The Go-Go Years - John Brooks

[Rainforesthiker]

[amazonsearch]The Go-Go Years[/amazonsearch]

 

Quotes from The Go-Go Years by John Brooks

 

 

“Reform is a frail flower that languishes in the hot glare of prosperity”  John Brooks

 

 

"Built into this situation was one of those moral absurdities that are so dismayingly common in American business life. . . .  If a schoolmaster were to assign one of his pupils to write an essay (to be graded by the schoolmaster himself) on whether or not he was a good schoolmaster, it might be cause for merriment all around.  Similar practices cause little mirth in business life because they are done all the time."

 

 

“Usually after general disaster in Wall Street or elsewhere, one man takes charge of cleaning up and putting things back together, of dragging the bodies off stage and rearranging the set for the next performance - rearranging it neatly and primly, as if in hopes that subsequent action will turn toward drawing-room comedy rather than more bloody melodrama."

 

 

“When a market panic is in progress, the SEC is as helpless as a meteorologist in a storm.  No power vested in it enables it to turn markets around, or cause person and institutions that are selling stocks to change their minds and begin buying them instead."

 

 

"Regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age-after a matter of ten or fifteen years-they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.”  John Kenneth Galbraith

 

To the above I would add that this life cycle is subject to revitalization and hence is cyclical;  see http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3018&context=lcp