Batting Better Than Goldman Sachs on Corporate Governance

Companies differ on how they handle personal and institutional conflicts of interest. This difference may reflect disagreement over whether a conflict of interest is inherently unethical, or whether one must be exploited for any conduct to be unethical. I take the former position: that to be in a conflict of interest is indeed inherently unethical. At the very least, being in a conflict of interest can trigger or spawn additional conflicts of interest. I point to Goldman Sachs’ response to an institutional stockholder’s corporate governance proposal as a case in point. That case can be contrasted with how the BATs board reacted in terms of corporate governance to bad public relations and a failed IPO.


The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

The Federal Reserve’s Housing Bubble

During one of his lectures to a class at George Washington University in March of 2012, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, claimed that the central bank’s lower interest rates did not trigger the housing bubble that began in the late 1990s and ended in 2006. For one thing, the Fed did not start cutting interest rates until a few years into the twenty-first century. Also, home prices rose after the Fed later began raising interest rates. Bernanke also cited Europe, where housing booms have not been associated with either tight or loose monetary policy.

The full essay is at "Essays on the Financial Crisis".

Efficiency and Ethics: On the Fairness of High-Speed Trading

Two months into 2012, the SEC announced that it had been examining the trading activities of high-frequency trading firms.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the SEC was “examining, among other things, whether high-frequency firms benefit from delays in the dissemination of prices from various corners of the markets. . . . High-speed firms use direct feeds from exchanges that can give them a leg up on slower traders.” High-frequency traders “can access prices a split second faster through their access to direct feeds.” This is accomplished by placing the trading computers in the same data center that houses the exchange’s computer servers. Just over a year later, the Wall Street Journal reported that high-speed traders were using “a hidden facet” of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s computer system “to trade on the direction of the futures market before other investors get the same information.” Even getting the confirmation of a high-speed trade just one to ten milliseconds faster can enable a computer to know the direction a commodity is going and trade on it. According to the Wall Street Journal, the “ability to exploit such small time-gaps raises questions about transparency and fairness amid the computer-driven, rapid-fire trading that increasingly grips Wall Street and confounds regulators.” Both the increasing use of high-speed trading and the problem of accountability from a regulatory point of view raise the stakes in determining the ethics of the practice. 

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.  

Cardiologists as Ethicists: On Cheney’s Heart Transplant

Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had a heart transplant on March 24, 2012, "after five heart attacks over the past 25 years and countless medical procedures to keep him going. Cheney, 71, waited nearly two years for his new heart, the gift of an unknown donor.”[1] At the time, more than 3,100 Americans were on the states’ waiting list for a heart. Of the roughly 2,300 heart transplants performed in 2011, 332 were over sixty-five. On average, heart failure was killing 57,000 Americans a year at the time, so just a fraction of those who could use a heart get one. One might question, therefore, whether the 332 recipients who were over 65, and Cheney, who was 71, should have been allowed to avail themselves of the relatively short supply of available hearts.

The full essay is at "Cardiologists as Ethicists."

                                  

1. Kasie Hunt, “Dick Cheney Heart Transplant: Former VicePresident Recovering After Undergoing Surgery,” The Huffington Post, March 24, 2012.