A trust-driven financial crisis : implications for the future of financial markets

Abstract

There are many important dimensions of the, hopefully overcome, financial crisis that have appeared in the vast debate that it has originated: its unprecedented size at least in the post World War II period; the fact that, contrary to many other financial crises (but similar to the 1929 collapse) it originated and had its epicenter in the US; its nature, the ingredients and proximate causes that triggered it: too much financial deregulation?; too relaxed monetary policy?; too much concentration of power in the hands of the banks following the impetuous wave of mergers during the late 1990s that amplified moral hazard and risk taking?