Those who cannot remember the past... what was the rest of that again?
In January 1933,The Atlantic Monthly, a Boston-based cultural magazine, published an article called "The Royal Road to Bankruptcy". It was written by an anonymous Wall Street banker who had lost everything in the crash just a few years before.
Nearly eighty years later, as NAMA looms over our four green over-developed fields, some of the mea culpa sentiments might seem quite familiar.
"In these latter days, since the downfall, I know that there will be much talk of corruption and dishonesty. But I can testify that our trouble was not that. Rather, we were undone by our own extravagant folly, and our delusions of grandeur. The gods were waiting to destroy us, and first they infected us with a peculiar and virulent sort of madness.
Already, as I try to recall those times, I cannot quite shake off the feel that they were pages torn from the Arabian Nights. But they were not. The tinseled scenes through which I moved were real. The madcap events actually happened—not once, but every day. And at the moment nobody thought them in the least extraordinary. For that was the New Era. In it we felt ourselves the gods and the demigods. The old laws of economics were for mortals, but not for us. With us, anything was possible. The sky was the limit."
Plus ca change, wha?
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