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Roger Barris

Roger Barris

Roger Barris is an American who has lived in Europe for over 20 years, now based in the UK. Although basically retired now, he previously had senior positions at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and his own firm, initially in structured finance and latterly in principal and fiduciary investing, focussing on real estate. He has a BA in Economics from Bowdoin College (summa cum laude) and an MBA in Finance from the University of Michigan (highest honors).

Articles by Roger Barris

Crony Socialism and Failed CEOs

January 15, 2017

Blind to Crony Socialism
Whenever a failed CEO is fired with a cushy payoff, the outrage is swift and voluminous.  The liberal press usually misrepresents this as a hypocritical “jobs for the boys” program within the capitalist class.  In reality, the payoffs are almost always contractual obligations, often for deferred compensation, that the companies vigorously try to avoid.  Believe me.  I’ve been on both sides of this kind of dispute (except, of course, for the “failed” bit).
So where’s the liberal outrage with a story like the pension swindle in El Monte, California?  This is about a dying town, with a per capita income of $10,316 and a quarter of its population below the poverty line, that is paying a pension to one of its retired (at the age of 58) city managers of more than $250,000 per year.  Adjusted for inflation.  With medical for him and his wife.  And survivorship benefits.  And to which he contributed nothing.

People are usually struck by the seeming injustice of CEOs running companies into the ground and then getting paid obscene amounts in the form of “golden parachute” type good-bye presents. Often there is no other way to get rid of a bad CEO though – if his or her employment contract guarantees a large termination benefit, the company may have little choice in the matter.

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Wealth Management Products: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

June 10, 2016

A Convocation Of Gamblers
The Wall Street Journal and BloombergView have just run articles on the shadow banking system in China.  This has put me in a nostalgic mood. About 35 years ago when I was living in Japan, I made a side trip to Hong Kong.
I took the hydrofoil to Macau one afternoon and the same service back early the next morning.  On the morning trip, I am sure that I saw many of the same faces that I saw the day before.
They had been gambling all night and were now heading back, blurry eyed and hungover, to their desks in Hong Kong’s financial district.
My fellow travelers now sit atop the world’s second biggest economy and a steaming pile of debt.  What could possibly go wrong?

Asia’s Sin City, Macau Photo credit: Nattee Chalermtiragool

Lord, Make Me Financially Prudent…But Not Yet!
The WSJ article is the more detailed one.  It describes the market for wealth management products (“WMP,” which is ominously and accurately close to the acronym for weapons of mass destruction).  These are products sold to Chinese “investors” – remember the boat back from Macao – by Chinese banks.
Number of wealth-management products issued by Chinese bank each month
Monthly WMP issuance – some observers were worried about this three or four years ago already.

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