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Report – The Financial Crisis of 2015 An Avoidable History

The Financial Crisis of 2015 – An Avoidable History, January 2011, Oliver Wyman

  • “The sub-prime crisis of 2007 will not be the last financial sector crisis. Even during the relative calm of the last 25 years, we witnessed the property crises of the early 90s, the Asia currency crisis, the LTCM/Russia crisis and a number of other smaller emerging markets-led financial crises. We are due another crisis soon. Financial services executives and regulators have worked hard to design a safer and more stable financial system, but we will not know whether they have succeeded until it is tested by the next crisis. The first aim of our 2015 crisis scenario is to stress test the design of the new financial system, to consider how well it would stand up to this type of adverse scenario. The broader aim of the report is to encourage readers to think about the future financial system using several scenarios rather than basing decisions on a single predicted course of events. Shell Oil, guided by Arie de Geus1, was a pioneer in using scenario planning in the 1980s. De Geus claimed that the main purpose of using scenarios was to “think the unthinkable” and claimed that scenarios were “vastly superior in dealing with the future than predictions”. Strategists who focus on a single path of future events, he claimed, tend to filter out news that does not fit their view of the world. Companies with a single strategy or plan are “virtually blind” to new information.”
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