Things Are Different Now, or Are They?

Folks there are about six weeks remaining in 2022. I believe goal setting is a critical component of success. If you have not started planning for next year, you are probably going to start the year without a solid plan. If you’re planning in January, then you missed the starting gun. Every year, our team takes three days to plan the upcoming year. This year, we will be doing that work from December 9-11. It will be a face to face session held over those three days in Ottawa Canada. We have only a few number seats available for those who would like to participate in our planning process. This would be a seat at the table with our team as we develop our individual and personal goals for 2023. If you would like to spend these three days with us, send an email to goals@victorjm.com and we will send you information on how you can participate and work on your own goals following what we believe is a very solid process for goal setting. Send an email to goals@victorjm.com

On yesterday’s show we talked about the importance of learning from the GFC. It seems that the root causes of the financial crisis have been glossed over and not properly dealt with.

Ben Bernanke who was the Fed chairman at the time has gone on record and said that the scope of the subprime mortgage loans was not sufficient to explain the magnitude of financial destruction that took place during those years. He also went on to say that the Fed lacked the tools to effectively deal with the crisis.

The Fed stepped in to bail out some institutions. But the crisis did not appear first in the US. The cascade of dominoes started overseas and did not involve any US entities at first.

The first inkling of a problem happened on Aug 7, 2007 when trading in three funds based in Lichtenstein virtually stopped. These were money market funds, denominated in US dollars, trading in London and securitized a basket of assets that were considered to be high quality, on par with US Treasuries in terms of quality.

A credit bubble appeared in both the United States and Europe. This tells us that our primary explanation for the credit bubble should focus on factors common to both regions. Home prices in the UK, Ireland, Spain, France, Italy and Australia experienced similar effects to the United States. But as we discussed on yesterday’s show, Canadian real estate was largely unaffected by the financial crisis. So why is that? What was different?

Large financial firms failed in Iceland, Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom, among others. Not all of these firms bet solely on U.S. housing assets, and
they operated in different regulatory and supervisory regimes than U.S. commercial and investment banks. In many cases these European systems have stricter regulation than the United States, and still they faced financial firm failures similar to those in the United States.

Did the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission really get to the root cause of the crisis?

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Hoat: Victor Menasce

email: podcast@victorjm.com