Oliver Griffiths

Quite

My flippant comment on the financial crisis is that it has reinforced for me the different uses of the word 'quite' in American English and British English. Let me explain.

My dictionary provides two meanings of 'quite' that are essentially mutually incompatible. A first meaning is 'completely, fully, entirely'. This is the almost universal American usage and it is in this sense that people have been describing the financial crisis as 'quite worrying'. 'Quite worrying' is interchangeable with 'very worrying'.

But in British usage, 'quite', when used as an adverb or adjective, adopts a second, different meaning: 'somewhat, moderately, fairly'. 'Quite worrying' is less worrying than 'worrying', which is less worrying than 'very worrying'. So natural British responses to the statement that the financial crisis is 'quite worrying' are that the spokesman (a) is badly underestimating how bad the situation is or (b) has a dry sense of humour or (c) is deliberately using the power of understatement.

This paper asks why the markets reacted so strongly to Greenspan's comments about 'irrational exuberance' in 1996 but didn't move when Bernanke said in testimony to Congress in 2006 that he was 'quite concerned about the intermediate to long-term federal budget outlook'. The answer may be global misunderstanding of what 'quite' meant. My experience is that when you work in an environment with both British and American employees, it's best to steer clear of the phrase 'quite good' altogether.

Posted at 09:40 24 October 2008 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[2]

Moral markets

It is a fairly reliable rule of thumb that a financial crisis will be blamed on greed. But the enormity of the current challenges has led some people to signpost this as the high-water mark of this particular tide of globalization (see Irwin Stelzer's argument) that the era of free trade has ended) and question the future of capitalism itself.

President Sarkozy's recent speech on the financial crisis has received a fair amount of interest. It did not feel to me like the broadside against capitalism that some have portrayed it, although there was some therapeutic knocking down of straw-men: 'the idea of the all-powerful market which wasn't to be impeded by any rules or political intervention was a mad one'. It would indeed be a mad idea, which is why we have lots of rules (including a legal code) and regulations (even if they didn't work very well in some cases) to channel markets. The part that has received most attention was President Sarkozy's assertion that 'if we want to rebuild a viable financial system, raising the moral standards of financial capitalism is a priority'.

The idea of moralising the market is an idea as old as the hills, of course. During a crisis it is a natural step on from talking about regulation (which, let's face it, is pretty dull). Regulation changes the duties and incentives faced by a company. At its purist, moralisation aims to change the motivations of the people working in the company. But it hasn't been very successful.

Defenders of free markets argue that moralisation isn't necessary and could do harm. Adam Smith famously said that 'it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest'. But Smith was by no means the first in the game. Perhaps the most notorious rebuke of moralizers was written by Bernard Mandeville, a Dutchman living in London during the birth of modern finance. His Fable of the Bees, written to rile the self-explanatory Society for the Reformation of Manners, argued that it was private vice itself that led to public economic benefits. A libertine kept an array of tailors and innkeepers in business in a way that a church-going spinster did not. You can draw a straight line from Mandeville to Gordon Gekko. Greed is good.

The interesting middle ground is moralizing the mission of the company. Free marketers argue that profits are a company's good works for society and companies trying to deliver public interests will be distracted from their core business. But there is mounting evidence that consumer dollars are interested in the social responsibility footprint of individual companies. So far this - to borrow shamelessly from Google's logo - seems primarily to be on the basis that a company should do no evil. So multinationals have queued up to manufacture in Cambodia because of the ILO's excellent Better Factory Cambodia initiative. If it says 'Made in Cambodia' on the label, you can be fairly certain as a consumer there was no child labour involved. The Kimberley Process, established in 2003 and covering 99% of rough diamond trade, is another good example: you don't want a conflict diamond to be forever. The next step up the ethics chain is to buy from a company because it does good. Consumers may start to reward more systematically companies that get out ahead on addressing climate change, for example.

Going back to Sarkozy's aim of raising moral standards in financial capitalism, I wonder whether corporate social responsibility has had less bottom-line traction among financial services companies than in other sectors of the economy. There have been a few virtue funds launched (though also some counter-veiling vice funds). Some entities run ethical investment policies.  But they feel like a vanishingly small minority. In policy terms, the proxy we seem to have hit on for raising moral standards in banks is to oversee executive remuneration.

Posted at 09:40 20 October 2008 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]