发帖
雷达卡
疯狂、惊恐和崩溃：金融危机史，Manias, Panics and Crashes，Kindleberger, Charles P，发表于1978.London : Macmillan 。
1. Definitions
The three words in the title of this section - 'manias', 'panics' and 'crashes' - make up the title of Charles P Kindleberger's book on financial crises1. Let us begin with some definitions. One of the dictionary meanings of 'mania' is 'excessive or unreasonable desire: a craze'2. Applied to financial markets, we are talking about a frenzied burst of buying of a financial asset, which causes the price of that asset to rise very sharply. In Kindleberger's phrase, a mania is 'speculative excess'. The implication is that people buy on the assumption that the price will continue to rise and thus they will be able to sell at a higher price later, making a speculative profit. People behaving in this way appear to forget the possibility that the price might fall. They dismiss potential losses from their minds. This collective refusal to acknowledge, at least in the case of one particular asset, that prices in markets might fall as well as rise is against all market experience. It can, thus, be held to be 'unreasonable', as in the dictionary definition or 'irrational'. The use of the words 'desire', 'craze' and 'frenzied' here suggests that other motives, notably greed and rapaciousness, take over and dominate rationality, although
people may also be sucked into the craze by a defensive fear that they are missing out on something.
京公网安备 11010802022788号
