Selling Our Services to the World – Part 2 of 17

Last week in San Antonio, I provided my perspective on Online Trading for Financial Freedom the situation we now encounter in a marketplace entering the early stages of recovery from a period of excess, indiscriminate behavior and historical (and occasionally hysterical) amnesia, and on the efforts we at the Federal Reserve are making to calmly and prudently restore the efficacy of the financial markets. I said then—and I assert again today—that there is nothing “unprecedented” about the situation we find ourselves in. To illustrate the point, I want to read a passage from Washington Irving’s 1819 essay on the Mississippi Bubble.For those of you who think the recent housing bubble and the ensuing financial imbroglio are “unprecedented,” listen to these words penned almost 200 years ago:

“Every now and then the world is visited by one of these delusive seasons, when the ‘credit system’…expands to full luxuriance: everybody trusts everybody; a bad debt is a thing unheard of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open…. Banks…become so many mints to coin words into cash; and as the supply of words is inexhaustible, it may readily be supposed what a vast amount of promissory capital is soon in circulation…. Nothing is heard but gigantic Stock & Commodity Trading operations in trade; great purchases and sales of real property, and immense sums made at every transfer. All, to be sure, as yet exists in promise; but the believer in promises calculates the aggregate as solid capital….