Naturally I think about how I would have approached these periods if I had been living through them. I’m certain that even if I had seen the signs of things coming that I’m passing along in this book I never would have confidently predicted such bad outcomes—as noted earlier, seven of 10 countries saw their wealth wiped out. In the early 1900s, even those looking back over the past few decades would never have seen it coming because there were plenty of reasons to be optimistic based on what had happened during the second half of the 19th century.
