Financial crisis

Financial crises are a lot like childbirth -- they both involve a lot of pain and end up costing you a lot of money. But, after a while, you forget about all the negatives and are ready to do it again. ...  This propensity to forget, so useful when it comes to having babies, is incredibly destructive when it comes to our economy. So why do we do it?

In 1990, John Kenneth Galbraith tried to answer this vexing question in his book, A Short History of Financial Euphoria. Using the 1987 market crash as his launch pad, Galbraith looks at the history of financial bubbles -- and the subsequent and inevitable crashes -- and at why the lessons that would prevent boom and bust cycles from happening with devastating regularity are never learned. To Galbraith it's a combination of "the extreme brevity of the financial memory" and a general ignorance of history.

"There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance," he writes. "Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present."

Read :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/jpmorgan-volcker-rule_b_1542420.html.

I have always had great admiration and respect for J.K.G., a wise man  indeed. But I missed that one. Once again, he was right !