11 Dec 2010

The perfect crisis?

"It would be wrong to call the financial crisis that began in 2007 "the perfect crisis", since it could certainly have been immeasurably worse. An yet what is clear as one reviews the crisis even from a little distance in time is just how many forces simultaneously fed into the same destructive vortex. [...]the massive financial imbalances caused by macroeconomic relationships; a sustained global period of loose money; a fundamental complacency both macroeconomic, institutional and individual; a financial system that was overconfident in its own risk-management techniques; the globalizing of the bubble through securitization and the widespread dispersion of risk. Economic historians will surely study this period for many years to come."

by Stephen Green, "Good value - reflections on money, morality and an uncertain world"