After several years of strong domestic and global growth, financial markets appeared highly accommodative for issuers and investors. Many willing investors purchased complex financial products convinced that they would achieve outsized returns because the future would look like the recent past. On the other side of the trade, originators operated under the presumption that secondary markets would remain liquid.
The role of money (as a store of value, a unit of account and a medium of exchange) is also an important instrument in how we connect with each other, through trade, commerce, and our everyday interactions and hence in building social capital.