“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 the Great Depression began.
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 slow fizzle. 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.