I just finished watching videotapes of a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series called the Ascent of Money. Much of it was focused on telling the story of the rise of the global financial industry and how important the concept of money was in creating a global economy. That was the good news in the story.
The bad news was that money’s ascent has also resulted in increasingly bigger economic bubbles as investors fund bigger investments leveraging a tightly connected worldwide money network. These investments can yield untold rewards. On the other hand, they are very risky because they can also yield catastrophic losses and distress. I covered a perfect example of this in my last column, when I referred to the idea of investors relying too much on other people’s money and resources to succeed—the Other People’s Bubble (OPB) that recently burst causing a worldwide recession.