Madoff: Investment Fund, or Virtual Reality Game?

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It’s beginning to look like Bernie Madoff’s business model had less in common with a hedge fund or investment management firm than it did with an online virtual reality game. Sort of a Sim City for investors. The money sent in was real: everything thereafter was from Oz.

Until now, we’ve thought of Madoff’s business as another financial management operation gone crooked. Think rogue currency traders, badly hedged positions, or just pump and dump.

But the Madoff scandal may be truly unique.

Consider this, from the Boston Globe:

A federal agency that regulates brokerage firms says there is no record of Madoff’s investment funds placing trades through his brokerage operation. That leaves only two options – either he was placing trades only through other firms, which would be highly unusual, or he was not placing any trades.

"There was no evidence of the Madoff broker-dealer executing trades for the [Madoff] investment adviser," said Herb Perone, spokesman for the regulatory group, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority [FINRA]

What are the implications?

• If there were no trades, then there were no investment gains. The “profits” he made were a myth.
• Madoff has claimed he made money only on trading commissions—but if there were no trades, then there were no commissions.
• The statements he issued to investors were truly fictitious. His “statements” were to real accounts as an avatar is to a gamer.

All an investor could know for sure was that you gave Madoff money, and you got back pieces of computer paper with ink on them.

Let’s say you sent in $1M through a feeder fund. You got back monthly “statements.” Let’s say you got a return of 15%. In five years, you “owned” $2M.

But follow the money. Your original $1M went to Madoff’s bank account. Each year, Madoff took out a few percent (“transaction fees”), and your feeder fund took 20% of your “profits.” (Neither “transaction” nor “profit,” of course, are real; the only thing real is that Madoff and the feeders took money out).

In five years, that’s about $400K. Instead of $2M, you know “own” $600K. And of course, “own” belongs in quotes too.

Even that was bupkus. Virtual reality money. Sim City money. Monopoly money. In the real world, it didn’t exist except in Bernie’s bank account and a computer program.

But it did exist, you say; people got their money back!

Close your eyes and envision Christopher Walken, in his best Balls of Fury voice, saying, “What paht of ‘Ponzi Scheme’ dint you unduhstand?”

I’ve seen some Madoff statements. They look like day-trader accounts. They show page after page of “transactions,” without any subtotals or easy way of matching buy/sell orders.

If you checked, the market prices all looked valid. They were. They just weren’t hooked up to a real account. He was in effect running an entire trading system in simulation mode—and telling everyone it was real.

If you looked at the bottom of your “statement,” you’d find Madoff’s broker-dealer firm’s name. Except—it apparently never made those trades.

Many people believe it’s impossible that one man could pull all this off. I’m not so sure.

Madoff made his reputation on building complex financial systems, covering the full range of investment management—accounts, trades, taxes, clearinghouses, balances.

All he had to do was switch the input signal from real accounts to simulated accounts. And every programmer knows what happens then: GIGO—Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Call it the Madoff Virtual Reality Trading Simulation Game.

And pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

 

What’s the Market’s T/E Ratio Lately?

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Yes, I said T/E ratio.

Not P/E, as in the ratio of price to earnings; but T/E as in the ratio of trust to earnings.

The P/E ratio of a company, industry, or market, signals many things. High P/E ratios may signal expectations of high growth, understated earnings, or low returns from alternative asset classes.

But P/E ratios also reflect levels of trust that certain things will continue to work:

• The law of gravity will not be repealed (at least not before Q4).
• The sun will set, as we anthropomorphically put it, in the west.
• Banks will still lend money to each other
• Interest rates will remain positive
• Oopsie…

P/E ratios, in other words, have a lot of co-variance with what we might call the Trust/Earnings, or T/E ratio. But while the numbers may overlap, they are not the same.

It’s one thing to have a certain level of confidence that CitiBank will work its way out of its difficulty. It’s quite another to trust that borrowers will continue to feel the same moral obligation to pay down a mortgage when 11% of borrowers are underwater. Or that they will trust their fellow man with their money in the form of government-insured deposits (interestingly, zero percent interest rates are bullish for institutional trust–it says whole lots of people find government-issue paper at zero to be safer than investing in anything).

