经贸文章选读报刊.doc

The background to the 2007 financial crisis
. Goodhart
Published online: 19 February 2008
# Springer-Verlag 2007
1 Introduction
There have been many facets to the current financial crisis. It is difficult for a single person to put together a completely coherent story of everything that has happened, unless they have been working for one of the banks at the centre of the storm. Rather like the blind men who feel aspects of the elephant, commentators, like myself, are likely to have a personal view; it may take quite a long time before a comprehensive history of this crisis can be written, and this is not such a complete history. Subject to that caveat防止误解的说明
, let me begin with a survey of some of the background influences that led up to this crisis.
2 The mis-pricing of risk
In many respects, this crisis was foreseen in advance. Almost every central bank which published a Financial Stability Review, and international financial institutions, such as the BIS and IMF, which did the same, had been pointing for some time prior to the middle of 2007 to a serious under-pricing of risk. This was characterised by very low risk spreads, with differentials between risky assets and safe assets, having declined to historically low levels. Volatility挥发性，易变
was unusually low.
Leverage杠杆作用，力量、影响
was high, as financial institutions sought to add to yield, in the face of very low interest rates. Those same institutions were apparently prepared to move into increasingly risky assets in order to do so, often leveraging themselves several times in pursuit of that objective. Indeed, at the beginning of the crisis, that is prior to August 2007, there was some general satisfaction among the monetary authorities that the undesirable
and excessive under-pricing of risk was in the process of being reversed.
IEEP (2008) 4:331–346
How had this come about?
(a) Very low interest rates, 2001–2005
In part, this under-pricing of risk had resulted from the long period