Financial crisis

So absolutely decimated the business.

And it's just because no one was spending money on consulting or training during the financial crisis.

And it was particularly tough here in Dubai, you know, people leaving their Lamborghinis and their Ferraris at the airport and these sort of things, right? So it was a big economic shock.

And Dubai has adapted, you know, their strategies with gold visas and stuff like that as a result of those pressures.

But I wasn't sure that restarting the training business after the financial crisis, whether I had the heart in me to do that, you know.

And so I thought, well, actually it was in 2008 I attended a conference here I'll tell you the moment when I realized.

I attended a conference here and Stephen Covey was presenting, you know, the seven habits of highly effective people.

It was training and I was doing conferences, but I didn't have the profile.

The last time Iceland considered joining up was 2009.

We begin our coverage tonight of what's been called the worst financial crisis in modern times.

Three of the five biggest investment banks are gone.

The global financial crisis hit Iceland harder than almost anywhere else in Europe.

The Icelandic krona crashed, unemployment soared and the stock market was more or less wiped out.

Pro-EU campaigners say if the country had been an EU member, it might have given Iceland greater financial stability, particularly if it had been using the euro.

So my brother and me came, and we went off to school, and we were told, you know, "Get an education.

You can make anything happen here." And I went off to college, and then the great financial crisis hit.

Mm-hmm.

And I would say that that was probably the moment that shaped me the most, um, in ways that I, I didn't even realize until much later.

...

this total over-control by the government.

But by the time I had reached college and the great financial crisis happened, I really empathized with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I thought, "The system is unfair, and there needs to be ...

Oh, completely.

So to set the, the mission for this deep dive, we're looking at how the ultimate rational investor navigates a, a once in a century financial panic.

Mm.

If you think about the 2008 market, um, it wasn't just a game of musical chairs where the music stopped.

That's the simpleton's description.

I think the easiest way to understand derivatives is derivatives are what caused the financial crisis.

Like no shadow of a doubt.

Like people didn't understand them.

It was, and I'm not exaggerating this, you know, it was fucking crazy.

It was

wild, because I feel like you had like, I mean, for a start, like before the financial crisis, the value of the London Stock Exchange was higher than the value of the New

York Stock Exchange.

And I suppose that's an ethos that I and my team have always taken all the way through and is still very much evident in a much bigger business in Colliers today.

The global financial crash, 2007, 2008, 2009, what are your recollections from that period running the

business as well? I remember the day seeing everybody from Lehman's walking out with their boxes under their arms.

watching the news thinking, oh my goodness, what on earth is this? Where is this going to end up? We'd sold the business about two weeks before that happened.