Harold’s History Lesson

I have this bad feeling that aviation stories are going to be harder and harder to find. My instinct tells me that aviation doesn’t do well in a Depression -- more so than most businesses.

Meanwhile, while I search for an interesting aviation angle, you can read this history lesson from Harold Meyerson at The Washington Post.

A Page From the Hoover Playbook

”Devised by the quants (Wall Street's name for the gifted mathematicians it employed), the models factored in an immense number of variables, including market behavior going back a quarter-century, in coming up with daily quantifications of risk.

But in addition to all their quants, Wall Street should have hired a handful of hists (my version of Wall Streetese for economic historians). Those hists might have insisted that the risk models include data from the late 1920s, the last time that America's financial institutions were as highly leveraged and as lightly regulated as they were last year. “

Speaking of history, I was watching The Daily Show and one of the guests mentioned that some historical book about the Depression was sold out at Amazon. It’s on back order for 6 months.

Gee...(ahem)...who knew you could learn so much from books ?

Don Brown
January 7, 2009