Great post. As someone who lived through it on a trading desk, the true "villian" was the structure of leverage in the system. It built up over years on the back of several variables that were self-reinforcing. It's simpler to blame one person or institution (Angelo! Freddie! Rating Agencies!), but that's just not what happened. It was a complex system. And watching repo markets upend in a very short period of time was nothing but spectacular. I've always thought Gary Gorton did a great job capturing what happened. Just amazing how even in 2023, <1% of the public can explain this.
Thanks for the comment. One feature, it seems to me, is that by 2006 and 2007, there was an insatiable demand for low risk assets, and the financial engineering was geared toward meeting that demand. Of course the marginal new products were less safe - diminishing returns and all that. This was highly contractionary sentiment. And in spite of it coinciding with collapsing housing starts, slowing nominal gdp growth, etc., it was simply interpreted as more reckless cyclical optimism. The requirement for higher returns on the new not-so-safe assets rhetorically twisted, for instance, as “reaching for yield”. Misinterpreting all these contractionary shifts as just the continuation of a bubble (basically The Big Short is entirely this) meant there was no way to correct macro-level policy decisions toward a stabilizing path.
Does that description ring true to you?
(Of course for the firms that create and trade those financial products, it was a boom time.)
IOW, there is a big difference between a market throwing cash at pets.com and one focused on how many aaa-rated securities you can carve out of a pool of loans. And it’s wild that they were treated as two episodes of the same type of market behavior.
Yes, explaining how 2008 was different from, say, 2000 is incredibly important. Sure, both were "bubbles," but the critical difference was the structure of leverage supporting these systems. Once you understand them, only then can you understand why "unwinding" them yields results that differ by orders of magnitude.
Now, would it have helped if the Fed was a bit smarter on the non-traditional financial system? Yes.
Did the post-GFC money market reforms (limiting repo collateral types) do some good in reducing the reoccurrence of this risk? Yes.
But I refuse to join the Fed-bashers. The Fed is asked to do an impossible but necessary job.
Great post. As someone who lived through it on a trading desk, the true "villian" was the structure of leverage in the system. It built up over years on the back of several variables that were self-reinforcing. It's simpler to blame one person or institution (Angelo! Freddie! Rating Agencies!), but that's just not what happened. It was a complex system. And watching repo markets upend in a very short period of time was nothing but spectacular. I've always thought Gary Gorton did a great job capturing what happened. Just amazing how even in 2023, <1% of the public can explain this.
Thanks for the comment. One feature, it seems to me, is that by 2006 and 2007, there was an insatiable demand for low risk assets, and the financial engineering was geared toward meeting that demand. Of course the marginal new products were less safe - diminishing returns and all that. This was highly contractionary sentiment. And in spite of it coinciding with collapsing housing starts, slowing nominal gdp growth, etc., it was simply interpreted as more reckless cyclical optimism. The requirement for higher returns on the new not-so-safe assets rhetorically twisted, for instance, as “reaching for yield”. Misinterpreting all these contractionary shifts as just the continuation of a bubble (basically The Big Short is entirely this) meant there was no way to correct macro-level policy decisions toward a stabilizing path.
Does that description ring true to you?
(Of course for the firms that create and trade those financial products, it was a boom time.)
IOW, there is a big difference between a market throwing cash at pets.com and one focused on how many aaa-rated securities you can carve out of a pool of loans. And it’s wild that they were treated as two episodes of the same type of market behavior.
Yes, explaining how 2008 was different from, say, 2000 is incredibly important. Sure, both were "bubbles," but the critical difference was the structure of leverage supporting these systems. Once you understand them, only then can you understand why "unwinding" them yields results that differ by orders of magnitude.
Now, would it have helped if the Fed was a bit smarter on the non-traditional financial system? Yes.
Did the post-GFC money market reforms (limiting repo collateral types) do some good in reducing the reoccurrence of this risk? Yes.
But I refuse to join the Fed-bashers. The Fed is asked to do an impossible but necessary job.
Great insights.
In my not-so-recent past, I scoured the US for a possible semi-retirement locale. (I ended up going to SE Asia and still work a ton of hours).
The sad reality: It is places like Dayton or Akron that are the last refuges of pleasant affordable housing (I was vicariously Zillow-hunting).
Look for a Rust Belt city, medium or smaller sized, that hasn't been totally Detroitified.
Some places in Missouri too.
This is national tragedy.
But...our macroeconomists cannot stop talking about inflation.
but he was named Angelo, had a swarthy complexion, and wore a tailored suit, so he had to be the villain, right?