As to trying to sum up why it all happened, Cohan ends with the voice of Alan Schwartz, Bear Stearns’ last chief executive, attributing the global financial crisis to many factors, including ‘Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis’, which suggests that whenever the economy is stable for a long period, financial markets create their own instability. That sounds quite like the historian Niall Ferguson’s theory that ‘finance is a crisis-prone system’, and is one for would-be writers of the definitive credit-crunch history to start chewing on. In the meantime, in the closing paragraph of House of Cards, Schwartz says pretty well everything that can be said for certain now: ‘In truth, it was a team effort. We all fucked up. Government. Ratings agencies. Wall Street. Commercial banks. Regulators. Investors. Everybody.’
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