If you are over the age of 40, there is a good chance you remember where you were on September 15 2008, the day Lehman Brothers went bust. It was one of the first of many shocking moments during the last global financial crisis, a searing time of bank runs, crashes and bankruptcies when big economies tumbled into some of their deepest recessions since the Great Depression. Stunned Lehman staff, who left the 158-year-old investment bank’s offices carrying their belongings in cardboard boxes, came to symbolise the millions who lost their jobs, homes and life savings in a disaster that destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth.
There were multiple culprits for the mayhem but, as with so many financial debacles, the property market was implicated. In 2006, the air went out of a US housing bubble fuelled by supposedly safe mortgage-backed securities that had been sold around the world and included risky “subprime” home loans. As the number of mortgage defaults and foreclosures climbed, the value of these securities plunged, saddling investors with crippling losses and prompting panic in financial markets.
In the months after the crisis hit, government bailouts and sweeping reforms began to put the battered financial system back together. Today, big banks are better capitalised. Markets are better regulated and investors more protected as a result of those reforms. And yet each month now brings warnings with echoes of that strife. Fears are growing that property markets could again be roiled, this time not by risky lending practices but by rising numbers of climate-related disasters putting pressure on insurers and other critical financial institutions. “Property values will eventually fall — just like in 2008 — sending household wealth tumbling,” said Next to Fall, a December report on climate change and insurance from the then Democrat-chaired US Senate Budget Committee. “The United States could be looking at a systemic shock to the economy similar to the financial crisis of 2008 — if not greater.”