Some of the readers of this blog have requested that I discuss the current financial crisis and resulting recession.  As I shy away from subjects too close to the business of Thomson Reuters, in part to avoid 20 pages of risk factors in each post, I will respond here only in general terms.  

As we entered 2007 and the markets kept booming, we were living on borrowed time. Debt was rising at record levels, a bubble in real estate was driving consumer spending well beyond real income levels and the weakest business models seemed a sure thing.  Then housing started to collapse, the consumer caved and we woke up to a severe and dangerous credit crisis.  That fateful weekend in September 2008 when Lehman was allowed to file for bankruptcy the global economy reset. 

In the face of this unprecedented challenge,  the single most important quality that every ceo, banker, portfolio manager or politician should possess and display is agility. 

In hindsight, it is very easy to recommend that bankers should have avoided the sub-prime mortgage market or other toxic corners of the housing bubble, but this would ignore the pressures on public company executives not to miss the wave of a rising tide.  When Chuck Prince of Citi famously declared that “we’re still dancing” just before the credit wave crashed ashore, he spoke for many executives in saying that he would not sit on the sidelines while others danced their way to outsize profits.  Similarly, if your financial adviser or portfolio manager kept you out of tech stocks in 1998-2000, you probably were not happy with her relative performance. 

The goal should not be to resist all temptation.  Rather it should be to go with the herd only in a very wary, agile way.  For companies this means not to over-extend and ignore cash flow, for banks this means not to fund short-term and invest long-term, for investors this means not to confuse theoretical credit quality with liquidity, and for would-be house owners this means not to be lured by complex loan products that can reset above levels you can afford. Above all, don’t add large amounts of leverage just because someone is silly enough to lend to you. 

What we have once again and painfully learned is that the economic cycle works like a game of musical chairs – exacerbated by high leverage into musical high chairs.  If you are wealthy or healthy enough to carry your own pillow, great; if you are fast and agile enough to jump into an available chair when the music stops, great; otherwise the fall is going to hurt.