They had been done in, they argued, by an unforeseeable event—a perfect storm such as strikes once in a hundred years. “I believe that,” Rosenfeld explained after the crash. “I do think it was something that never happened before.”10 Of course, it had happened, not once in a hundred years but many times—in Mexico, on Wall Street, in stocks, in bonds, in silver, in Thailand, in Russia, in Brazil. People caught in such financial cataclysms typically feel singularly unlucky, but financial history is replete with examples of “fat tails”—unusual and extreme price swings that, based on a reading of
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