Corporate finance Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 2

Corporate finance - Essay Example What is however important to note that these crises were largely unanticipated as they emerged due to the subprime mortgages which form a very little percentage of the overall activity that take place in the financial markets. This therefore raises the question of how many investors actually mispriced the risk that has to be included into the pricing of the securities given the fact that market participants always form rational expectations about the future equilibrium prices. Rational Expectations theory forms the basis of some of the most important macroeconomic models in recent times. The formation of the efficient market hypothesis is also one of the macroeconomic models which utilizes the rational expectations theory and assert that market participants always form rational expectations about the future equilibrium prices. Thus it is useless in predicting the future financial crises as the market participants already discount such future information into their risk calculations.(Hui & Lui, 2002). However, despite such theoretical assumptions, the current global financial crises were more of a shock for most of the participants as they emerged out of blue and affected almost every market on the earth. This paper will attempt to discuss the question of predicting the future financial crises in the light of efficient market hypothesis and rational expectations and will attempt to answer the question by considering the current global financial crises. The current financial crises has slowed down the pact of economic growth in many countries including US and UK and many governments have to inject money in order to save their financial systems from complete collapse. These financial crises apparently emerged due to the imprudent banking practices and resulting lending into the subprime mortgage sector. Over the period of time, the competition for banks became stronger and banks, thanks to de-regulation, were allowed to engage themselves into practices which