Knight Kiplinger On The Crisis
The present financial crisis has generated a tremendous amount of coverage and I am sure that much more is to come. And rightfully so. One of the more recent offerings is Knight Kiplinger’s column Lessons From the Crisis, which is available in the December issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. Kiplinger, who is the magazine’s Editor in Chief, offers a thoughtful and concise “lessons learned” for investors and regulators alike. Among the more notable lessons are:
- “Complexity breeds chaos” (or phrased differently in the column “Investors: If you don’t understand it, don’t buy it. Regulators: If a new kind of asset has no good reason to exist, have the guts to just say no.”);
- “Securitizing doesn’t change risk”; and
- “‘Too big to fail’ must entail consequences”.
However, I think that the most notable part of the column is not a lesson learned, but a question asked:
These are some of the painful lessons we’ve learned. But will we remember them when the crisis is past?
Readers will recall similar observations in an earlier post titled History. (November 14, 2009)