The Trouble With Mass Delusions

Wednesday, November 5, 2014
By Paul Martin

Paul Singer
ZeroHedge.com
11/05/2014

The trouble with mass delusions is that they are recognized as such only when they are over – when the dazzling absurdity of certain widely held beliefs is unmasked by subsequent events. Interestingly, many delusions relate to war. At the beginning of World War I, there was a widespread misconception that the war would be over in months. In hindsight, this delusion was fueled by a deep misunderstanding, among citizens and military experts alike, of the impact that evolving technology would have on modern warfare. Parenthetically, we would argue that the current drawdown of military capability throughout the developed world is based on a delusion that ignores thousands of years of immutable, or at least always repeating, human history of almost continuous (in the grand scheme of things) warfare.

Economics also provides its share of delusions, including the debt-fueled bubbles of both the 1920s stock market and the first dotcom boom. The real estate boom of the 2000s was another one, as excess demand was fueled by the combination of near-free money, the most marginal financial products ever invented, and the frenetic selling of houses to people who could not afford them and did not actually own them in any meaningful sense of the word.

The Rest…HERE

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