Sublime

Along with the invigorated stature of public officials, security concerns created heroes among firefighters and law enforcement officers, who suddenly achieved a newly exalted stature.

Wilson made increasingly caustic comments about bankers. In June 1911, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he told a cheering throng that “the greatest monopoly in this country is the money monopoly,” adding that “all of our [financial] activities are in the hands of a few men.”

None of the Morgans, or Loebs, or Belmonts, or Barings, who shoveled billions of dollars into American railroads, and telegraphs, and steel mills, and iron and coal mines, thought about selling wrapped and scented ladies’ soap. But that, it emerged, was what all that infrastructure was for. P&G used tree resin instead of animal tallow for the fatty

Not until November 13 did prices reach their bottom for 1929. The disaster which had taken place may be summed up in a single statistic. In a few short weeks it had blown into thin air thirty billion dollars—a sum almost as great as the entire cost to the United States of its participation in the World War, and nearly twice as great as the entire

In 2008, it all came apart. After September, once Lehman Brothers went under, global lending froze, which in turn sent global production and stock markets into free fall. The Fed, Congress, and the U.S. Treasury eventually took unprecedented measures to cushion the blow. They cut interest rates to zero, extended unlimited credit to foreign central

But only fools and Americans think they can outrun the past.

We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. There is “neither art nor philosophy,” Fukuyama says. All that’s left is the “perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”