Two ways it might all fall apart

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

“What brought it on?”

“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”

—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926, three years before theGreat Depressionbegan.

The market is jittery today, with most the big tech stocks down in early trading. I still expect the whole thing to collapse, sooner or later. Maybe not today, but eventually. Maybe suddenly, or maybe as a slowfizzle. Or, as Hemingway put it, first gradually and then suddenly.

One route to collapse is psychological; the other has to do with unpaid bills. The two are by no means mutually exclusive, and certainly overlap. I have tended to focus on the former; this morning I read something fascinating spelling out how the latter might go.

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