“The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again,
often in a slightly more unstable version.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria, 1994
Financial markets finally caught a whiff of economic reality these past two weeks, erasing more than $5 trillion of global wealth in seven short trading days. It was the worst market correction since the onset of the financial crisis in late 2008, and it may just be the beginning. A final bombshell dropped late on Friday evening as Standard & Poors held true to its word and robbed the United States of its AAA rating for the first time in history.