For their lending business, banks hire dull people and train them to be even more dull. But this is just for show.
If they look conservative, it is because their loans only go bust on rare, very rare, occasions. There is no way to gauge the effectiveness of their lending activity by observing it over a day, a week, a month or even a decade.
In the summer of 1982, large American banks lost close to all their past earnings (cumulatively), about everything they ever made in the history of American banking. They had been lending to South and Central American countries that all defaulted at the same time--"an event of an exceptional nature." So it took just one summer to figure out that this was a sucker's business and that all their earnings came from a very risky game.
All that while the bankers led everyone, especially themselves, into believing that they were "conservative." They are not conservative; just phenomenally skilled at self-deception by burying the possibility of a large, devastating loss under the rug. In fact, the travesty repeated itself a decade later, with the "risk-conscious" large banks once again under financial strain, many of them near-bankrupt, after the real estate collapse of the early 1990s in which the now defunct savings and loan industry required a taxpayer-funded bailout of more than half a trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve bank protected them at our expense.
Today's subprime loan crisis proves, once again, that when "conservative" bankers make profits, they get the benefits; when they are hurt, we pay the costs.
Source: "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House)
