The individuals or banks making the decisions were not aware that
their increasingly interdependent positions were generating a threat to
the stability of the whole system. In fact, the individual actors all felt
themselves to be well protected having, in effect, insured their positions
with others. There was no central mind to perceive this. The system,
indeed, as Hayek (1989) argued, was always organizing itself. However,
this self-organization, contrary to a standard and largely ideological
view, was not stabilizing. Indeed, as I have said, it needed only a small
downturn in the property market for banks to start becoming concerned
about who was holding the bad risks. As soon as this happened, banks
became wary of lending to each other and the interbank credit market
dried up. This in turn led to a shortage of credit for firms and individuals.
To repeat, the system froze, not as a result of some single specific event
but as a result of a series of related occurrences, and without the actors in
the system having foreseen the collective result of their individual actions