“
Speculation on the stock exchange has spread to all ranks of the population and shares rise like air balloons to limitless heights…. The population was now engaged in evading taxation and devoting their money to speculative purchases…. Shares in respectable concerns which had paid a 20% dividend, were pushed higher and higher till the final holders could not expect a return of even 1%.”
- Adam Fergusson,
How quaint.
I am an avid consumer of written history. As a doom-oriented pattern recognizer, the written chronology of historically transformative events provides an endless source of almost-relevant analogies to fret over. For those of us in the gold/hard money/real asset/Austrian school of economics, the ultimate doom porn is Adam Fergusson’s seminal book on the hyperinflation experienced in Germany after World War I,