The world's financiers are doing their homework. After an era of buying and selling assets they did not fully understand, and taking risks they did not comprehend, financial wizards are learning to wise-up.
The era of rising markets and easy profits, in which everything increased in value, is over. Now, traders, investors, and even bank managers need real knowledge, and better ways of assessing risk, to identify undervalued assets that might just perform better than the 2 per cent return on a Treasury bill.
And nowhere are the stakes higher than in the US, where more than 100 fund managers are jostling for the spoils of a public-private partnership to buy up troubled assets underwritten by Treasury secretary Tim Geithner.