Standing in front of the NASDAQ board in Times Square, I was with a friend who had most of his inherited money in tech stocks. With a wild look in his eyes, he said, “This is the future. It will just keep going up.”
His jittery fear and greed all balled up into absolute knowledge, it being 1999 and all, I just thought, “Well, it won’t hold. But who am I to burst someone’s bubble?”
Bubbles, like amniotic sacks, break. For how else can we welcome the newly born?
I thought I would write about how awful it is that bubbles are allowed to occur and that the government should really regulate prices in order to maintain some peace of mind in markets (in much of Europe, food and energy costs are highly regulated). But frankly, why not let the markets go hog wild? It gives people a chance to check their greed.
When my tiny house was tipping at 1M in street value, I sat, sort of smug, on my plastic-bottles-recycled sofa and thought, “It’s so nice to be rich.” But then I thought, again, “This won’t hold. It can’t.” And it hasn’t.
When things got so bad at IndyMac Bank in Pasadena that the Feds had to take it over, I thought, “It should never have to come to this.” But, people only understand grand gestures in The U.S. after much pain. It's a Christian thing. To have cut this off any sooner, there would have been a howling.
So, suffer little greedy children, and then come unto me. Those bubbles, back away from them. They are the blob and they will eat you. In the future, perhaps awareness of bubbles will correct them more quickly. The market is a reflection of thinking. Why people have such strange, uninformed thoughts is beyond me. Oh, wait, no, it’s because no one wants to pay for education. And fantasies are the better sell. The United Sell of America.
Pass the Ramen.
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