Just before the 1974 crash, and again in the 2000s, young folk who were getting richer by the minute saw no reason to dress up or to look serious. Now, the dress-down phenomenon is starting to fade again. Handling other people’s savings is a serious matter, and those who do it should try to look their part.

Flooding the market with cash has not yet led to inflation, because the recession created a Grand Canyon of underutilized capacity to be filled first. When it is, though, expect inflation, and lower prices for long-term bonds. For a parallel situation, consider The Great War Loan Conversion, described in my Famous Financial Fiascos, where bond investors lost 99% of their money.

I doubt if the way out of the present imbroglio lies in programs, regulations, or bailouts. It is simpler and deeper than that. It is not an event; it is a syndrome. We have forgotten prudence.

They had not reviewed the testing manual, so they made a little tiny trifling booboo or two.

Warren Buffett, that most eminent investor, has been fond of proclaiming smugly that “it’s only when the tide goes out that you see who’s been swimming naked.” Is it indeed true that nudity is revealed by an ebb tide?

“Strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime.” Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and SEC Chairman Christopher Cox make soothing noises just before the financial crisis.

This has been a fairly typical speculative waterspout: houses, in this instance, go higher and higher, propelled by wormy mortgages that are flogged off to institutional suckers. Rising prices draw in more and more speculators until everything is overpriced, whereupon the waterspout collapses.

The current catastrophe illustrates several traps and delusions that come up frequently, even though they are fairly obvious… Enough so, indeed, that I have pointed them out in my books.

When large matters go awry, they often follow standard patterns—groupthink, hubris-nemesis, the Ponzi scheme, speculative manias, the “distance lends enchantment” mirage, and other raptures—alone or in combination.

Few management philosophers have combined so much wit and wisdom, and none was as charming, as Professor C. Northcote Parkinson.