Anna Kinberg Batras hybris

I en recension av Mark Hannam av ett par böcker om finansvärlden och ekonomi fÃ¥ngade följande passage mitt intresse¹:

The standard story told about the global financial crisis is that greedy bankers took excessive risks, knowing they could capture the upside benefits and that the rest of society would pay any downside costs. An alternative account notes that bankers, along with policy-makers and regulators, underestimated the likelihood of a sharp fall in US property prices and failed to foresee the systemic consequences of such an event for the liquidity of the global finance system and thus for bank solvency. In this account, the relevant failures were epistemic rather than ethical, and were located both inside and outside the finance community.

Those of us who find the alternative account more convincing than the standard story are likely to think that ethical improvement is not the whole solution. For sure, the financial services industry needs to deal more forcefully with the “scoundrels within” if it is to regain public trust. But equally importantly, it needs to find ways to explain to the public that much of finance is akin to a voyage into the unknown, and does not resemble the exercise of professional judgement based on an agreed body of knowledge. If the roots of the financial crisis lay in ignorance rather than greed, then we should hold bankers (and policy-makers) responsible primarily for their intellectual hubris.

Den svenska bostadskonjunkturen fortsätter rakt uppåt och politikerna verkar inte ha några verktyg för att hejda uppbyggnaden av vad som kan vara en bubbla. Amorteringskravet har lagts på is, de rekordlåga räntorna eldar på prisutvecklingen och nyligen har såväl Anna Kinberg Batra som Magdalena Andersson påpekat att ränteavdraget skall finnas kvar.

När det gällde den finanskris som utlöstes av den amerikanska bomarknadens kollaps finns det alltså, enligt Hannam, olika tolkningar: var ansvariga för giriga eller för okunniga, hade de drabbats av intellektuell hybris?

Huruvida politikernas ovilja att ta bort de regler som eldar på utvecklingen och i förlängningen skulle kunna ge oss en bobubbla och finanskris handlar om girighet eller intellektuell hybris eller något helt annat lär väl framtida forskning få utvisa.

1. Mark Hannam, ”Fools or knaves”, TLS 10 april 2015, 28 [↩]