Als Prüfungslektüre habe ich gerade Galbraiths The Great Crash abgeschlossen und befasse mich nun mit meinen Notizen. Unter anderem lese ich aber auch Rezensionen aus den 1950ern durch.

Folgende Textstelle einer Rezension ist mir ins Auge gestochen – es ist schon fast unheimlich, wie der Crash von 1929 Dinge hervor brachte, mit denen wir uns in der derzeit herrschenden Finanzkrise erneut herumschlagen müssen:

Optimism of the „Coolidge prosperity,“ faith in the omnipotence of bullish financial prophets and the belief that everyone could get rich combined to drive the market ever upward. As long as the market rose, the supply of buyers buying for an increase kept pace. In a sense, this is to say that the market went up because it went up! In retrospect there seems to have been little else to support belief in the ability of the market perpetually to generate riches.

Quelle: The Journal of Finance, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Mar., 1956), pp. 100-101

In einer anderen Rezension lesen wir:

Then, as in the twenties, the mere suggestion that stock prices might be going up too fast was treated as nonsense, or perhaps something even worse, both by the speculators themselves and by those leaders of business and government who confuse the prosperity of stockmarket speculators with the prosperity of the whole economy.

Quelle: The American Economic Review, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Sep., 1955), pp. 687-688

Nassim Taleb und Benoit Mandelbrots Theorien warnen davor, die heutige Krise mit den Mittel zu lösen, die die Krise von 1929ff. gerettet hätten:

Of course, its worth noting that eighty years ago, should something like this have happened, the system itself was simple enough that the car would have been fairly simple to fix … painful at the time, of course, but doable. Now, we’re reaching a point where you cannot solve what amounts to a fractal catastrophe with linear solutions.

Quelle: Bailouts, Burnouts and Non-Linear Innovation – O’Reilly Broadcast

the emergence of an abstract, even absurd world—call it Planet Finance—where mathematical models ignored both history and human nature, and value had no meaning.

Quelle: Wall Street Lays Another Egg: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com