Steve Chiavarone doesn’t want to scare anyone, but what he remembers most from the last banking crisis was how sure most people were that it wouldn’t happen.
At his New York office in early 2008, Wall Street’s best and brightest — "strategist after strategist after strategist after strategist,” recalls Chiavarone, now senior portfolio manager at Federated Hermes — paraded through to say that even if a recession hit, it’d be shallow and short.
That’s not, of course, how things played out. A few months later, "you’d go to your office every day and something that you never thought would happen would happen,” he said.