One way to combat this costly tendency to forget is through intensive study of market history. “You can’t know the future,” says Marks, but “it helps to know the past.” He pulls from a bookshelf his inscribed copy of Galbraith’s book A Short History of Financial Euphoria and reads me his single favorite piece of financial writing, which explores the causes of market euphoria: “The first [cause] is the extreme brevity of the financial memory. In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten. In further consequence, when the same or closely similar circumstances arise again, sometimes in
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