History: Still Repeating After All These Years
As soon as I saw that Garrett Graff had written an oral history of the Bear Stearns collapse, I bookmarked the Washington Post page, figuring it’d be a great thing to read when I got some time. Then I forgot about it for a few days—until the markets imploded earlier this week.
Graff has a way of eliciting you-are-there quotes, even about events that happened seventeen years ago. And sure enough, seeing how the titans of Wall Street and Washington watched as the financial system seemed to be crumbling is a sobering exercise. Reading it while our own economic foundations are shaking makes it doubly so. (Graff used the same techniques for his masterpiece about 9/11, The Only Plane in the Sky.)
“Nobody knew where this was going and how bad it could get,” said Samuel Molinaro, the Bear Stearns CFO. He was right then, and it feels right now.
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