The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It
What You Need to Know About the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time-and How to Survive It
Chapter One
"More Risk is Simply More Profit"
It goes without saying that risk is at the heart of a
capitalist system. The worrying, the chin scratching,
nail-biting and hair pulling that go with it are part
and parcel of an economy organized around risk. You can
take a calculated risk, a measured risk or an educated
risk. But you can't eliminate risk from capitalism
without turning it into a system more akin to socialism
or communism. You can't have capitalism without some
level of risk. And you can't have risk without some
level of worry. In the current environment, sometimes
the level of worry has exceeded logic. In early
December, for instance, short-term Treasury notes
actually traded with a negative yield. That meant
investors were paying the government to lend it money,
an exceedingly rare quirk that underscored the high
degrees of fear and worry in the marketplace.
During the twenty years prior to our current fi ... read full excerpt from The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It: What You Need to Know about the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time--And How ebook
