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“A lot of economic, market and bank supervisory theory is based on the premise that financial actors are largely rational. The crisis convinced me that they are not. It was not rational for very experienced financial leaders to make their companies hostage to short-term financing that was, in the final analysis, secured by the irrational assumption that house prices will always go up. It was not rational for Dick Fuld to reject offers because their terms offended his pride. It was not rational for money market fund investors to flee all money market funds just because one fund made a bad bet. It was not rational for some lenders, at the height of the crisis, to stop accepting even Treasuries as collateral. The crisis convinced me that greed, ego, fear, short-sightedness, group-think and other human foibles have at least as much, if not more, to do with financial behaviour as rational thinking does.”
Mike Silva
Former chief of staff to New York Fed president Tim Geithner during the 2008 financial crisis
(Speech to the LBMA, October 2018)
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