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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index
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To: Travis_Bickle who wrote (120123)5/2/2008 6:50:22 AM
From: Giordano BrunoRead Replies (2) of 306849
 
The death of common sense comes with a very heavy price

...Is that a distant echo I hear? After the South Sea Bubble popped in 1720, Charles Mackay's classic work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, reflected on the victims' determination to find a culprit: "Nobody seemed to imagine that the nation itself was as culpable as the South Sea company. Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the people... These things were never mentioned."

.Mackay concluded that men go mad in herds, but only recover their senses one by one. Thus common sense is abandoned more readily when everyone else is at it. If nobody poses the inconvenient question, nobody needs to come up with the unacceptable answer. It is a conspiracy of silence.

This phenomenon is not restricted to the United Kingdom. In most parts of the world where speculation is rife, common sense is hard to find.

In America, a master of financial sophistry invents a scheme to turn the mortgage debts of over-borrowed welfare claimants into AAA securities. The obligations of a janitor in an Alabama trailer park are covered in fairy dust and - abracadabra! - they rank alongside BP bonds.

Think about it for two seconds and you know this is nonsense. The only way dog food can be disguised as fillet steak is with a lot of sauce. So the Clever Ones poured it on, thick and spicy, until in the end nobody knew whether they were buying Aberdeen Angus or diced donkey...

telegraph.co.uk
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