This blog writes mostly about personal trust, not social or institutional trust. But they are related, and powerful.

Our economic and commercial world is astonishingly inter-related. If we start losing trust in the complex ways we have evolved to cooperate with strangers–banking, insurance, credit–we are all at risk.

Fortunately, we have personal, human habits, manners and customs that keep us in the habit of behaving nicely with others.

We need to make sure our institutions reflect those habits, not undermine them.

As for P/E ratios, the bad news is we are down considerably from the highs of 2002. The good news is, that was the height of the dot com silliness, and are now at the high end of average for the last 70 years.

Since no one has invented a T/E ratio (and I wouldn’t trust it if someone did), let me make a few assertions unconstrained by facts. Assess them against your own gut instincts.

The P/E ratio is much more volatile than the T/E ratio.

When the P/E ratio was in the 40s a few years ago, that was over-confidence, not over-trust. If anything, we saw the abuse of trust in commerce.

A P/E ratio now at the high end of normal might seem comforting, but I suspect that again Wall Street optimism masks not only the depth of the recession, but some erosion in the T/E as well.

A decline in the T/E is of more concern than a decline in the P/E. The world economy depends a whole lot more on us learning to trust each other—individually and collectively—than it does on interest rates.

For evidence, see the case of Japan over the last decade. Oh, you didn’t notice what happened with Japan? I rest my case.

LL Bean: Urban Myth or Rural Superstition?

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Over at The Consumerist, there’s a snappy bunch of stories about the legend of LL Bean, the Maine-based outfitter who just wants to make you happy. As one reader tells the story, they insisted on taking back monogrammed shirts that his wife had bought in entirely the wrong size.

He tried to insist it was his fault, not LL Bean’s, but Bean wouldn’t take no for an answer. They just had to make sure that his monogrammed shirts would fit him by accepting the old ones for return. (The comments alone are worth reading for a thorough exploration of the pros and cons of having such a liberal policy. Plus they’re fun.)

But let’s talk about the larger issue. LL Bean is not the only firm behaving this way. Every time I teach an exercise on customer satisfaction, someone has a Nordstrom’s tale to tell. There’s a lunch counter in Lincoln Nebraska that uses an honor box to sell sandwiches on the sidewalk for a buck each in the summertime. And so on.

In discussing the dynamics of such policies, I’m bemused to find how many people insist, “it won’t work.” If you point out that it has worked for over a hundred years for LL Bean, they repeat, “it won’t work.” Endless loop.

Sure, it can be abused, and sometimes it is. What’s interesting is, why isn’t it abused more often? In Lincoln, reportedly the homeless people monitor each other to be sure no one takes undue advantage. (I know, I know, it’d never happen in New York. Except I bet it does).

There is an innate sense among people that will keep anthropologists, bio-ethicists, animal intelligence students and other social researchers busy for years to come trying to “explain” it. Meanwhile, it clearly “is.”

And you can make book on it. This is the principle that underlies trust-based selling: if people trust you, they will strongly prefer to give you the business. There’s no better way to get people to trust you than to trust them, by putting yourself at risk.

David Maister always put an explicit guarantee on his work: 100% satisfaction or just pay him what you thought it was worth, including nothing.

Takers? None.

The act of the offer ensures it will rarely be taken up–as long as the offer is genuine.

This is reciprocity in the sense that academic Robert Cialdini writes about as the number one source of influence. If you treat me right, I’ll treat you right. If you listen to me, I’ll listen to you. If you trust me, I’ll trust you.

The wonder is not how often our trust gets abused; it’s how few Bernie Madoffs there are.

I remember hearing of a pizza chain that offered a satisfaction guarantee—if you didn’t like the pizza, you’d get one free. One nasty customer kept saying he wasn’t satisfied, and demanding another new one each time he ordered.

Finally the owner went to the customer and said, “I’m really sorry, but it appears we have failed consistently to meet your high standards. It frustrates me no end, but I have to confess, we just don’t seem to be able to make a good enough pizza. I wish we could, but we have no choice but to reluctantly stop selling you our inferior pizza. Please accept our apologies.”

