Concorde’s fate offers a lesson for finance
Published in the Financial Times on April 15 2009
The supersonic Concorde aircraft was considered in the 20th century to be the most sophisticated airliner, flying at twice the speed of sound. Its crash in Paris on July 25 2000 destroyed this confidence. Some blamed the crash on metal fragments from another aircraft; others argued that Concorde was overweight and unbalanced. The accident led to some design modifications but in 2003 Concorde was in effect jettisoned in favour of subsonic aircraft, much slower but easier to maintain.
It is not too much of a stretch to compare the global financial system of the pre-subprime era to Concorde. It was fiercely innovative and grew at a record pace for close to two decades, only to suffer a new type of hard landing without clarity as to whether it was the fault of the system’s pilots or also of those regulating its maintenance.
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