This week starts with British politics in such a state the word ‘febrile’ is getting seriously overused. In the US, there are more and more hints of reasons to impeach the president and a war in the Middle East is being openly discussed. Some major new long heralded stick market flotations have been postponed.
Not the rosiest of times for investors one might imagine. But stock markets seem to be happy range trading as they have been for weeks. A diversified portfolio will see modest gains over one period and then see the short term profit evaporate.
I am an avid reader and have found it fascinating of late to dip into the diary extracts of people who kept a personal record of history (the source is the outstanding anthology The Assassin’s Cloak). One can learn of lot from looking back on real peoples’ ‘live’ observation of history.
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day when I will visit is small patch of land in the forest about a mile from where I am now and contemplate how 1400 men women and children were machine gunned to death in the pit they had been forced to dig. Diary entries I have read of Jewish people all over Europe reveal that many took the gradual increase in Nazi hostility with resignation and never saw the ‘final solution’ coming until it was upon them.
This is a sad source for a lesson in human nature, I realise, but it should not be forgotten. When a situation deteriorates slowly, we tend to ‘get used it’ and are unprepared for a truly disastrous shock that we ought to have seen coming. Such progressive scenarios often occur in stock markets.
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