Buying Decisions: Stepping on the Value Scale

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The phone’s not ringing.

The deal’s not closing.

What went wrong?

If you’re in a selling role for any period of time, you know the feeling of an opportunity slipping away.

We’re inclined to accept the client’s explanation at face value or write our own stories about why we’re losing the deal.

We were too high. The competition had a capability we didn’t. The timing wasn’t right.

Often times, we know in our gut that these are only part of the story. We often accept these as answers because they are concrete, tangible or quantifiable; we can package them and tie them in a bow – they are clean.

The truth is often messy, intangible and more personal; which is why the client is reluctant to share them with you.

So–what really did go wrong?

What if we take a 30,000 foot view of a simple question: what’s the role of the seller?

a. Make a sale?
b. Provide a ROI for the client?
c. Reduce Costs?
d. Improve efficiency?
e. Meet customer needs?

Yes, yes and yes. But the common thread woven through all of these reasonable responses is … to create value.

Neil Rackham, author of Re-thinking the Sales Force and SPIN Selling summarized his years of research: “The only single ‘truth’ that seems to be holding true for all sales forces is that they have to create value for customers if they are to be successful. Just communicating the value inherent in their products isn’t enough.”

But–what is value? How do we measure it, and what is its impact on sales revenue and profitability?

Let’s remember a simple formula: Benefits – Costs =Value

We tend to think of costs synonymous with the price we charge–for example – $1,250 plus tax – while disregarding the costs of the “hassle factor." Likewise, we tend to think of benefits as things that help the customer close a needs gap–improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction. We discount a critical but less apparent value, i.e. – the way we engage with the client prior to actually making the sale – the process.

The hassle factor on the cost side, and the engagement process on the benefits side can significantly tip the scale in either direction. And your perceived trustworthiness has a lot to do with the balance of the scales.

Read the full article here.

 

A Country Music Star as a Trusted Advisor?

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I saw Vince Gill in concert. First time. I was pretty sure I’d enjoy the music, but I had no idea I’d walk away having learned something from a country music celeb about being a Trusted Advisor.

The concert was magical. Sure, the music was good (if you like country, and I will confess I do). Vince is talented, as is his entourage. But he created something with his band and his audience that turned a good concert into an extraordinary experience of community and connectedness. How? By how he was being: humble, self-deprecating, intimate, vulnerable, and totally transparent.

There were several bands listed on the playbill that night, presumably warm-ups for the Big Guy. At curtain time, a lone man appeared on stage, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, and simply started playing guitar and singing.

I kept looking at the program, trying to figure out who he was. I also wondered why this guy was playing a song I recognized as Vince’s when the star himself would be on stage in an hour or so. Turned out it was Vince. All by his lonesome. No fanfare, no glitz – just showed up and started doing what he does best.

At one point he traded his guitar (for which he is known) for a fiddle. I don’t remember the song as much as I remember what he said as soon as it ended: “Boy, am I glad that’s over!” Everyone laughed, and he shared with us how he is a novice with the fiddle and always nervous about playing it on stage – especially in the company of one of his band-members who is very accomplished with the instrument. He told us that he hates how, due to some recent weight gain, it gives him a triple-chin.

Later, he introduced a song he wrote after his father’s death with a story about his father. He knows how to weave a good story, so that made a difference. But what really drew us in was the authentic and loving way he shared about the trials and tribulations of their relationship. We could all relate. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house at the end of the song.

I will remember this concert for years to come. Why? Because this country music expert created something magical for me and several thousand of my closest friends because of how he was being. And I, and you, and every other expert in the corporate world have available to us the ability to have the same kind of impact.

Forget about your decades of experience and advanced degrees – just for a moment. Put aside your To Do list. What possibilities are you going to create for your clients today out of how you are being?

 

 

January Carnival of Trust is Up

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The January Carnival of Trust is up.

Hosted by Diane Levin at MediationChannel.com, this month’s edition certainly had a feast to choose from, what with all manner of scandals and conflict in the news. Diane’s choice of material for the Carnival chooses to emphasize the basics of trust–something well worth doing in times of off-scale low trust.

