The final programme in the documentary series The Love of Money finishes by ascribing the causes of many financial crises, including the most recent, to a “reckless love of money”. Over the series, we have seen how reliance by banks on imprudent investments in property loans with high default risk led to the near total collapse of the world’s financial systems.

Was this the consequence of the actions of a powerful few, driven by extraordinary levels of greed and recklessness, or can the roots of the crisis be found in much more commonplace aspects of human psychology? I am going to argue that there is a great deal in common between the psychology of every day decisions about money and the psychological processes involved in the creation of this global financial crisis.

Consider two examples:

Jenny has recently lost her job, she knows that money is tight and she needs to reduce her costs dramatically, but every time she tries to think about sorting things out she feels bad and ends up by going shopping to cheer herself up.

Jared took on a 100% loan to buy a house with repayment levels he could only just afford. As he thought about this decision from time to time, he felt anxious about the possibility that he would not be able to meet the payments. He was able to avoid this anxiety by focusing on the way in which house prices seemed to keep on rising and by telling himself it was really a ‘one way bet’.

In each case there is a common factor: employing a strategy to avoid bad feelings and maintain good feelings, rather than facing the real problem or risk. We all behave like this from time to time. We all have strategies to regulate our emotions and often do so with the goal of avoiding bad feelings. However, when we feel particularly anxious or are powerfully motivated by an important goal, this tendency can cause us to ignore the important information that negative feelings can carry. Often this can involve fostering illusions about ourselves and the world around us which help us feel better.

Stock market results in a newspaper.
[image © copyright Jupiterimages]

We might imagine that professional financial decision-makers would be better at avoiding such traps. After all they work in a climate which places a great premium on rational decisions. However, in a large-scale study of 118 traders in four City of London investment banks, myself and colleagues found traders to be just as prone to these kinds of illusions as the rest of us. In particular we studied traders’ propensity to suffer from the illusion of control: the tendency to believe we are more in control of events than we really are (especially under stress). We found a significant relationship between a tendency to suffer from illusions of control and poor trader performance (including poor management of risk).

How might this relate to the causes of financial crises? One example back in the early 1990s is worth recalling. Peter Baring has been reported as telling shareholders at an AGM one year before the collapse of Barings’ Bank that, on the basis of the previous year’s performance, he had concluded it is easy to make money in the derivatives market. A year later the bank was valued at £1.

Any banker understands that there is a strong relationship between risk and return. Faced with unusually good financial performance in part of a bank’s operations, an important question to ask is “What hidden risks are we carrying that account for this high return?” However, faced with good returns, it is tempting to foster the illusion that good performance is a result of our unique skills and capabilities, while failures are due to events beyond our control. This tendency is known by psychologists as the self-serving bias.

This unwillingness to seriously question what hidden risks lay behind unusually high returns seems to have been an important factor in the recent demise of Lehman brothers and other major banks. A reckless love of money seems to have fuelled collective illusions about the risks being faced.

We need to understand more about how these kinds of emotion regulation processes work in financial decision-making. Current research is helping us understand these processes and how such blindness to risk can be reduced. The European Commission has funded me and an international group of researchers to conduct a major study looking at ways of improving financial decision-making. This study is looking at traders, investors and private citizens, and is paying close attention to the role played by emotions in their decision making.

Take it further

• Trading on emotion
• Has Robert Peston caused a recession?
• Bankers won, politicians lost

Further reading

Traders: risks, decisions, and management in financial markets, by Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, Nigel Nicholson, Emma Soane and Paul Willman, was published by Oxford University Press.

About the author

Mark Fenton-O'Creevy is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the OU Business School. His research includes investigations into the performance of traders in financial markets, and the problems that occur when management practices are transferred from one country to another.

He is also a National Teaching Fellow, and Principal of the Centre for Practice-Based Professional Learning.

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The programme Supersave Me went through a list of different investment and speculative alternatives, from short-term savings products through shares and property to betting on the horses. It looked at different attitudes to investing at different stages in the ‘life course’, with younger savers more interested in setting money aside for a rainy day or a deposit on a house and older savers keen on having an income in retirement. It showed how most savers want to choose themselves, believing they have an edge in choosing cars, property, share or racehorses. And they were all aware that there is risk involved.

There are a number of simple ways in which you can get the risk return trade-off that suits you. Some people, say close to retirement, don’t want too much risk; others, younger, are looking for capital growth which only comes with risk attached. If you have a nest egg, or are saving monthly, just decide how much you can afford to lose. For example, with a £10,000 nest egg, would you be able to survive if it fell to £5,000? Or can you afford only to have it fall to £8,000, say? The smaller the fall you can afford, the less risk you can take on.

