Lehmans 10th anniversary: How important has quantitative easing been to asset prices and what happens next?

Assessing central banks since Lehmans' collapse

It is ten years since Lehman Brothers went bust, a moment that marks in popular consciousness the apogee of the Global Financial Crisis, writes Toby Nangle, global head of asset allocation at Columbia Threadneedle Investments.

The massive economic fallout of this financial disaster still haunts us, as do the effects on our political landscape. But investors have enjoyed strong returns since the episode, in no small part due to the interventions of central banks. They responded to market disarray by slashing interest rates to levels never seen and buying vast quantities of financial market assets - a process we have come to know as quantitative easing (see figure 1, below). Since these extraordinary market interventions began, returns for almost all asset classes have been strong. The investors set for a ...