CHAPTER 13
What Has Changed: How Little Has Changed in Terms of Complexity, Producer Managers and Absent Management in Banking
Having mentioned plagues in relation to the Florentine bankers in the fourteenth century, it is illuminating to compare the historical ability to manage major global crisis of health and finance. The Plague killed over a third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century, and as a side effect caused the failure of the Medici predecessor banks in Florence. The influenza epidemic in 1918–1919 may have killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide or between 3 and 5 per cent of the world’s population. Since then there has thankfully been a considerable improvement in the containment of medical epidemics. More recent outbreaks of plague, such as the Ebola tragedy in Western Africa in 2013 that caused the loss of over 11,000 lives, were contained mainly to the unfortunate countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and eradicated within three years from its outbreak. This is a remarkable, historical improvement in containing medical crisis. Compare this to the 2008 financial crisis. Importantly this probably caused mainly material losses rather than human life. However this financial crisis was not contained to a few countries but went global and spread from individual country’s banking crises to become an international sovereign crisis affecting dozens of countries. There had been no improvement in containing financial crisis such as the Great Recession to one country compared to the Great Depression nearly 80 years earlier. The Great Recession is still widely felt in many countries through personal and © The Author(s) 2020 C. Dinesen, Absent Management in Banking, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35824-2_13
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