Excessive Caution
Felix Salmon offers a take on the financial crisis I hadn’t heard (or thought of) before:
One of the themes of my talk was that it wasn’t an excess of greed and speculation which led to the financial crisis, but rather an excess of overcaution, with an attendant surge in demand for triple-A-rated bonds. Investors didn’t want risk, and investment banks made billions of dollars, during the boom, by waving their magic securitization wands and seemingly making that risk disappear.
As usual, I don’t really know enough about this stuff to comment with any sort of intelligence, but it’s an interesting angle.