Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs): opinioni controcorrente sui mali della finanza e le riforme necessarie

Il CEO di Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein ha parlato ieri a Francoforte alla Handelsblatt Banking Conference. Ecco alcuni passaggi:

We believe attracting and retaining the best people is vital to our effectiveness and that incentives are an important element in that process. But we also recognize that, misapplied, they can also encourage excess. As an industry, we need to do a better job of understanding when incentives begin to work against the public interest rather than for it and take action to redress the balance.
I do think it is important to recognize that while incentive structures should be improved across our industry, that is no panacea for poor risk management. More than a few financial institutions kept billions of dollars of assets on their books. Often, they kept those assets because they didn’t know they were bad or toxic. Those institutions and the people that worked there – particularly at banks that failed -- suffered as a result. Thousands of professionals went down with the ship and lost much of their net-wealth as a result.
After the shocks of recent months and the associated economic pain, there is a natural and appropriate desire for wholesale reform of our regulatory regime. We should resist a response, however, that is solely designed around protecting us from the 100-year storm. Taking risk completely out of the system will be at the cost of economic growth. We know from economic history that innovation – and the new industries and new jobs that result from it -- require risk taking.

La stampa ha sottolineato le sue parole sui compensi dei banchieri che suscitano rabbia, "comprensibile e giustificata". In realtà il discorso è una difesa del modello operativo della sua banca e della vituperata finanza innovativa e globalizzata: la crisi è scoppiata per colpa di operatori miopi e incompetenti. Il fair value accounting, i modelli di risk management, le strategie di trading dinamico non sono il male assoluto, ma strumenti di lavoro che bisogna saper usare (loro li hanno saputi usare e continuano ad usarli).
Nei mercati finanziari di ogni epoca c'è posto per pochi vincitori, che si chiamino de' Medici, o Rotschild, o Goldman Sachs. Qual è il motore delle loro fortune, e come queste si correlano con la crescita e la redistribuzione della ricchezza reale? La questione, in ogni epoca, rimane aperta.

Luca
PS 11/09: Questo articolo su breakingviews.com fa la lista delle banche vincitrici, sopravvissute, messe a dura prova e in rianimazione.