The Fed has three basic functions: central banking, bank regulation, and calling down police brutality on Occupy Wall Street protesters. While the first function is getting all the attention today, the New York Fed’s blog is spending some time on the second. Specifically, they’re trying to figure out how bankers should get paid.

Optimal design of banker compensation is a thing that people like to think about, and that regulators like to regulate. We’ve talked about it before, and I’ve suggested that the right way to reward bankers is not to give them mostly equity or extra-levered equity, which encourages asymmetric risk-taking, but rather to give them exposure to their firm that roughly matches that of their main stakeholders. Which, for a bank, means basically various flavors of creditors. So a bank CEO whose net worth consists 20% of equity of his firm and 80% of unsecured debt of his firm, like Brian Moynihan, in theory has better incentives to do the right thing by bondholders, depositors and the financial system than someone who’s 100% in out-of-the-money stock options. And a banker who is paid in structured credit products that can’t be foisted on to clients has incentives … well, he’s an interesting case study at least.

I like the NY Fed researcher-bloggers because they’re pretty sober people who want to optimize banking regulation but don’t spend their time freaking out about stupid popular things like how CDS will kill us all, banning short selling, or just generally hating on bankers. So I’m pleased to see NY Fed researcher Hamid Mehran is with me on this whole comp thing: Read more »