Quote for the Week
Ever since the Compagnie d’Occident of John Law (which was formed to search for the highly exiguous gold deposits of Louisiana); since the wonderful exfoliation of enterprises of the South Sea Bubble; since the outbreak of investment enthusiasm in Britain in the 1820s (a company “to drain the Red Sea with a view to recovering the treasure abandoned by the Egyptians after the crossing of the Jews”); and on down to the 1929 investment trusts, the offshore funds and Bernard Cornfeld, and yet on to Penn Square and the Latin American loans—nothing has been more remarkable than the susceptibility of the investing public to financial illusion and the like-mindedness of the most reputable of bankers, investment bankers, brokers, and free-lance financial geniuses. Nor is the reason far to seek. Nothing so gives the illusion of intelligence as personal association with large sums of money. — John Kenneth Galbraith (source)
From the Archives
Last Call
- Seeking Certainty – J. Clements
- Paying Your Tuition – HumbleDollar
- Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy? – P. Krugman
- How to Think About the Tariffs – Overshoot
- Market Concentration and Lost Decades – Enterprising Investor
- 4 Years of Lessons from Running My Own Bookstore – R. Holiday
- If You Know, You Know. Or Do You? – D. Dunning
- How Did Eastern North America Form? – Knowable
- What Limits a Cell’s Size? – Asimov Press
- The Greatest Two-Hit Wonders – Can’t Get Much Higher