In his most recent issue of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, Jim Grant quotes Charles Moore of the London Spectator. This has nothing to do with investing and everything to do with investing.
One point that struck home was how scares run in fashions. According to Ridley, the hole in the ozone layer is very much the same size as it was when we all got worried about it in the 1980s, yet few today live in fear as they did then. Even Al Gore has fallen silent in his claim that the hole was sending rabbits living in the Tierra del Fuego blind. A yet more curious example of the change in fashion is that, in the 1980s, it was commonplace for people to say that nuclear weapons made them unable to sleep at night because of the fear they felt for their children. Today, because of proliferation, the danger of nuclear bombs is probably greater than it was then, but you hardly meet anyone who claims to lose a wink of sleep over it.
Investment sentiment also runs in fashions.