Queen Elizabeth II Dies at 96

Queen Elizabeth II Dies at 96 There’s not much market moving about the Queen of England’s death, but we’d be remiss not to mark the news in this newsletter, most of all because of her long reign over a time in which the world and financial markets changed many times over.  Today's Barron’s obituary explains Queen Elizabeth II's less-known but occasionally important role in the world of finance: Besides these ceremonial functions and associations, she was always ready to support financial institutions, most notably opening the new building of the London Stock Exchange in 1972 – and living long enough to open another one in 2004. Though she rose above the fray of business in the same way that she did above politics, she made a perceptive remark when opening the New Academic Building of the London School of Economics in November 2008. Describing the turbulence of the markets as ‘awful’, she asked Professor Luis Garicano why nobody had noticed that the credit crunch was on its way. ‘Why did nobody notice it?’ His reply was: ‘At every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and everyone thought they were doing the right thing.’ The following year the British Academy convened a forum to debate the issue, and presented their findings to the Queen on July 22, 2009 – that the crisis had been foreseen, but not the exact timing of its onset or its ferocity. In summary, they concluded that it came about as ‘principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.’ You can read the rest of the Barron's obituary here.