Here’s another snip from Michael Lewis’s Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity that has me remembering bubbles past and catching seeming parallels to today’s situation. And, with regard to Charles Mackay’s classic, at least twice for yours truly:
“Financial markets work in free verse and no matter how much you’ve studied them, no matter how many times you’ve read Charles Mackay’s Extraordinarily Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, you remain at risk of being sucked into the passion of the moment. The internet boom and bust is an excellent case in point. In retrospect it seems obvious that money losing companies created by 26 year olds should never have been worth billions, but, at the time, the companies appeared to at least have a shot at playing extremely important roles in wildly compelling versions of the future. That future never happened in many cases, but who knew that then.”