The great Yale economist Irving Fisher, a towering figure of the early 20th century, has long suffered from an opinion he expressed on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash that stocks had reached ‘a permanently high plateau’. In a similar way, a lot of today’s intelligent and credentialed people came unprepared for what has befallen us. If there is a Fisher-type statement for our own era, it might be the column published in the Financial Times on the day of Trump’s coronavirus speech, in which Robert Armstrong opined that coronavirus ‘is not the result of a flaw in the organization of the world economy, in the way people, goods and money flow across the globe. It is a global crisis, not a crisis of globalization’.
That sentiment has become less and less tenable with each passing day.
Read the whole thing.