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Cultural Capture and the Financial Crisis

This is a syndicated repost published with the permission of The Baseline Scenario. To view original, click here. Opinions herein are not those of the Wall Street Examiner or Lee Adler. Reposting does not imply endorsement. The information presented is for educational or entertainment purposes and is not individual investment advice.

A few years ago, while still in law school, I was invited to write a chapter for a Tobin Project book on regulatory capture. It was a bit intimidating, being part of a project that included luminaries like David Moss, Dan Carpenter, Luigi Zingales, Richard Posner, Tino Cuellar, and the deans of two of the best law schools in the country. I was asked to write something about an idea that I had slipped into 13 Bankersalmost in passing, about the cultural prestige of the financial industry and the political and regulatory benefits the industry derived from that prestige. My chapter turned into a discussion of the various mechanisms by which status and social networks can influence regulators, creating the equivalent of regulatory capture even without traditional materialist incentives (cash under the table, promises of future jobs, etc.).

Two weeks ago, an investigation by ProPublica and This American Life illustrated the culture of deference, risk aversion, and general sucking-upitude among New York Fed bank examiners that effectively resulted in the capture of regulators by the banks they were supposed to be regulating. As David Beim wrote in a confidential report about the New York Fed, the core problem was “what the culture expected of people and what the culture induced people to do.”

I wrote about the story for the Atlantic and referred to my book chapter, but at the time the chapter was not available for free on the Internet (at least not legally). The good people at the Tobin Project have since put it up on the book’s website, from which you can download it (legally!). Note that they are only allowed to put up one chapter at a time and they rotate them, so this is a limited-time offer.

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