Calvin Trillin (NY Times) kirjoittaa hyvinkin uskottavan jutun siitä, mistä tämä kaikki lopulta johtuu: “ne liian fiksut hankkiutuivat töihin Wall Streetille”.
“When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys!..”
John Cassidy (The New Yorker) puolestaan on sitä mieltä että systeemi romahti siksi että kukin toimija toimi rationaalisesti omalta kannaltaan kussakin tilanteessa kulloinkin käytettävissä olevilla tiedoilla. Jälkiviisasteluhan on sitä paitsi tunnetusti aina helppoa. Hänen mukaansa edes näiden subprime lainojen määrä markkinoilla ei ollut merkittävä, vaan:
…this shouldn’t have caused too many problems: the entire stock of outstanding subprime mortgages was about a trillion dollars, a figure dwarfed by nearly twelve trillion dollars in total outstanding mortgages, not to mention the eighteen-trillion-dollar value of the stock market. But then banks, which couldn’t estimate how much exposure other firms had to losses, started to pull back credit lines and hoard their capital—and they did so en masse…
Artikkelissa luodataan markkinoiden käyttäytymistä ja sehän on kuin sopulilauma:
John Maynard Keynes [...] in “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” pointed to the inconvenient fact that “there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole.” Whatever the asset class may be—stocks, bonds, real estate, or commodities—the market will seize up if everybody tries to sell at the same time. Financiers were accordingly obliged to keep a close eye on the “mass psychology of the market,” which could change at any moment. Keynes wrote, “It is, so to speak, a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs—a pastime in which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who passes the Old Maid to his neighbour before the game is over, who secures a chair for himself when the music stops.”
Tämäkin juttu on valaisevaa luettavaa.
