Hermes CEO Nusseibeh: The single, simple lesson from 2008

The takeaways from Lehmans' collapse

In thinking about the events of 2008, and the extraordinary financial environment that followed, there may be a temptation to try to find complex lessons that would justify the cost to our society of the GFC, writes Saker Nusseibeh, CEO of Hermes Investment Management.

These included not only massive wealth destruction but, perhaps more importantly, led to an environment that resulted in social disruption, that in turn led to the rise of populism, which possibly threatens our core liberal values as a society. The investors set for a £6bn Lehman Brothers pay-out However, the more I think about this, the more I come back to one single, simple lesson, which seems to repeat itself with monotonous regularity, and is then ignored by generation after generation of investors. For as long as we have been investing in markets, succeeding generations of inv...