Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637 the Banque Royale of 1719-20 the railway speculation of the 1840s the great crash of 1929.
World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.
