Thomas Levenson "Money for Nothing" (Random House, 2020)
New Books in Economics
00:00
Is It Human Madness?
It's a mistake to call it madness. Human beings behave in broadly similar ways in the face of money, nanny,. is time after time after time. Asset-backed securities are a great idea but as you make them more abstract they become hard for people to grasp and understand. Some people can exploit that asymmetry of information and some people are just trapped by it. We can see pretty immediately and quickly where the structural flaws in the South Sea deal actually fell. But we couldn't. That was the first time that it ever happened. This was really, really new to them. The bubble did almost 300 years earlier.
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