19 nassim price

Is it a lack of intergenerational memory? We certainly don't have much sense of history, yet most of us know at least something about the Great Depression and Stock Market crashes of the past. Is it mere self-deception, i.e., the determination to think ourselves so clever that we've all become real estate moguls? In the late 1990's, I remember clearly being surrounded at my tennis club by 20-somethings, knee-deep in internet-land, sipping well-aged single-malt scotch, and puffing on expensive cigars, secure and, indeed, smug, in their status as "captains of industry."

I wonder what happened to those guys?

In truth, it is hard to say why we 19 nassim price seem to have to keep learning the same lessons over and over again. This is, perhaps, a question better put to sociologists, and not to lawyers and financial people. But the consequences are, as ever, predictable, to those who see the writing on the wall.

In a previous article, I pointed out that the decline in housing values, coupled with other developments in banking, consumer lending and revisions to the Bankruptcy Code all portended very poorly for the American Middle Class. Depending on what happens in this area in the near future, a similar prognosis may, I am afraid, await the Upper Middle Class who also have a great deal of their wealth tied up in their homes.