Rachel Botsman - Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart

Abandon weapons first, then food. But never abandon trust. People cannot get on without trust. Trust is more important than life.

Confucius to his disciple Tzu-Kung

I was getting married on the day the hammer fell on Wall Street. The date was 14 September 2008. I had been living in New York for almost a decade and had met my then fianc, Chris, in a downtown dive bar called Eight Mile Creek. We were both city people but we wanted to have our wedding in a rural, rustic setting. The place we finally chose was called Gedney Farm, nestled in the charming old Berkshire village of New Marlborough, Massachusetts.

So, you want to get married in a horse barn? my father said when I showed him the venue, a Normandy-style red barn surrounded by lush meadows and abundant orchards. Getting into the spirit of things after that, he decided we should arrive at the venue in an old-fashioned horse and carriage. I went along with his Cinderella fantasy and climbed into an open-topped white carriage, complete with a driver and a footman, drawn by an old grey mare. The horse, on its last legs, was slow. It rained. I was late.

Around eighty guests, our closest family and friends from all over the world, joined us for the occasion. Lit by candles and strings of Edison bulbs, the ceremony was traditional and very beautiful. The best mans speech was funny and the food was delicious, despite my finding a grasshopper about the size of my little finger in the green salad.

So there I was, at the heart of one ancient institutionmarriagebuilt on trust and life-long commitment, while anotherWall Streetwas imploding. Lost in the bubble of the celebrations, I in an attempt to avert a financial crisis. Washington Mutual, Wachovia and HBOS in the United Kingdom were within a whisker of collapsing. The fate of another giant, American International Group (AIG), the vanguard of the credit default swap market, teetered in the balance.

A couple of friends who were senior executives at JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs apologized for having to leave, summonsed to red alert emergency meetings. It would be a race against the clock to avoid the blind panic that would surely happen when the markets opened. Several other guests drank nervously and partied hard, not sure if they would be carrying their work belongings out in boxes the following day. We danced the Horah, a traditional Jewish wedding ritual, which ended with me being elevated on a chair and my husband being thrown precariously up in the air on a large white tablecloth. Another moment of trust. Guests whirled around us, clapped and made Oy! Oy! Oy! noises. Meanwhile, outside the barn, the biggest global financial crisis in history was building up a head of steam.

It was, of course, the beginning of the nerve-shattering period when many businesses fell off a cliff and the worlds financial system came closer to collapse than at any time since the Great Depression. As we now know, the economic repercussions of the meltdown would engulf the world for many years to come. But my wedding day, rich with tradition, also marked the downfall of something more profound: public trust in institutions.

Who was to blame for the crisis? What were the main causes? These questions were at the heart of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) created to investigate the banking collapse, and the answer was damning. The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire, the 525-page report found. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us. In other words, the meltdown was an avoidable human disaster.

The federal inquiry hammered the embarrassing failures of regulators, whom the report described as sentries not at their posts. The finger was pointed squarely at the Federal Reserve for its failure to question widespread, egregious mortgage lending, overreliance on short-term debt and the excessive packaging and reselling of loans, along with many other red flags. According to the report, however, the main culprit was not the toxic financial instruments but the human failings that drove them: reckless risk-taking, greed, incompetence, stupidity and a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics.