your back ribs and lift your chest. Try to keep the left arm right beside the left side of your head.
5. Stay in this pose about 1 minute. Release the arms, uncross the legs, and repeat with the arms and legs reversed for the same length of time. Remember that whichever leg is on top, the same-side arm is lower.
Anatomical Focus
> Ankles
> Hips
> Thighs
> Shoulders
> Chest
> Stretches the ankles, hips and thighs, shoulders, armpits and triceps, and chest
Contraindications and Cautions
> Serious neck or shoulder problems
Beginner's Tip
> Beginners often have a difficult time getting both sitting bones to rest evenly on the floor, which can make it difficult for the knees to stack on top of each other evenly. When the pelvis is tilted, the spine can't properly extend. Use a folded blanket or bolster to lift the sitting bones off the floor and support them evenly.
> From the full pose, lean forward and lay the front torso down on the inner top thigh. Stay for 20 seconds, then inhale and come up.
Modifications and Props
> Gomukhasana is a notoriously difficult pose for tight-shouldered people, who aren't able to hook their fingers together. The simple solution to this dilemma is to hold a strap between the hands. Begin the pose with a strap draped over the shoulder of the bottom arm. In step 2, as you swing the bottom arm behind your back, slide the forearm as high on the back torso as possible (Remember to keep the elbow close to your side), then grab the bottom end of the strap. In step 3, stretch the other arm overhead and then reach down the back for the other end of the strap. Pull with the top arm. See if you can draw the bottom arm higher onto the back. You're trying to work the hands toward each other and eventually clasp them. Be aware too that you may be able to clasp the hands on one side, but not the other.
> A partner can help you increase the stretch in the back of the top arm. Have her stand behind you as you perform the pose (in this example the left arm is high). She should take her left hand on the back of your upper left arm and gently pull it back and up, as she presses her right hand forward against your left shoulder blade.
Preparatory Poses
> Baddha Konasana
> Supta Virasana
> Supta Baddha Konasana
> Supta Padangusthasana
> Upavistha Konasana
> Virasana
Follow-Up Poses
> Ardha Matsyendrasana
> Bharadvajasana
> Garudasana
> Marichyasana III
> Padmasana
> Paschimottanasana
> Upavistha Konasana
Deepen The Pose
> You can increase the stretch in this pose if you're a little more flexible in the shoulders and armpits by moving your hands away from the back of your torso.
Gomukhasana - PIC: Back side |


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Pearls from artists* # 385
January 15, 2020* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Sunday of Carnival, the parade begins. For a whole day of celebration in music and dance, people can express their hope and fears, revive their myths and escape to a reality far from everyday life.
Thousands of spectators arrive from different parts if Bolivia and other countries. Filling the streets, they straddle benches, window ledges, balconies, cats and eve hang from walls or roofs to witness the entrance of the Carnival. Thus is the magnificent parade when Carnival makes its official entry into Oruro. The comparsas (dance troupes) dance to music for20 blocks, nearly eight lies, to the Church of the Virgin of Socavón (Virgin of the Mine). Each tries to out do the next in the brilliance of their costumes, the energy of their dancing and the power of their music. All their efforts are dedicated to the Virgin whose shrine is found on the hill called Pie de Gallo.
If there are thousands of spectators, there are also thousands of dancers from the city and other parts of the country. Among the most remarkable are the Diablos and Morenos which count for eight of the 40 or 50 participating groups. Keeping in mind that the smallest troupes have between 30 and 50 embers and the largest between 200 and 300, it is possible to calculate the number of dancers and imagine the spectacle.
… Each dance recalls a particular aspect of life in the Andes. Lifted from different periods and places, the dances offer a rich interpretation of historical events, creating an imaginative mythology for Oruro.
… Carnival blends indigenous beliefs and rituals with those introduced by the Spaniards. Both systems of belief have undergone transformations, each making allowance for the other, either through necessity or familiarity. The Christianity fought from Europe becomes loaded with new meanings while the myths and customs of the Andes accommodate their language and creativity to the reality of their conquered world. The process can be seen as a struggle culminating in a 'mestizaje' or new cultural mix.
El Carnaval de Oruro by Manuel Vargas in Mascaras de los Andes Bolivianos, Editorial Quipus and Banco Mercantil
Comments are welcome!


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