A decade ago, I spent a sleepless night worrying about a Spanish trash bin. The reason? On Thursday August 9 2007, financial markets suddenly seized up.
Since I was running the Financial Times markets team, I spent two days frantically trying to identify the reason for the panic. Nobody knew. But that weekend I suddenly woke in the middle of the night with an image of a Spanish bin in my head.
A month earlier I had attended a credit conference in Barcelona, where I read brochures about a little-known, and supposedly safe, entity known as a “structured investment vehicle”. The material had seemed achingly dull. So on the way home I tossed the papers into an airport bin — and forgot it. But, somehow, my subconscious knew that had been a mistake. So I awoke and went online to uncover what I had left in that bin.