Was a bailout inevitable? We’ll ask John Maynard Keynes (General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936 – our proponent of direct intervention) and Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged – our proponent of brutal free market policies – because no one collects Milton Friedman books).
The 2004 spike of Keynes is crazy but is based on three different books that sold that year so appears genuine. If I could figure out exactly what to attribute it too I’d be rich by now, but it appears to dove tail with my original theory of real world scarcity provoking rising book prices (in this case trickle down Milton Friedmanites running the U.S. government provoking a run on Keynes books – no one really collects Galbraith so there’s no great way of double checking that I can think of off hand. Peter Harrington the eminently respectable and egregiously overpriced London dealer has the only first edition for sale on ABE at $7000.)
How about poor people, working conditions, health care, you ask? I’ll leave you with a chart of Dickens’ Hard Times.
Neither encouraging nor hopeless.
Well, one question…this was written on Sunday so is there a Monday post-market plunge edition of Hard Times?