The indomitability of risk

Since my last post leads in to a point that I made in November 2008, I am recycling it here:

The 3 Laws of Risk

1. For every potential return created, we create an opposite potential risk. If banks wish to earn investment income, they need to engage in a financial transaction. The more transactions they enter, the greater the potential income and risk.

2. Risk, once created, cannot be destroyed or absolutely decreased (unless potential return is also decreased or given up). It can only be transferred, shared, or dispersed.

3. In a system where risk has been shared and dispersed among interconnected institutions, any random adverse change in risk in any locality will adversely change the risk in other localities of the system. This is true of all kinds of risk, whether credit default risk, market risk, volatility risk, interest risk, currency risk, sovereign risk, or capitulation risk. They are all inter-connected.

These three laws then lead us into extrapolating five major implications of risk on a financial system.

5 implications of risk on a financial system

1. Any firm trying to earn additional return by taking on the risk of another party, either by entering into a swap, selling an option, guarantee, or insurance to the other party, incurs a potential risk of loss that runs up to a maximum of the loss of the counterparty. AIG and Citibank, more than any others, have learned this the hard way.

2. Any firm that tries to hedge its risk by entering into a swap with another party only succeeds in transferring the original risk to another party. That’s what Goldman was successful in doing to AIG.

3. Worse, if each party in the chain that offers to be a counterparty in this risk management process tries to earn a minimal return on the transaction, it creates additional counterparty risk that was not there before. Hence the more firms involved in a chain of counterparty swaps and derivatives transactions, the greater the resulting risk created in the system. Any and all returns earned from entering into these types of transactions should not paid out to employees or shareholders of the firms, but kept as capital buffer in the event of such systemic meltdown.

4. The more interconnected a system, and the more of these types of transactions it has, the greater the likelihood of a systemic meltdown. Due to the need to bailout insolvent but crucial entities (to the continued functioning of the system) in the event of a meltdown, these firms should not be allowed to enter into derivative transactions.

5. There is no such thing as a benign or risk-free environment. You can never create an environment where risk has been controlled or made benign. It only means risk has been put at rest. But the more risk is put at rest, the greater its potential blowup energy. You may only succeed in causing it to implode more fiercely, and in unexpected ways. This makes the case for having a centralized clearing house that more important. With a clearing house, we can better track where in the system risk is building up, and we can correspondingly require greater collateral protection before something unexpected blows up.