Lady holding a piggy bank
with dollar bills falling from the sky.
[image © copyright Photos.com

The stock market, for example, can, as we have seen, fall 40 to 50% in a single year, although that is a rare occurrence. So, decide up front, how much you can afford to lose. It’s likely that if you are in your fifities, you will have a higher minimum value on your nest egg than a thirty-something with years to go before retirement.

You also have to decide your time horizon. If you are investing for 10 or 20 years, and can afford to hang on to your investments, you shouldn’t worry about short term falls as, at some point in the future, prices will recover. That is true of property too, but the problem with property is that it tends to be a ‘leveraged’ investment. People tend to borrow to invest in property, so that a fall in the value of the property or in rents can mean that the loan is called in and substantial losses incurred. People tend not to borrow to buy shares so investing in shares is less risky than borrowing to invest in buy to let.

But the simplest way to make sure you maximise your expected return for a particular level of risk is to diversify across different kinds of assets. Put simply, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Put some in cash, some in bonds, some in shares and possibly some in property or another ‘alternative asset class’ such as gold or even classic cars. By so doing, you will be making sure that at least part of your savings doesn’t fall. For example, when the stock markets were crashing in 2008, investments in government bonds were racking up capital gains of 30% or more. And if your pot is not big enough, there are plenty of investment trusts or unit trusts who will diversify on your behalf.

And, finally, if you are investing in the stock market, don’t invest it all at once. Regular saving, so called ‘dollar averaging’ means that you don’t put all your money in at the top of the stock market cycle and also that you do put some money in when shares are cheap. Regular saving avoids the classic small investor’s temptation – to buy at the high in the heat of a stock market boom and to sell when prices have gone down.

Take it further with Open2

• Saving time and pennies
• Is tax avoidance only for the rich?
• Private equity - who's paying for their profits?

Take it further with the Open University

• You and your money: personal finance in context
• Debt and borrowing in its wider context
• Introduction to bookkeeping and accounting

About the author

Janette Rutterford is Professor of Financial Management at the OU Business School, having previously worked in corporate finance and investment. Jannette's research includes pension funds, equity valuation and investment history, in particular the history of women and wealth.

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How much attention should companies pay to their share price?

Share prices of all companies have certainly been volatile in the past couple of years. Indeed, individual shares have risen or fallen as much as 25% in a single day. As well as that, most shares have fallen in value by around a half in the past two years and are back at levels seen five or more years ago.

Executive directors had bonuses in share options, so boosting share price made them personally richer

In the twenty first century, shareholder value became the new corporate mantra. CEOs and directors of companies had as main objective the maximisation of shareholder value and that meant boosting the share price. A couple of simple techniques were developed to do this: share buybacks and takeovers. Borrowing money to carry out share buybacks meant more leverage on the balance sheet which meant greater percentage profits growth in the boom years.

Buying companies using debt also increased leverage and allowed the stripping out of surplus cash as dividends. Since executive directors all had bonuses in the form of share options, the more they could boost the share price, they richer they personally became. Directors certainly paid a lot of attention to the share price as the inexorable rise in the early twenty first century could be used to keep investors happy and provide a measure of bonuses to come.

In the bear market since 2007, share prices have fallen faster than ever before - partly due to the embedded leverage of many companies. The worst to suffer have been property companies, financial services companies, and private equity firms whose investments in companies were themselves highly geared. Indeed, for many firms, the options included in bonus packages are 'under water' and new ones at lower prices have been issued.

But falling share prices have other consequences for management. One problem now for many companies is whether they are going to be forced into liquidation as they breach debt covenants. The share price is a reflection of investors' perception of that probability. The lower it is, the less likely that investors will be willing to refinance the firm. Recently, some rights issues have had to be done at 50% or more discount to the current, low, share price to be successful. And, by law, firms cannot issue shares for less than their nominal values of say £1 per share or 25p per share.

Another problem is the lack of loyalty of today's shareholders. In the old days, retail shareholders and institutional investors could be relied upon to invest for the relatively long term. No more. Today’s investors include hedge funds which are just as willing to sell as to buy shares. Some of the major UK banks have ended up part nationalised after sudden collapses in their share price after short selling by hedge funds. Although some people argued that short selling was not the cause, it was banned for a time in the UK on certain shares and even now has to be disclosed.

A low share price makes firms vulnerable, either to bankruptcy or to takeover. And the last thing a CEO wants is to lose control. Just look what happened to John Thain of Merrill Lynch after the takeover in extremis by Bank of America!

Find out more

Do hedge funds deserve to survive?

Why not explore these issues at a deeper level with The Open University Business School postgraduate courses in Financial strategy or Issues in international finance and investment?

About the author

Janette Rutterford is Professor of Financial Management at the OU Business School, having previously worked in corporate finance and investment. Jannette's research includes pension funds, equity valuation and investment history, in particular the history of women and wealth.

Subscribe to Janette Rutterford's posts