SOURCE: BIZ WEEK “How could all of these institutions, run by very smart people, get caught in the same trap? In the middle years of this decade, we had negative real short-term interest rates. And that really means free money, which really distorts the system. Capitalism is premised on the idea that capital is a scarce commodity rationed with a price mechanism. It wasn’t just a handful of clever guys on Wall Street who figured out what to do with the free money. People all over the housing and financial-services industries figured out ways to lever themselves up way too far. That’s the engine that led us this far astray.”
They had too. If you see your competitors move into a certain market, you need to move there too.