The Next Financial Crisis Is Staring Us in the Face
All it takes to see it is a long look in the mirror.
Bloomberg, October 8, 2018
Last week, I attended an extraordinary conference. Usually, i am a speaker or a panelist but this event I was purely a spectator.
I referenced some of the highlights in today’s column, but I wanted to reference something that did not make it past the editors into the final piece — and that was the one big theme of the entire event, via Bethany McLean.
She notes that effectively, we have learned nothing from the great financial crisis. Not any of us as individuals, for surely some of us have learned something; rather all of us as an industry and society.
Bethany has written numerous books on the GFC, and she points to a single consistent theme, from Enron to Fannie Mae to the financial crisis that is contained in this classic Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. The takeway is that usually, all of our financial disasters are of our own making.
What more needs to be said?
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I originally published this at Bloomberg on Bloomberg, October 8, 2018. All of my Bloomberg columns can be found here and here.
