“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain is supposed to have said.
And the rhyme in the financial market is sounding eerily like something that has played out nearly 100 years before, according to a rising chorus of expert voices.
One of the loudest warnings comes from financial commentator Andrew Ross Sorkin, who recently authored a book called ‘1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – and How It Shattered a Nation’.
In a recent interview with CBS, Sorkin noted similarities between conditions prevailing now and those ahead of the 1929 crash.
“I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep. But I can assure you, unfortunately, I wish I wasn’t saying this, we will have a crash,” Sorkin said.
To be sure, the conditions between the 1920s – also called the Roaring Twenties – and the 2020s aren’t the same.
The 1920s boom was led by margin funding in stocks, a move that Wall Street copied from General Motors’ playbook of offering cars on easy finance. The leverage buildup in stocks combined with central banks’ inability to print their way out of a problem – thanks to the pesky gold standard – meant that a crash on Wall Street was accompanied by deflationary spiral on Main Street.
Today is much different, as ECB President Christine Lagarde noted in a widely-acclaimed speech last year, pointing to how central banks have used monetary policy to boost the economy while also being able to tame inflation that followed in the wake of their steps.
But while the conditions aren’t the same, there are similarities. There are three factors.
