Financial Cryptography

Banking - licensed to cheat! And whether you'll get away with it.

Research into what most people will feel is so trivially true that the research wasn't needed has been conducted -- are bankers cheats?

The subjects took part in a simple experiment of flipping a coin, and involved around two hundred bankers, including 128 from a single unnamed international bank. They were divided into two groups. The people from the first were asked specifically about their jobs in banking, while the other half were asked unrelated questions.

"The rules required subjects to take any coin, toss it 10 times, and report the outcomes online," the researchers reported in the journal Nature. "For each coin toss they could win an amount equal to approximately $20 depending on whether they reported 'heads' or 'tails'."

The point is that the players were told ahead of the game whether "heads" or "tails" would win as well as in which case they could keep their winnings.

Given maximum winnings of $200, there was "a considerable incentive to cheat," wrote the team of researchers.

The bankers were asked to fill out questionnaires before tossing each coin. Those who were asked about things unrelated to their job hardly ever cheated in the coin toss, reporting 51.6 percent wins.

But those asked about their banking careers made the cheat rate go up - they reported 58.2 percent as wins. If everyone was completely honest, the proportion of winning tosses in each group would be 50 percent.

That's actually a stunning result. Just talking about banking made the bankers cheat! As an aside, this research is a dead cert for the IgNoble awards, a sort of faux Noble in odd science which celebrates wacky research that on the face of it should not have been conducted, but in actuality reveals some interesting results.

Back to the banking cheats. Up until now, there has been a stunning silence on the behalf of the prosecution authorities for what is likely either the #1 or #2 crisis in modern history. So bankers are confirmed in their skulduggery, they will almost certainly get away with it.

What can we as society do about this? Putting some of them in jail has been commented as what is missing, indeed the reason we're likely confirmed that banking as a whole is a poisoned pot is that nobody's gone to jail for the financial crisis.

In Britain, last month, a crown court in London announced:

"A senior banker from a leading British bank pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court on 3 October 2014 to conspiracy to defraud in connection with manipulating Libor," the court said in a statement.

"This arises out of the Serious Fraud Office investigations into Libor fixing."

And, in Iceland a world-wide first:

Nov 19 (Reuters) - The former chief executive of Landsbanki, one of three banks that racked up $75 billion in debt before collapsing and crashing the economy in 2008, was sentenced to one year in jail on Wednesday for market manipulation.

Sigurjon Arnason was convicted of manipulating the bank's share price and deceiving investors, creditors and the authorities in the dying days of the bank between Sept. 29 and Oct. 3, 2008.

The Reykjavik District Court said nine months of Arnason's sentence were suspended. Ivar Gudjonsson, former director of proprietary trading, and Julius Heidarsson, a former broker, were also convicted and received nine-month sentences, six of which were suspended. All pleaded innocent to the charges.

"This sentence is a big surprise to me as I did not nothing wrong," Sigurjon Arnason told Reuters after the sentencing, adding that he and his attorney had not yet decided whether to appeal to the supreme court.

More:

In receiving a one year prison sentence, Sigurjon Arnason officially became the first bank executive to be convicted of manipulating the bank's stock price and deceiving investors, creditors and the authorities between Sept. 29 and Oct. 3, 2008, as the bank's fortunes unwound, crashing the economy with it. Landsbanki was one of three banks that had tallied nearly $75 billion in debt before the final curtain was drawn.

All pleaded innocent to the charges...

Posted by iang at November 21, 2014 12:07 AM