Dangerous equations

摘要

I once read that there have been more books written about World War II than all other wars combined, and it looks as if, among volumes on bubbles and crashes, we're in for something similar with the credit crunch. The similarities are striking. Like WW2, the CC was global, threatened life as we know it, had many moments of high drama, offered a clear-cut moral line between baddies (hedgies and bankers) and goodies (almost everyone else), and featured larger than life personalities. Bizarrely, there are even some lookalikes - if Dick Fuld, the scary-skull former boss of Lehman, went anorexic, he would be the spit of Goebbels. Give Hank Paulson a tin hat, and you've got a dead ringer for Patton.