Interessante entrevista com o Ferguson, um bom historiador econômico, ignorado, ao que parece, nos tristes trópicos.
Michael Hogan: First of all, this whole financial collapse is great timing for your book. Are you psyched?
Niall Ferguson: Well, I can say with a degree of self-satisfaction that it wasn’t luck. Two and a half years ago I decided to write this book, because I was sure that this financial crisis was going to happen, and the reason I was sure was because people kept coming up to me—whether it was investment bankers or hedge fund managers—telling me that volatility was dead that there would never be another recession. I just thought, “These people have completely disconnected from reality, and financial history is going to come back and bite them in the ass.”
In the book, you identify the five stages of a bubble. What stage are we at now?
We’re pretty much at the last stage, which is the Panic stage.
If you remember roughly how it goes, you begin with some kind of Displacement or shift that changes the economic environment. I would say in this case, the displacement was really caused by the wall of Asian savings coming into the U.S. and keeping interest rates lower than would have normally been in the cycle.
Then you get the Euphoria, which is when people say, “God, now prices can only go up, we should buy more. We should borrow more, because this is a one-way bet.” And then more and more people enter the market, first-time buyers, and that’s the classic run-up phase of the bubble. Then there’s this sort of irrational-exuberance Mania—which came at the end of ’06, when we still had property prices rising at an annualized rate of 20 percent. But then you get Distress. That’s when the insiders, the smart people, start to look at one another and say, “This is nuts, we should get out.” That’s when the John Paulsons start to short the market.
And then you get the shift into downward movement of prices, which ultimately culminates in Panic, when everybody heads for the exit together. In this bubble, it happened in a strange kind of slow motion, because the game was really up in August 2007, but it wasn’t really a full-fledged panic—at least across the board—until Lehman Brothers, September 15, 2008, more than a year later. Wile E. Coyote ran off the cliff in August of ’07, but he didn’t really look down until over a year later.
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