In addition, the tax rules meant that the impact of interest expenses was reduced, which would change with the tax reform in 1990-91. Moreover, there was a strong domestic inflation trend with price and wage spirals, which had long been something of a structural problem in the Swedish economy. The combination of high inflation, high inflation expectations and the design of the tax system meant that the interest rate after tax and inflation was negative for many investors and households, which of course made it tempting to take out a loan. Stabilisation policy was not sufficiently strict to dampen lending, and so the economy was heading toward overheating in the late 1980s. In 1990–91, there was a substantial reversal in the real interest rate, for several reasons. German reunification pushed international interest rates upwards, foreign exchange market unrest forced the Riksbank and central banks in other ERM countries to raise their policy rates to defend their respective exchange rates, and  5  More detailed accounts of the 1990s crisis and its background can be found in, for example, the Economic Commission (1993) and Wetterberg (2009). 3 [16]  the tax reform in 1990–91 made it more expensive to borrow. From having been negative, the real interest rate rose in a short time to around 5 per cent, in what has been called the ‘real interest rate shock’. This reversal shook up the financial system, property prices fell and a combined financial, banking and property crisis broke out.
It is also well-known that, despite their social challenges, many with autism have powerful intellectual skills – for example, in pattern recognition. That it is why it has been estimated that as many as 50% of Silicon Valley innovators may have Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of 8  autism. Yet how easy would it be for those with autism to thrive in our organisations? The facts rather speak for themselves. Only around 12% of high-functioning individuals with autism are in work. Another aspect to recruitment which inhibits diversity-building is that it tends to be judged with individual, rather than the organisational, attributes in mind. Let’s take a simple example to illustrate. Consider two candidates for a job sitting a test. The first scores 8 out of 10, the second 4 out of 10. The first person is clearly the best person for the job. But are they the right person for the organisation? 8  See The Economist (2016) ‘Beautiful minds, wasted: how not to squander the potential of autistic people’. 5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  5  That is not so clear. What if the second person answers correctly the two questions the first candidate gets wrong. And what if the same is true of most of the existing employees in the company – likely, as they will have probably helped set the test. In this situation, the second candidate may well be the better one for the organisation because they bring organisational strength through diversity, despite being individually weaker.