Each month, the Carnival of Trust rotates to a new host. Each host selects the Top Ten trust-related blogposts in categories including Sales & Marketing, Management and Leadership, Advising and Influencing, and Strategy, Economics & Politics.

Since the host chooses only the Top Ten, and thoughtfully adds some valuable perspective of his or her own, it ends up being a rich and rewarding reading experience. Diane’s selections include such topics as Ponzi Schemes (no big surprise there), trusting your customers, trust lessons from improv comedy, moral education in the workplace, and reflections from a week in the frosty northwoods–without electricity.

Many thanks to Diane. Hop over to the Mediation Channel and read the January Carnival of Trust.

Want to submit a post? Articles can be submitted through Blog Carnival’s submission form. Please be sure the article is related to trust and be aware that each host will choose only ten articles each month. The deadline for submissions is always the Thursday before the first Monday of each month.

You can also read past Carnivals here.

 

 

How Not to Regulate Untrustworthy Industries

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I haven’t done an analysis on this, but it feels like the financial sector has had more than its share of responsibility for scandal in the most recent economic “troubles.” Which makes it even more tempting to regulate by compartmentalizing and dictating specific behaviors.

In the broadest terms, that would be a mistake.

Say you have a 17-year old son who wants to take the family car out at night. You’re worried about alcohol abuse and aggressive driving—things occasionally associated with teenagers.

Do you say:

a. Absolutely not, and I don’t care what Louie’s parents are doing, you’re not going out at night with the car until you’re 18 / have your own car / etc. Period.

b. OK, but here are the ground rules, and if you violate them, here are the consequences; they will be severe and immediate, and I’ll check randomly.

I think most of us would prefer b. If not, just add a year to the age. Eventually you’re going to have to let the kid out at night.

More broadly, the question is: do you regulate by dictating behaviors, or combining audits with enforcement and sanctions?

You could answer this with ideology, or with a cost-benefit analysis. But there is one factor that I don’t think gets mentioned enough. And that is trust.

Let’s say an accounting firm is considered to have abused its relationship with its consulting branch. You could:

a. force accounting firms to sell their consulting businesses or build strong “Chinese walls (basically what Sarbanes Oxley did), or

b. increase the budget of the GAO, the Justice Departments’ enforcement branches, and the sanctions for violation of rules.

Others know more than I about the costs of Sarbanes; let’s just say it was high. But the real cost was that accountants won’t get to rub noses with consultants. Firms won’t have to develop their own policies. They have had to become compliance-driven, not outcome-driven.

The real trouble with structural regulation is that it removes the ability to evolve relationships, or trust, between business entities. Therefore it removes all possibilities for future economic improvement from trust.

Structural regulation is like putting up a concrete fence with your neighbor; it ain’t coming down anytime soon. The opportunity cost is bigger than the out of pocket cost.

In a really excellent NYTimes piece—The End of the Financial World as We Know It by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn (I find them the best source these days for understanding what just went down)–they nonetheless plop for structural approaches.

They are probably right in part; revolving doors from government to industry lobbying, for example, is a pretty sure source of corruption. But structural solutions ought to come as last options, not first.

There are tons of laws governing the financial industry that simply get buried in process, language, bureaucracy, small print. They simply do not get enforced, and if enforced, they are toothless, and even then do not get publicized.

Before we build concrete walls, invest some money in creative auditing, enforcement, and sanctions that really bite. It at least leaves the door open for good players to do something really good with relationships. To grow up and drive right.

 

From Mistrust to Cynicism to Corruption

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Q. What do Mark Twain, Clint Eastwood and Bernie Madoff have in common?

A. They all tell tales of the path from mistrust to corruption.

In 1879, Harper’s Monthly published Mark Twain’s wry tale The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg—a dark, cynical sketch of a town whose pride rested on its reputation for incorruptibility. A stranger manipulates that pride into corruption, and makes the town the cause of its own ruin.

The Wikipedia summary makes for eerie reading in these past-Madoff days.

