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Financial crisis explained: the most important lessons learned

Name: Financial crisis explained: the most important lessons learned
Uploaded: 2018-09-13T03:59:51.045Z
Duration: 2 min 14 s
Channel: Financial Times
Description: You asked, we answered: FT journalists on the financial crisis 10 years on

Question 4 of 4: Rana Foroohar, Rob Armstrong and Martin Sandbu answer questions from the FT's Instagram followers: "What's the most important lesson that we've learned from the crisis?"

September 13, 2018

Produced and Edited by James Sandy; Animation by Russell Birkett; Filmed by James Sandy, Petros Gioumpasis, Donell Newkirk, Ben Marino and Gregory Bobillot; Additional Editing by Liberty Martin

Transcript

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

Thank you.

Should I start talking?

You can do a clap for us. So right here, yeah.

So final question, what's the most important lesson that we've learned from the crisis? Well, to me, the lesson of the crisis is that you need to have a financial system that really supports the real economy. If you go back to the 1970s, most of the money coming out of the largest banks in America was supporting people that were growing businesses, buying homes, et cetera.

Today, only about 15% of all the capital flowing out the biggest financial institutions is actually going into the real economy. And ultimately, Wall Street and Main Street do reconnect. So I think getting Wall Street back into service of Main Street is a key thing that we need to have in the public debate going forward.

The main change that has happened is that American banks and European banks, for that matter, are required to hold much more equity much more capital against their loan books. And they're required to have their financing be much more long term versus short term. So that should, in the event of future financial stress, make the banks much more stable.

Of course, as one banker said to me, "lasts time we almost died of a heart attack. What are we going to die of this time?" The next crisis will be exactly the same. So we died of a heart attack. That doesn't mean we cured cancer.

One thing that has slowly happened since the crisis is work on making sovereign restructuring more manageable and bank debt restructuring more manageable. I think we still have a long way to go. The lesson hasn't been fully learned. We see in Europe that a lot of policymakers are still resisting this move to letting debt be restructured in extremes.

But that, for me is by far the most important lesson. We didn't have it right before the crisis. We didn't get it right in the crisis. We may slowly be moving in the right direction. But that will determine how well we do the next time a crisis comes around.

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