The Institutional Risk Analyst

New York | During our travels over the past two weeks, we tried to keep up with the financial press, particularly the growing sense of unease felt by many observers with the relentless rise of valuations for equities and other asset classes engineered by the Fed and major central banks. Suffice to say the number of queries we receive about bank stocks being overvalued has soared. Last week saw some real gems from the world of crypto currencies. Bitcoin and the enabling tech

In the mid 2000s, just before the financial crisis began, US banks were reporting credit metrics for all asset classes in loan portfolios that were quite literally too good to be true. And they were. The cost of bad credit decisions was hidden, for a time, by rising asset prices. The same aggressive, low-rate environment used by the Fed to artificially stoke growth in the early 2000s has been repeated in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, only to a greater extreme. Today US