Regulating Wall Street Bonuses

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has just announced its intention to exercise oversight over levels of pay on Wall Street. Is this an example of overreaching regulation, or of justified intervention in the public interest?

Here are the details, from Ben Protess and Susanne Craig, on the NYT‘s DealBook blog: S.E.C. Proposes Crackdown on Wall Street Bonuses:

Lavish Wall Street bonuses, long the scorn of lawmakers and shareholders, have met a new foe: the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The agency on Wednesday proposed a crackdown on hefty compensation awarded at big banks, brokerage firms and hedge funds — a move intended to rein in pay packages that encouraged excessive risk-taking before the financial crisis.

The proposal would for the first time require Wall Street firms to file detailed accounts of their bonuses with the S.E.C., which could then ban any awards it deemed excessive. The rules would be aimed at top executives and hundreds of rank-and-file employees who receive incentive-based pay….

In general, we should probably have as our starting point a healthy skepticism about government attempts to regulate pay in particular industries. Remuneration for high-level jobs is typically based on some combination of rewarding past performance and incentivizing future performance, in addition to sensitivity to things like skill, experience, and the scarcity of the particular talents the job requires. And it’s highly unlikely, again speaking in generalities, that government agencies are going to have the right information and motives to allow them to determine with any degree of precision and efficiency just what a private company’s pay structure should be. Now of course governments aren’t the only ones who could err in setting up compensation schemes; private companies are perfectly capable of screwing that up pretty badly themselves. But for the most part, if private companies screw up in that regard, it’s their shareholders that should hold them accountable, just as it is shareholders who ought to hold them accountable for any other foolish spending.

But there are likely to be justified exceptions to the general presumption in favour of the government taking hands-off approach to compensation. If it is the case — and this seems to be the S.E.C.’s conclusion, here — that compensation schemes in a particular industry are seriously and chronically causing harm beyond the walls of the organization, that seems to be a pretty good argument in favour of government action. This is especially true when the damage being done is not “merely” damage to particular individuals or groups, but to the stability of the economy as a whole. And as Protess and Craig point out, “The move by regulators to have more say on Wall Street pay highlights the huge role financial institutions play in the economy.” That is what arguably makes the harm done by Wall Street compensation not just a matter of private wrongs, but of public ones.

But of course, this argument doesn’t mean the S.E.C. should rush in like a bull in a china shop. All of the concerns mentioned above still apply — there are reasonswhy Wall Street firms have the compensation policies they have, and it’s pretty likely that at least some of those reasons are pretty good ones related to the necessities of the industry. Indeed, the S.E.C.’s chairwoman, Mary L. Schapiro, says that “This is an area where we want to be very attuned to unintended consequences.” The S.E.C.’s objectives here, seem to be good ones; the question will be whether the quality of the agency’s methods live up to the nobility of its goals.