94 years later, Clint Eastwood channeled the same stranger/corruption theme in High Plains Drifter, his second directorial effort. Elizabeth Abele’s review nails it:

…not only is there little difference between the law and the bad guys, but the "good, decent people" [of Lago, Arizona] do not appear deserving to be saved. In their silence and passivity, they are as guilty as anyone. The approaching outlaws are in many ways a McGuffin. The Stranger’s true adversaries are the townspeople–who simplistically reward the Stranger for his opening slaughter of their hired guns by hiring him as their savior.

Cue the Good Townspeople burned by Bernard Madoff, financial crackhead (I mean "crackhead" in the sense of someone consumed by an ever-growing need for more and more money to feed his insatiable, and growing, need. If the shoe fits…).

Stipulated: Madoff’s a bad man, and many innocent people were harmed.

But a great many other people bear the same kind of responsibility as the citizens of Hadleyburg and Lago. Such as “feeder” funds like Fairfield Greenwich Group , which claimed in writing (and charged greatly) to perform high levels of due diligence on its Madoff investments.

And how about its sophisticated partners and customers at institutions like Banco Santander and Union Bancaire Privee? Like the Good Townspeople of Lago, it beggars belief that none among them had suspicion skeletons in their closets.

Here’s the roadmap downhill from broken trust.

In Twain’s and Eastwood’s stories, an organization starts out proud of its reputation for rectitude. Then someone descends into venality. It starts with “borrowing” to tide things over the weekend. But–as with any crackhead–it doesn’t stop there.

There comes a critical point when the bad guy is found out. The organization or society of which he is a part can go one way or the other. It can be horrified and reject the miscreant. (Let’s refer to this as the “right thing to do.”)

Or, it can choose “tolerance.” He’s really a good guy, he hasn’t done it before, haven’t we all cheated on our taxes one time or another? Just let it be.

And the crackhead steals the family silver.

Tolerance then leads to cynicism. Hey everyone does it, it’s nothing new, what are you, naïve, don’t you know how things work? Knock it off. It’ll work out.

And the crackhead knocks over a store.

Finally, you end up with corruption. Hey, Bernie’s making a ton for everyone. Not everyone can get in on it, but I know someone who can get you a piece of the deal. Shhh, everyone knows it’s a little “off,” but look at those returns. Waddya, nuts? Just sell a little to your cousin. Hey if you don’t, someone else will. Might as well be you. I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone, what’s the harm. Wink wink, nod nod, know what I mean, know what I mean?

And the crackhead corrupts everyone.

In the Eastwood version, the Stranger renames the town “Hell” as he rides off into the sunset. Twain’s Hadleyburg too gets a name change.

John Wayne didn’t care for this movie (or for Eastwood in general, I suspect). But while John Wayne was hell on bad guys, I’m not sure he knew how to recognize a helltown of crackheads. And just changing the town name won’t do the trick.

 

 

Keep Your Damn Receipt!

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They say a pun is the lowest form of humor. Analogously, a rant may be the lowest form of blogpost. But we love both from time to time.

The other day I bought a salad at a health club (overpriced at $7.50). The pre-packed kind, in a plastic container with a tiny plastic cup of dressing inside. They sell sandwiches and water and chips—it’s a small place run by a concessionaire.

I gave the lady a twenty. She gave me back change—a few coins, and several bills—with the receipt neatly held together with the bills.

So here’s my little rant. I hate those gratuitous little receipts. I mean, a salad?

“I don’t need the receipt,” I said, making a bit of a show of peeling off the receipt and handing it back to her.

That’s when she upped the ante. “The wastebasket is right over there,” she sniffed, pointing behind me as she withdrew her hands from the proffered receipt. Which of course just ticked me off more.

“I’m sure there’s a wastebasket on your side too,” was my (oh-so clever!) retort as I turned and left the receipt on the counter.

Now, maybe I could use a good “get over it” lecture. Fair enough. Still…

What is it with dinky purchases and receipts?

If I’m buying a computer, furniture, office supplies—I get it. The tab for six at a business lunch, the week’s grocery shopping, hardware—I get it.

