"Bankers' Experience and Memory of Financial Crises, 1980s-2020s"

Financial crises are complex phenomena, which have multiple causes, including prevailing economic and political conditions, on which bankers have little control. Theoretical and empirical works have established that bankers’ over confidence and excessive risk-taking in boom times is one of the factors leading to the outbreak of financial crises. At the same time, financial actors are also, by definition, actors in the event, and their perception of financial crises necessarily includes their own part and/or that of the banking profession in financial crises.
This paper analyses senior bankers’ experience and memory of the financial crises between the 1980s and the 2020s. It is based on the interviews of twenty chairmen, CEOs and other top executives of leading American, British, French and German commercial and investment banks active at the time of the global financial crisis of 2008 and in the early to mid-2020s; and on a survey among 150 senior individuals working in financial services in the same countries, conducted in collaboration with YouGov in November 2023. Two major questions are addressed. First, had senior bankers experienced one or several financial crises before the outbreak of the subprime crisis in 2007, and if so, which crisis, or crises, mostly mattered to them and which lessons did they draw from them. And second, what memory of the global financial crisis was left in their institution and more generally in the financial world fifteen years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
By analysing senior bankers’ experience and memory of financial crises, the paper will fill a gap in the scholarly literature and help better understand which crises actually matter when it comes to remembering and learning from the past.