Steve Chiavarone doesn’t want to scare anyone, but what he remembers most from the last banking crisis was how sure most people were that it wouldn’t happen.
At his New York office in early 2008, Wall Street’s best and brightest — “strategist after strategist after strategist after strategist,” recalls Chiavarone, now senior portfolio manager at Federated Hermes — paraded through to say that even if a recession hit, it’d be shallow and short.
Q4 2022 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
That’s not, of course, how things played out. A few months later, “you’d go to your office every day and something that you never thought would happen would happen,” he said.
All sorts of crises have been predicted by financial Cassandras in the aftermath of 2008. In reality, they’re exceedingly rare in markets. And yet, with three US banks down, a fourth teetering and the government-brokered acquisition of a fifth — and much larger — institution in Europe, the comparisons to that episode have become a little harder to ignore.
Not that this episode will match the magnitude of that one. While odds of a recession are way up, authorities are better equipped today to deal with stress in the financial system, and the largest banks are stronger than they were then.
Reasons for Wariness
But for the current class of investing professionals who seem largely unperturbed by recent events — desensitized perhaps by the years of false warnings — there are important messages to be gleaned from the first-hand accounts of veterans, like Chiavarone, of that crisis. His biggest: Things can unfold in ways that seemed inconceivable just weeks earlier. “It’s one of the reasons I’ve been as cautious as I have,” he said.
And given the pace at which events are unfolding, and how there are new potential problem areas that didn’t exist back then — high inflation, for instance, and the boom in the opaque world of private credit — telling the difference between investor courage and complacency has become a more urgent matter.
“The equity market has largely treated the recent events as a surgical strike on a specific cohort of stocks,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s head of hedge fund coverage Tony Pasquariello wrote in a trading note Thursday. “I find that a bit remarkable.”
On Sunday, UBS Group AG agreed to buy Credit Suisse Group AG for $3.2 billion in a government-brokered deal aimed at containing a crisis of confidence. The Swiss National Bank has agreed to offer a liquidity line of 100 billion francs ($108 billion) to UBS as part of the deal, while the government is granting a 9 billion-franc guarantee for potential losses from assets UBS is taking over.
Read the full article here by Justina Lee, Katie Greifeld, Vildana Hajric, Isabelle Lee, Advisor Perspectives.
