How Wall St. broke its brand
Read Eric Dinallo’s enlightening op-ed piece in the Financial Times called How we modernized ourselves into this ice age.
Key brand take-away: what made the US brand of finance the strongest in the world in the last century was its safety, security and transparency. You could trust that system with your money more than any other financial system in the world.
It was regulation that made the brand
Dinallo notes that this brand of trust was born largely of regulation–a system of very strong ground rules for how the game is played. The brand governed the players.
In effect, Wall St. was a brand of regulation–and one of the strongest brands in the world.
But as Dinallo explains, in 2000 regulations were dialed back, leading to a short-term Wall St. boom and then catastrophic trillion dollar losses, and a finance system in tatters.
Taxpayers are now being asked to re-build the brand that Wall St. wrecked.
Interesting issues:
- The role of regulation as a builder of brand.
- Regulators as brand builders.
Hat tip: Yves Smith.
