A bubble, Galbraith observed, is always supported by the belief that there is something new in the world. The history of past cycles is dismissed as irrelevant. “For practical purposes,” Galbraith wrote, “the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than twenty years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant on previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to come on the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its
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