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If there is a Magna Carta for this new world of electronic finance, a single document that spells out the terms and scope of the revolution that will shift money power away from central bankers and into the hands of consumers, it could be found in "Financial Markets in 2020," a speech delivered in 1993 by Charles Sanford Jr., then CEO of Bankers Trust, to a gathering of economics sachems in Jackson Hole, Wyo.
Sanford is a complex, brilliant figure in American finance and someone to know if you care to comprehend why your bank just got gobbled up or why your mutual-fund company has begun offering a hundred new ways for you to invest your money. He popularized the notion of risk management, one of the most important ideas in modern finance. He didn't come up with the notion (credit academia), but more than anyone else he helped pioneer a new kind of risk-aware investing that offered a first glimpse of a world of high-wire, high-tech finance. His legacy has touched every American with a home loan, a credit card or a checkbook. And it has not only made consolidators like McColl and Weill possible--it has also made them essential and inevitable.
All investments can be characterized by two variables, in the same way you might categorize a person by his hair color and height: risk and reward. They tend to be proportional. If you want more reward, generally it means taking a bigger risk. Home mortgages, for example, are fairly riskless propositions for lenders, but the reward is tiny--perhaps 6% a year in interest payments. On the other hand, lending money to the government of Malaysia is fairly lucrative, but it is not an investment for the faint of heart--the double-digit interest rate brings with it risks of a devaluation, a government coup or an outright default.
The idea was to take all investments--from insurance policies to vacation loans--and break them into tiny packages of risk that could be put into a computer and auctioned on a global network. Different investors, looking to buy different kinds of returns for their money at different times, would step up and buy the various chunks of risk. Because these risk bundles were derived from the underlying investments, they were called derivatives. To explain this new world, Sanford embraced what has come to be known as the theory of particle finance. Just like quantum physics, which involves looking deep inside atoms to understand how the physical world works, Sanford proposed looking deep inside every investment to understand better how markets work.
The idea proved to be hugely popular. By allowing institutions to manage their finances more carefully, derivatives offered the possibility of locking in greater rewards at lower risks. Suddenly what seemed to be the first immutable law of finance--you can't get a bigger reward without a bigger risk--was up for grabs. Alas, derivatives aren't inherently good: Just ask the citizens of Orange County who lost millions of dollars in public money when a derivatives deal blew up in 1994.