Sublime

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we still are stymied by the complexity of the biosphere, and, just as with our financial systems, our efforts to intervene have often led to confounding results.

“They have hired astronomers; they have hired mathematicians; they have hired physicists; they have even hired theologists. They never even interviewed an economist.”

in the real world, there is no such thing as an externality.

In the words of Bill Gross, who runs the world’s largest bond fund at the Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), ‘bond markets have power because they’re the fundamental base for all markets. The cost of credit, the interest rate [on a benchmark bond], ultimately determines the value of stocks, homes, all asset classes.’

to whom that new wealth will go. At the same time, success or failure

At the end of the day, what matters is not what happens during the recurrent bubbles, but what comes next. The price to pay for widespread instability is that some investors regularly lose money because they didn’t pick the winner, whereas many employees eventually lose their jobs because they happened to work for the losers. In this context, the