Well, now I'll say a few words about globalization. Well, this term has become a a buzzword because everyone talks about globalization. I would like to point out just a couple of things about that. Well first of all, globalization arrived in this world, including the world of capital markets, very fast. It's hard to imagine to most of you, but when I was a business school student, it was 25 years ago. China, as an economic agent, as a powerful economic agent did not exist. Well, China obviously existed as powerful and huge country with a lot of people with it's multi thousand year history but as an economic agent, it was basically nonexistent. By the same token at that time we had lots of currencies and unions, like for example Eurozone, in which more than a dozen countries would use the same currency. It did not exist. Moreover, many other countries at that time did not play such an important role as they do now. And all that happened in less than a generation. And as a result, we saw that globalization was accompanied by not only massive deregulation in the narrow meaning of this word but with breaking artificial barriers. Now money and then people started to travel freely around the world, and now, it's normal for the individual to work from one place and for the company that's located somewhere else. That happened, to a significant extent, due to the explosive development of technology. So, we can see that the markets have become global due to, first of all, some geopolitical changes. Then, which is I would say even more important sometimes, technology, and I mean primarily technology of, clearly, communications, and the Internet. The Internet. And all that sounds great, because the result of that was not only that maybe more people involved. But at the same time the challenge in globalization is that it seems that now information is quotedly free, and available to everyone. Well indeed, you don't have to open up your computer on your phone. You can download whatever you want and find anything through browser. And it seems that you can easily access any information. The problem though is that, as we already know through the development of this course, that the availability of this information is not equivalent to the ability to properly digest it and use in order to assess and analyze risks and outcomes. Therefore, to a significant extent it can be said that this free availability of information sometimes does not serve a great goal, because people seem to be misinformed. People seem to know everything. That is also exacerbated by the explosive growth of the social media, because right now, everyone can immediately share his or her opinion with everyone. And oftentimes, if it's re-posted then this opinion becomes sort of a ruling trend. Well, unfortunately, the people who are most active in this area, they sometimes are aggressive, even manipulating oftentimes. And as a result, you can see that some trends become sort of central or ruling but that unfortunately does not contribute to the ability to mitigate risks and problems. And that, on the one hand, produces this is the illusion that now we can solve problems more efficiently, but unfortunately this illusion is in itself quite dangerous. So that is the thing that is kind of important here, and we can also say that it is the global structure of this market right now that contributed so strongly into the scale, depth and the propagation of the crisis that we had here since 2007 or the last ten years. Because for example, a lot of people compared this crisis to the Great Depression. It was much greater in scale but they said that instead of you know, emotional, psychological, moral impact was as strong, but if we go back to the years of the late 90's and early 30's, then it was, again it was a Great Depression, not only in the United States, it was a global phenomenon. But at that time the markets were fragmented and it did not reinforce itself because of the interaction between the US market and the British market and the German market, for example. Now, these days, it did happen. Huge flows of money around the globe when there were some bad signals, and then people started to behave almost simultaneously with really a lot of fear. And that resulted in the crash of major institutions and the potential crash of many others. So that resulted in the phenomenon of too big to fail. That resulted in the new legislation that was about to sort of alleviate this problem. So we can see that to some extent, although clearly globalization, we've gotten used to the fact that globalization is clearly a positive trend. This is a trend that allows us to do things in a more convenient and efficient way. But at the same time, it produces greater challenges and without recognition of these challenges, we sometimes cannot be well equipped to alleviate the resulting problems. Now, that's the observation about the globalization. And in the next important episode, I will say a few words of what has been done since the understanding and the recognition of the crisis in order to solve some of the major problems, and to what extent it has been successful.
