www.transparencytaskforce.org
“ It must never happen again!” JACKIE BEARD | DIRECTOR OF MANAGER RESEARCH SERVICES, EMEA, MORNINGSTAR
Edition 18
O c t o b e r 2 017 ...7
“It Must Never Happen Again!” was the eye-catching title of the London Transparency Symposium hosted by Morningstar on 13 September. The day’s sessions looked back at the last 10 years, since Northern Rock announced it had received emergency funding from the Bank of England as lender of last resort. The question posed was: What can we do to avoid a repetition of the events that led to the global financial crisis in 2008? Human behaviour is flawed, history repeats itself and events happen beyond our control. Indeed, we can look back nearly 200 years to a time when a hurricane had catastrophic effects in the United States; devastating fires broke out in Europe; there was a knife-edge election for the American presidency; and risk-taking investments were very much in vogue. It sounds rather like a recap of events happening today. The more things change, the more it seems they stay the same. Numerous key factors have been cited as contributors to the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08, such as a failure in financial regulation and supervision; a breakdown in corporate governance; and excessive borrowing in the US for residential property and subsequent defaults on those subprime mortgages.