The excessive optimism that began in the market after the dot-com crash of 2000, starting around 2002, led to a blindness—a state of mind they later found difficult to explain—and an acceptance that “things will continue as they are” among the individuals and institutions supposed to control the system in the world’s financial center and bastion of capitalism. Interestingly, rating agencies were also caught up in this same vortex, choosing to participate in this blind optimism. Even more striking is that, after a brief period of turmoil, similar optimism persisted until the 2008 crisis.
The basis for this level of reckless optimism stemmed primarily from the fact that those running large corporations lived in a virtual world, shielding themselves from all negative news. With their worldviews and inflated egos fueled by motivational speakers, these so-called CEOs lived disconnected from the realities of the world and the US. For example, Richard Fould (1), CEO of Lehman Brothers, described himself as an “emotional” person and said that instinct guided his decisions. At the same time, motivational guru Tony Robbins, appearing on Larry King’s program, described his sixteen-year mentorship of ten top executives in the financial world.
The financial industry, built on virtual investment instruments like mortgages and hedge funds, generated imaginary values based on assumptions, revalued these non-existent values, and managed them according to the “law of attraction” in Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret or Pierre Franckh’s law of resonance. According to Franckh, everything in the universe interacts with each other through vibrations. If you resonate with the universe, you can realize your expectations. To summarize, the prevailing understanding of the financial world for many years was based on “instinct,” and these institutions were governed by the expectation, “If you think carefully, it will be good.” From today’s perspective, it’s clear that this situation, which is hard to believe, would be mo