Over the years, I frequently hear people say that the current times are particularly uncertain, risky, etc., etc…

These are not the strangest of times. It just seems that way.

It is a quirk of human nature that the present always seems more difficult than the past. It is a bias behavioral economists like the Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler have thoroughly documented. We all might remember this bias next time we feel that these are the worst of times.

Although I am quite familiar with the history of the stock markets in the 1960s, this weekend I read the (1973) treatise, The Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street's Bullish 60s. The magnitude rivalled the crash of 1929 and the Wall Street failures of 2008.

Wall Street in the 1960s was poorly capitalized. So much so that several firms went bankrupt and mergers were forced to shore up the financial system. An example from The Go-Go Years was the fact that Ross Perot* was involved in saving F.I. Du Pont, the third largest brokerage firm in the country. I was unaware of this fact. The situation went from bad to worse. It turned out Perot had to invest $30 million at the time of the transaction and ultimately the cost was $100 million (in 1960s dollars).

Civil unrest, assassinations, and the Vietnam war are a few more of the strange times of the 1960s The 1970s followed with inflation, the oil embargo and Watergate. More problems came in the following decades. All feeling more intense at the time than past crises. No doubt the next financial calamity will have newscasters stating that the current crisis is unprecedented. It may feel like it, but it won’t be unprecedented if we remember the past.

I worry about many things. I have worried (needlessly) about higher interest rates and higher inflation for the last decade. I still worry about them. I never worried about the marijuana stocks because I avoided them - despite the bubble that made them look like easy money. Now, I am avoiding crypto currencies and the frothy parts of the stock market. There are always things for me to worry about, but I never worry that today is uniquely worse than the past.

*Ross Perot was a self-made billionaire from founding Electronic Data Systems in the 1960s and he ran for President of the USA in the 1990s.