Harvard's Niall Ferguson, one of the world's leading financial historians, says that the American empire is on the verge of a collapse.
In this excerpt from his annual letter, investing great Seth Klarman describes 20 lessons from the financial crisis which, he says, “were either never learned or else were immediately forgotten by most market participants.”
In reflecting on why the past 15 years have been so riddled by irresponsible speculation, it is impossible to ignore the rise over that same period of widely-viewed financial programming that is equally riddled with cartoonish content that encourages short-term thinking and speculation (buy-buy-buy! sell-sell-sell! boo-yah!). When we observe a clear change in the quality of analysis on the financial news, and the departure of its more speculative elements, I suspect we'll also see greater emphasis on fundamentals and better allocation of capital, while speculation will be less effective in the face of overvaluation. During the late-1990's bubble, it struck me that the discourse on CNBC was remarkably similar to the sort of discourse that I had read from news archives preceding the 1929 crash.
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