Nigeria's Capital Market: A Lesson from the Crisis

A collection of articles on the vagaries of Nigeria’s financial and capital markets over the last year. It reveals the opportunities the market benefited from, and the subsequent avoidable woes that nearly brought it to its knees. I address the importance of the "mark to market" accounting system, and how Nigeria's financial houses ignored it. During the time of this writing, the market was booming. The tightening of money accessibility to purchase stocks, amid analyst's growing concern over market valuations, ended the boom. Using the mark to model instead of the mark to market accounting system, asset classes were overly valued, which opened up a can of worms when investors that had borrowed money to fund their operations defaulted, leading to a market collapse. Most of these funds were on margin loans. When margin loan borrowers couldn’t repay their loans, a cascade of banks requested payment.