A short history of modern finance

A couple of weeks ago the Economist wrote A short history of modern finance. It's a good summary of the last 35 years and I learned a lot. it is at times too oblique, e.g.,

"These asset-backed securities became ever more complex. Securitisation eventually gave rise to collateralised debt obligations, sophisticated instruments that bundled together packages of different bonds and then sliced them into tranches according to investors’ appetite for risk. The opacity of these products has caused no end of trouble in the past 18 months."

It's conclusion is a little too unsupported for my tastes, "Amid the crisis of 2008, it is easy to forget that liberalisation had good consequences as well: by making it easier for households and businesses to get credit, deregulation contributed to economic growth. Deregulation may not have been the main cause of the rise in living standards over the last 30 years, but it helped more than it harmed. Will the new, regulated world be as benign?"

But it's still worth a read.