Ben and the Banker's Big Bubble

You know that screeching sound a balloon makes as it's about to burst?   The world economy is the balloon and  the slew of trillion dollar bailouts over the last two years were of the last bursts of air from a set of exhausted, dollar denominated lungs.

BUBBLES 

When did this bubble begin?  Some would reach back to the founding of the Fed, the end of the Gold Standard, or the beginning of the 1980’s and Ronald Reagan’s wild spending spree.  This particular bubble began shortly after the last one blew up in our faces.

Robert Schiller maybe considered the ultimate expert in bubbles; he called both the Internet bubble and the housing bubble.  He describes a bubble as,

"a situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increases and bringing in a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of an investment, are drawn to it partly through envy of others' successes and partly through a gambler's excitement."

ALL YOU CAN HOLD FOR FIVE BUCKS

Written by Joseph Mitchell
Originally published in The New Yorker in 1939

The New York State steak dinner, or “beefsteak,” is a form of gluttony as stylized and regional as the riverbank fish fry, the hot-rock clambake, or the Texas barbeque. Some old chefs believe it had its origin sixty or seventy years ago, when butchers from the slaughterhouses on the East River would sneak choice loin cuts into the kitchens of nearby saloons, grill them over charcoal, and feast on them during their Saturday-night sprees. In any case, the institution was essentially masculine until 1920,when it was debased by the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The Eighteenth Amendment brought about mixed drinking; a year and a half after it went into effect, the salutation “We Greet Our Better Halves” began to appear on the souvenir menus of beefsteaks thrown by bowling, fishing, and chowder clubs and lodges and labor unions. The big, exuberant beefsteaks thrown by Tammany and Republican district clubs always had been strictly stag, but not long after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the suffrage, politicians decided it would be nice to invite females over voting age to clubhouse beefsteaks. “Womenfolks didn’t know what a beefsteak was until they got the right to vote.” An old chef once said.