Eugene Rotberg

Gene Rotberg, a lawyer and international investment banker, is an expert on risk taking, interest and exchange rates, financial market regulation, and the role of international development institutions. He served as vice president and treasurer of the World Bank from 1968 to 1987, responsible for overall funding and investment operations.

Quotes

 * Banks are unprofitable because they make too many bad loans and their good loans have little profit in them. They also have the dubious advantage of an awful set of accounting conventions—“a rolling loan gathers no loss”—that permits them to mask their mistakes and hold assets without marking their value to market. Spreads are narrow, costs are high and there is too much reliance on insured deposits, with the accompanying incentive to take risks with someone else's money.
 * “Speech on Banking Systems for the New York Times and Glass Steagall.". (1990)


 * Never penalize those who work for us for mistakes or reward them for being right about markets. It will go to their heads, is counterproductive and, in any event, material compensation will not correlate with their ability to predict the future next time.
 * “'The only perfect hedge is a Japanese garden': Speech to the National Association of Corporate Treasurers." (1990)


 * Sigmund Freud would have been a wonderful witness here. He would have explained the use of derivatives as denial and rationalization—the pretense that we are doing one thing when we really mean to do something else; the relationship between the banker and its client as one of ambivalence and reliance on the father figure; the use of accounting conventions as repression and the absence of reality testing; the work environment as the pleasure/pain principle—current pleasure for future damage, let someone else pick up the pieces; leveraging and doubling our bets as counter-phobic behavior; termination therapy as what happens when the CFO and Treasurer get caught; and, of course, transference—how the trader seeks to shift responsibility to his or her superior when the string runs out.
 * Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs., 23 June 1994


 * A war takes place; an earthquake occurs; a flood of a magnitude not seen in a hundred years washes over the land; a cartel falls apart; oil prices quadruple; tax laws change, and the market in which you had an open position, or even hedged, moves in a magnitude not only unforeseen, but totally outside past models. They always do. You are in trouble.
 * "Testimony Before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs.", October 1 1998


 * Freud, Galileo and Darwin told us, at different times and in different ways, that we are not the center of the universe; that we do not have control; that we do not fully understand our motivations; that we are not all that special. They did not have an easy time of it—for each society wants to believe that it can exercise control over its own destiny and over others. I suspect their findings apply not just to science or personal behavior, but to the way power and leverage can be exercised by nation states. Yours, I suspect, will be the first generation which will have to achieve results with neither military nor economic predominance—no matter where you sit.
 * Informal remarks, University of Pennsylvania Law School., 2006


 * “Admit we are not sure of all the risks. . ..
 * Show some humility. . ..
 * Figure out what we are really trying to do. . ..
 * Try to understand why a transaction makes sense to your counterparty. . ..
 * Ask ‘what if?’ Quantify ‘what if?’ . ..
 * Ignore accounting conventions. They are not useful risk management tools; they are designed to make our lives easier and comfortable.
 * Always measure opportunities lost.”


 * We design performance measures to cover-up error. They are called benchmarks. We make decisions based on: Will we be found out? Discovered? Identified as the wrongdoer? Do we really want to have to explain this stuff to someone who spent his or her life in sales or marketing?
 * Informal remarks on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Eurobond market." (2013)