En voici un extrait :
I’ve been reading—not for the first time —Charles Mackay’s lively book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which I’ve owned for many years and which I browse through every time some episode of financial madness goes whirling across the landscape. I remember studying it very closely in 1968, when we had a lively little stock-market bubble involving companies whose names ended in “-onics,” and again in the early 1980s when our banks were gleefully lending billions of dollars to unstable Latin American dictatorships, and later that decade when the savings-and-loan companies were running wild, and again in the late 1990s when the Internet-stock boom transfixed the world with dreams of instant billions. And, of course, I gave it another run-through over the past year or two after the implosion of the subprime-mortgage fantasia and the associated collapse of all credit-related dreams.
Mackay was a Scottish lawyer and journalist with a vigorous, pungent literary style, and his book, first published in 1841 and revised and expanded eleven years later, remains entertaining and exceedingly readable more than a century and a half later. It has never gone out of print, and is available today in a variety of editions, including a free Internet version. My copy of it is the thirteenth printing of a reprint that was issued in 1932, a year which, some of you may recall, saw the global economy in a very deep doldrum indeed after the speculative excesses of the go-go 1920s.
My 1932 edition carries a foreword by Bernard Baruch, a shrewd old financier now, alas, largely forgotten, who made millions (at a time when a million dollars was a serious amount of money) by betting against the instincts of the crowds. “All economic movements, by their nature,” Baruch writes, “are motivated by crowd psychology,” and he goes on to quote the German poet Schiller to the effect that “anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead.” And in the conclusion of his preface he notes, “I have always thought that if, in the lamentable era of the ‘New Economics,’ culminating in 1929, even in the very presence of dizzily spiraling stock prices, we had all continuously repeated, ‘two and two make four,’ much of the evil might have been avoided.”
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