It could get worse, of course. The markets, I mean. “The worst is not/So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’,” as Edgar cheerfully points out in King Lear.

Several big institutional investors expect to see another major banking collapse. A survey of 146 of them, carried out recently by Greenwich Associates, the US financial services consultancy, found that almost 60 per cent believed another failure would take place within the next six months.

Serves them right, you might say. All that absurd financial engineering was bound to end in tears. The former editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, wrote last week that our sympathy for the Masters of the Universe should be limited. “The past year has actually not been very bad at all – unless you are a banker, a bank shareholder or Gordon Brown,” he said.

Now the financial wizards – or at least some of them – are copping it from another, unexpected quarter. A paper presented at last week’s annual gathering of the US Academy of Management in California suggested that there is something else we can blame the investment banks for: the spread of management fads.

Continue reading ‘Column: Beware of fad-loving analysts‘

August 19, 2008 2:23am in Finance, Strategy/ops | Comment