"Developments that enhanced flexibility ranged far beyond regulatory or statutory change. For example, employers have long been able to legally discharge employees at modest cost. But in the early postwar years, profitable large corporations were dissuaded from wholesale job reduction. Contractual inhibitions, to be sure, were then decidedly more prevalent than today, but of far greater importance, our culture in the aftermath of depression frowned on such action. Only when bankruptcy threatened was it perceived to be acceptable.
"But as the depression receded into history, attitudes toward job security and tenure changed. The change was first evidenced by the eventual acceptance by the American public of President Reagan's discharge of federally employed air traffic controllers in 1981 when they engaged in an illegal strike. Job security, not a major concern of the average worker in earlier years, became a significant issue especially in labor negotiations. By the early 1990s, the climate had so changed that laying off workers to facilitate cost reduction had become a prevalent practice. Whether this seeming greater capacity to discharge workers would increase or decrease the level of structural unemployment was uncertain, however. In the event, structural unemployment decreased because the broadened freedom to discharge workers rendered hiring them less of a potentially costly long-term commitment.
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...recent regulatory reform coupled with innovative technologies has spawned rapidly growing markets for, among many other products, asset-backed securities, collateral loan obligations, and credit derivative default swaps.
Financial derivatives, more generally, have grown throughout the world at a phenomenal rate of 17 percent per year over the past decade. Conceptual advances in pricing options and other complex financial products, along with improvements in computer and telecommunications technologies, have significantly lowered the costs of, and expanded the opportunities for, hedging risks that were not readily deflected in earlier decades. The new instruments of risk dispersion have enabled the largest and most sophisticated banks in their credit-granting role to divest themselves of much credit risk by passing it to institutions with far less leverage. Insurance companies, especially those in reinsurance, pension funds, and hedge funds continue to be willing, at a price, to supply this credit protection, despite the significant losses on such products that some of these investors experienced during the past three years.
These increasingly complex financial instruments have contributed, especially over the recent stressful period, to the development of a far more flexible, efficient, and hence resilient financial system than existed just a quarter-century ago.
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