Reseña de 1873 por Josh

This is an excellent history of the crash of 1873, its origins and repercussions. It's also surprisingly entertaining - Ahamed has a keen ear for a quotable line and manages to make what might otherwise be a rather dull topic fascinating.

A few of the lines that stuck with me: * “It is not terribly difficult to identify a bubble; what is difficult is to know when it will burst.” -Liaquat Ahamed * "Things take much longer to happen than you imagine. And once they happen, they happen much quicker." -Ahamed (might be a direct quote from Rudi Dornbusch) * "Everyone speculated and - for a time - everyone speculated successfully." - Henry Adams * “Millionaires in America make corners as though they had nothing to lose. As if it were only an expensive game. An Englishman fears poverty excessively, and a Frenchman shoots himself to avoid it. But an American with a million will speculate to win ten, and if he loses take a clerkship without thinking much about it. The peculiarity makes them the most dangerous business gamesters in the world.” -The London Spectator - This quote ^ is actually from a decade after the crash - 1884 - but it points to a trait that many people throughout the 19th century commented on. I wonder if the same could be said today. In the century and a half since the English and French have both built extensive welfare states that provide a social safety net while the U.S. hasn't. In theory one might expect that this would make Americans more risk averse, but it's not clear that's happened.

This was also an era of great and evocative insults: * Karl Marx referred to the prominent French politician Adolph Thiers as “that monstrous gnome [who] has charmed the French bourgeoisie for almost half a century, because he is the most consummate intellectual expression of their own class corruption.” * An unnamed observer described Jay Gould as a “bearded little ferret.” * I'm actually not sure if this is an insult, but The New York Herald described Gould and his partner as “The great gorilla of Wall Street; the gold goblin Gould and the amphibious financial Orangutang otherwise known to naturalists and the world at large as the irrepressible Jim Fisk Jr.”

Oh to be an amphibious financial Orangutang.