Closing Wall Street’s casino

http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2011/11/18/closing-wall-streets-casino/

David Cay Johnston
Nov 18, 2011 15:26 EST

A superb example of a sound rule in law and economics that needs reviving, because it can halt the rampant speculation in derivatives, is the ancient legal principle that gambling debts are not enforceable through court action.

Not so long ago — before casinos, currency and commodities speculation, and credit default swaps became big business — U.S. courts would not enforce gambling debts.

Restoring this principle offers a simple way to shrink the rampant speculation in derivatives that was central to the 2008 meltdown on Wall Street.

Professor Lynn Stout, a deeply principled Republican capitalist who teaches corporate law at the University of California, Los Angeles, raised this issue at a conference where we both spoke about the 2008 Wall Street meltdown.

“Derivatives are gambling,” she said, referring to credit default swaps, at the University of Missouri-Kansas City law school conference on the financial crisis. “They are a zero-sum game in which one side loses the bet and one side wins,” Stout said.

Actually they are worse than that, since the hefty fees Wall Street pockets for arranging the bets result in a less-than-zero-sum game.

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Stout recounted the history of unenforceable gambling debts back to the Romans. She cited an 1884 Supreme Court case on what were then called “difference contracts” to show that derivatives have a long history of being treated by the law as unproductive at best and often damaging to society, just as we saw in 2008.

“I have not found a successful economy that did not have legal restrictions on bets,” she said.

She said that in addition to being nonproductive, such bets add risk to the system, invite bad conduct because bets can be rigged and foster asset bubbles, which are inevitably followed by crashes like the one from which we still have yet to recover.

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Stout noted that speculators these days like to call themselves by other names — for instance, hedge fund managers. But hedging suggests engagement in a business such as oil or grain and buying or selling contracts backed by assets you have or will use.

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Stout likened some derivatives to a market in fire insurance in which you buy coverage not for your own home, but for those of strangers. Such insurance would create an incentive to commit arson for profit. Yet we allow speculative derivatives that melted the housing market.

Stout’s approach would not stop derivatives that are backed by hard assets, such as a mortgage whose interest rate is derived from an index like the London Interbank Offered Rate or Libor and thus varies over time.

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