I hope this video somehow survives its tumble through the vasty oceans of information to come and becomes the historical artifact it deserves to be. One can imagine or read about self-satisfied fatcats living in their castles in the sky in the 1920s, but one has no opportunity, so far as I know, to hear them. The laughter and sighing adorning these interviews with one of the best-known bears of the past couple of years will tell our grandchildren more than any words about the pompous idiocy of our high capitalist culture.
The point, of course, is not merely that the object of derision was right. Plenty of bears have been wrong, and hindsight is 20/20. It is not even that so many bulls were so wrong about the economy. This goes beyond the particular subject matter to give us a novelistic insight into the shining, ringing confidence people can build upon their own ignorance. I love the ones who say "I have no idea where you're getting this from" or "I don't know what numbers you're looking at." I find it hilarious that these same people are probably going to continue to work as analysts, when we have here what could fairly be called proof that they were not just wrong in their judgment but ignorant of the possibility that they were wrong, which seems pretty damning of their expertise.
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What really struck me about this was the ridicule—why ridicule and try to totally deflate this person's input without really engaging the details of his argument? Probably because (a) he had a point, which they didn't want to let into the light more than they absolutely had to; and (b) they were materially and psychologically invested in the stock market and housing prices going up, up, up, up. They were no longer grounded in reason, but in presumption, ideology, and delusionally wishful thinking. And they were probably making a ton of money off it—just like that all the other financial people who crashed the economy while reaping big short-term rewards. Some, however, are just cranks. That first guy, Art Laffer, is the founding father of supply-side economics, which is just what George H.W. Bush termed in 1980—"voodoo." (Which may be an insult to voodoo, actually.)
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