Financial Debt Crisis: Ten Years on What Have We Learnt?

This month is the ten year anniversary of the beginning of the credit crisis in June 2007. Whilst things got a lot worse over the next 21 months into the lows of March 2009, asset prices have risen a long way since then. If you want to understand why asset prices have done so well since then there’s three drivers you need to grasp.

Firstly, governments responded to reduced private sector demand by stepping up stimulus spending. That’s slowed a little in more recent years but government debt to GDP now is way above where it was 10 years ago and is still rising. In a normal market that growth in debt would have seen the interest rates...