When these sorts of widespread assumptions – these financial myths – turn out to be wrong, most financial-market participants find themselves poorly positioned for the resulting shocks. The result is insolvency of groups of firms and substantial uncertainty – uncertainty about the exposure of many firms to direct losses, or to indirect losses created by their counterparty exposure to other firms that suffer direct losses. These so-called financial myths are not unique to this time period, or to this country. I would like to briefly mention two among the numerous examples from recent history – examples where financial myths were important in helping to create a potential crisis. The first example involves the assumption of many in Japan that real estate prices could not fall in the late 1980s. The second involves the assumption, in the late 1990s, that the Internet had completely changed how we should think about company valuation. I will then briefly mention four financial myths that played critical roles in the recent financial crisis.
So what followed was an era of ultra-cheap credit globally – the Heineken era, in which credit reached the parts of society it previously had not reached. Levels of debt, in particular among households, rose pretty much exactly in line with levels of inequality. Rising credit meant expanding bank balance sheets. To maintain this expansion, banks began to manufacture new financial products, slicing and dicing loans to meet investor demand for high yield. The acronyms we have now come to know and loathe – the CDOs, the ABSs and the CDOs of ABSs – emerged to meet this demand. Manufacturing high-tech loans was a lucrative business. Returns to banking rose to their highest levels since the roaring ‘20s. Those designing and selling these new financial gadgets saw their salaries sky rocket. In 1980, an investment banker was paid roughly the same as a similarly-skilled professional in any other industry. By 2007, they were earning nearly four times as much.1 Those salary differences were particularly pronounced at the top of the pyramid. In 1989, the CEOs of the largest US banks earned 100 times the median US household income. That is quite a gap. Yet by 2007, that multiple had risen to 500.2 A similar gap emerged for UK and European bank CEOs. These widening discrepancies within banks compounded the widening discrepancies between banking and other industries. Banks, especially the top of banks, became first among unequals.