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Download this reportThe FT Year In Finance
Inside this issue
• In February Martin Wolf assessed how bad the global downturn might get
• October’s £400bn underpinning of the banks was given a warm welcome by Gillian Tett
• The FT’s banking teams describe how 158 years of Lehman history ended - -
Content
How gamblers broke the banks
Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, describes a year of turmoil through the FT’s pages
Worst financial crisis in 60 years marks end of an era
The current crisis marks the end of an era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency, writes George Soros
How a local squall might become a global tempest
The EU’s economy is more than five times larger than China’s. It also matters more to US exporters, Niall Ferguson writes
US risks mother of all meltdowns
Martin Wolf writes that there are ways for the authorities to deal with the global financial risks, but, unfortunately, they are poisonous ones
The sins of Greenspan have come back to haunt us
Greenspan did not just stand aside. He said repeatedly that housing was a safe investment because prices do not fall, writes David Blake
A shift from bumbling to sensible policy
Gillian Tett writes that the problem with the Tarp is that the toxic assets are so fiendishly complex they cannot be easily valued or traded
Capitalism and credit
We need to be reminded of the dictum of Keynes that ‘money will not manage itself’. That goes for credit too, writes Samuel Brittan
Brinkmanship was not enough to save Lehman
Lehman had thought of itself as the smart, scrappy underdog – not just good at spotting chances but also nimble enough to get out in time, write Henny Sender, Francesco Guerrera, Peter Thal Larsen and Gary Silverman
Why a new Bretton Woods is vital – and so hard
The final challenge is that of making the global institutional architecture less illegitimate than today, writes Martin Wolf
The economic forecasters’ failing vision
Policymakers have been far from consistently wrong. JeanClaude Trichet dines out on stories of how he predicted the crisis, writes Chris Giles
