xxix Preface It has been ‘A Hard Day’s Night’* John Raymond LaBrosse, Rodrigo Olivares-Caminal and Dalvinder Singh The sub-title to this part of the book could have been – What have we learned since the demise of Lehman Brothers? The question, however, could not actually have been that short as we would have needed to add something about the number of investment banks that had to convert to become US holding companies, the re-nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the death and then resurrection of AIG, the collapse of the Icelandic banking system, the overhauls of fnancial regulation in the UK, US and much of Europe, the Greek debt tragedy, and of course, we would need to list the extraordinary measures that governments took around the world to prop up their banking systems through explicit guarantees that contributed to the ballooning of government fscal defcits. Instead, we think that The Beatles’ 1964 tune A Hard Day’s Night is more appropriate. While some of us might remember the lyrics better than others, the words go a long way in describing the recent global fnancial crisis. For some, people have been ‘. . . working like a dog’, or not working at all, trying to save their homes from a short sale or foreclosure. For others, they are fnally seeing conditions in fnancial markets improving as low interest rates and quantitative easing are helping to boost the real economy and improving bank proftability; leading managers and traders to long for a return to large bonuses and the prospects of acquiring bargain-priced vacation homes in exotic locations. Perhaps it is not much more than a natural evolution of the capitalist system. By and large, policymakers and regulators have not been ‘. . . sleeping like a log . . .’ (as the song goes), as many of them have awoken with what seems to be a terrible hangover. Some of those mornings-after were brought about through bank managers taking excessive risks or an evaporation of confdence, while others are sufering after following advice or the spin of people like Bernie Madof, R. Allen Stanford and Marc Dreier – fraud artists who were not ‘playing by the rules’. 1 As well, central bankers had John Raymond LaBrosse, Rodrigo Olivares-Caminal and Dalvinder Singh - 9780857933829 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 05/06/2020 09:49:46PM via free access