Money blindness
The present financial crisis started with private real estate
and is now continuing with "national" real estates. Common behind
these crises has been the fact that far too much mispriced credit
was extended to private and national entities. When you advance
mispriced credit to people with no incomes and no collateral, or in
the case of countries to governments pursuing policies that prevent
creating sufficient taxable income to pay them back - you get
repeatedly into situations we face today.
Recall, back in 1974, many real-estate investment trusts lost as
much as 90% of their value in less than a year, being highly
leveraged and too dependent on commercial paper just when interest
rates started rising fast. Later, in the 1980s, Western banks were
sitting on an estimated one trillion dollars of losses on loans
advanced to so-called Third World countries - at a time when a
trillion was a trillion...
Reuven Brenner holds the Repap Chair at McGill's Desautels School of Management. the article draws on his Force of Finance, A World of Chance and on "The Keynes Conundrum" (with David Goldman, in First Things).
Read full article: , July 23, 2011
Ìý
Feedback
For more information or if you would like to report an error, please web.desautels [at] mcgill.ca (subject: Website%20News%20Comments) (contact us).