Two things for today. First is Alan Greenspan speaking on October 23rd, 2008, who said that the crisis was a once-in-a-lifetime tsunami:
Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief ... [The failure of self interest to provide self-regulation was] ... a flaw in model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.As Lanchester points out, 'That's a hell of a big thing to find a flaw in.' Put not your faith in markets.
Second, Lanchester finishes with a magic Montagu Norman (Governor of Bank of England at start of Great Depression) quotation which I though I had favoured you with before but cannot find anywhere. Ben is his old friend Ben Strong, his American counterpart:
As I look back, it now seems that, with all the thought and work and good intentions ... nothing that I did, and very little that old Ben did, intentionally produced any good effect at all except that we collected money from a lot of poor devils and gave it over to the four winds.
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