05-15-2021, 04:49 AM
(05-14-2021, 02:54 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: 58-Year Rule....
Those with childhood memories of the last Crisis would be retiring/vacating the institutions.
Those with adult memories of the last Crisis would be quite old, and dying off.
That specifically explains the last 3T. 1924 and 1925 make a good approximation of the divide between those old enough to recognize that something was screwy leading to the Great Stock Market Crash and those who had to learn such from schools or family members. Childhood memories are powerful and they last a lifetime. Consider how things were with the financial industry: beginning in 1933 the bankers were compelled to sacrifice the potential for large entrepreneurial gains so that they could be the guard dogs of Other People's Money. They were obliged to be the cautionaries in what could be a reckless economy in which shysters competed with promises against people who offered more modest gains. The shysters would typically crash and burn because they neglected something basic -- such as that the only good business was ultimately good for its customers, employees, and investors alike. Bankers beginning in the 1930's learned to compel would-be borrowers to put more collateral at risk and to show a more modest business model than "the sky is the limit" before lending the money. After all, bankers were the recycling business in capital, typically lending the returns of capital as new loans. It worked.
If as in the late 1920's a real-estate huckster (like the George Babbitt of the novel bearing his surname) could say things like "The Good Lord isn't creating any more land" during the 1920's, the inference of the 1930's was that the Good Lord wasn't churning out enough new suckers. Speculative booms depend upon suckers scared of losing out, and financial panics result when the boom runs out of suckers willing to pay too much for what they get. GI kids generally recognized that any promise needed backing, and that fleece deals were bad for the system as a whole.
Fast forward 58 years from the Great Stock Market Crash, and it is 1987. That is 3T. OK, even before that was a huge real-estate fraud involving crooked financing in Texas. Texas developers were promising ridiculous rates of return on investment -- rates of return that could never be met. The Inevitable happened.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
