The White Swan

Crisis Economicsを37ページ、第1章終了。

the recent disaster was no freak event. It was probable. It was even predictable, because financial crises generally follow the same script over and over again.

people effectively used their homes as ATM machines.

these episodes were crises of confidence in overindebted governments, not of capitalism.

While thousands of dot-coms went bust, no banking crisis materialized, because most of the funding had come from shares sold to domestic and foreign investors in capital markets, rather than from bank loans.

By 2006, credit had become so readily available in the United States that the spread between the yield on high-risk junk bonds and low-risk Treasury bonds shrank to historic lows of less than 2.5 percent. A handful of economists raised the alarm, but few listened.

Over the previous two decades, bankers and traders had increasingly been rewarded with bonuses tied to short-term profits, giving them an incentive to take excessive risks, leverage up their investments, and bet the entire bank on astonishingly reckless investment strategies.