But a Hershey bar at the airport bookstore? A coffee at Starbucks? A bag of chips or a magazine at a chain pharmacy? Like I’m going return it? Or put it on an expense account?  My tax return?

Am I the only one that thinks it annoying to get a receipt for every little purchase?

Here’s what I suspect.

• I suspect it’s largely the bigger, chain stores that are guilty of this.

• I suspect this is the same crowd that brought us “Your message is very important to us…”

• I suspect some programmer suggested it ages ago, something like, “now that we’ve got the inventory replenishment process linked to the POS system, you know what else we could do—like, for free?”

• I suspect some “customer service analyst” thought, “If the customer has to ask for a receipt, that’s annoying to the customer—but hey if we just give it to everyone without being asked…”

• I suspect the higher-up that approved this nonsense thought, “Hey, if we give one to everyone, then no one can ever blame us, and we don’t have to allow our brainless frontline staff to make any decisions at all. It’s a total win!”

That’s what I suspect, anyway. How about you?

 

Who You Gonna Trust–Your Own Eyes, or Your Grandparents?

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Eric Uslaner is a respected academic student of trust. He has just published an article in the Oxford Journals Public Interest Quarterly called Where You Stand Depends Upon Where Your Grandparents Sat: the Inheritability of Generalized Trust.

It’s interesting reading. It shows that “generalized trust” is very much an inherited trait.

Uslaner articulates two theories of trust: one says we learn trust experientially, the other says we inherit it from our parents and grandparents. Which is right?

He suggests a clever analysis: if we learn experientially, then living in trustworthy communities ought to affect trust. But if we learn culturally, then who our grandparents were ought to affect our trust levels more than the communities we live in. Who drives trust: my own eyes, or the culture of my grandparents?

The data suggest—drumroll—it’s your grandparents! The cultural explanation has more power than the experiential explanation. Which means, by the way, that the Nordic, British and Germanic cultures foster people who are more likely to trust. Much lower propensity to trust scores come from those with African and Spanish/Latino heritage.

I don’t doubt the data, nor Mr. Uslaner’s logic. However, interpreting trust data is tricky business.

In particular, the “generalized trust” that Uslaner (and many other researchers) talk about is about trusting, not about being trustworthy. More importantly, it’s about a general, abstract sense of trust primarily as it relates to strangers.

Very specifically, "generalized trust" work is often based on longitudinal data from the General Social Survey (by the National Opinion Research Center), which asks three trust questions—variations on “Generally speaking, do you believe that most people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”

In analyzing trust, it’s tempting to emulate the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlamp—not because he lost them there, but because it’s easier to see there. Want valid, survey-based, long-term, cross-cultural data on trust? Then you’ll love focusing on “generalized trust"–because that’s where the streetlamp is. The academics are clear enough about that, but just reading about "generalized trust," it’s easy to forget what’s left out.

And “generalized trust” leaves out an awful lot.

It leaves out biological accounts of trust. Think about the implications for trust in this line: “I trust my dog with my life, but not with my lunch.”

It leaves out the notion of specificity. As another researcher quips, “I trust Bill Clinton with the economy, but not with my daughter. And I trust George W. Bush with my daughter—but not with the economy.” I may trust your recommendation to buy a book on Amazon, but not to recommend a restaurant.

Most importantly, it leaves out personal trust. A general propensity to trust does not explain why Bernie Madoff could con hundreds of highly cynical, suspicious investors (including British, French, South American, Catholic, protestant and Jewish people) into trusted him implicitly.  And while a Brazilian or Argentinian may be quite suspicious of strangers and of institutions, in my own experience they have great ability to trust individuals they have come to know.

There is no contradiction with these notions of trust and the “generalized trust” Uslaner talks about—they are simply different things.  And this isn’t just about academic researchers, either. The business world, e.g. Edelman’s annual Trust Survey, is fixated on the definition of trust as it relates to credible sources of information about a company–itself a fairly narrow subset of trust.

There’s no critique of anyone here, no right or wrong. I’m simply reminding us all that “trust” is an extraordinarily rich, complex and non-obvious nexus of notions.

Caveat Reador.