Silver Thursday

Some Good News

Before I get to Silver Thursday, I’d like to share some good news. Amazon’s Kindle Singles team all read Decisions, and had this to say: “We’d love to have DECISIONS in the Kindle Singles store. We agreed it’s a gripping and eye-opening memoir that takes readers into a world they couldn’t access otherwise. A highly engaging read.” Amazon is redesigning the cover and in two weeks or so, they will offer the eBook edition exclusively in the Kindle Singles store and promote it to their wide audience.

Do You Remember Silver Thursday?

Long-time colleagues know that Stephen Fay’s The Great Silver Bubble, also published under the title Beyond Greed, is an old favorite of mine. (If you are lucky, you can snag a copy of this out of print book in the secondary market, and you will ask yourself how this book was ever allowed to go out of print. Why aren’t universities assigning it as required reading?) The bubble burst on Thursday, March 27, 1980.

Here’s a quote from Fay’s classic book that applies to today’s global financial bubble as much as it did to the silver bubble in 1980:

“The most alarming thing about the crisis caused by the silver bubble was that no one in the markets, or in the banks in the United States and Europe, or among the men running government agencies in Washington, could predict how it would work itself out or what the consequences would be. Anything could have happened, and the policy-makers felt powerless to control events.”

Fay observes that after the crisis, it seemed everyone tried “to erase the memory of the awful threat that hung over them all, perhaps in the belief that if they forget about it, nothing like it will ever happen again.”

How did that work out?