A SKIT in the 1979 film, “The Secret Policeman’s Ball”, features Peter Cook, a revered British comedian, as the leader of a cult whose members have gathered on a mountain to watch the end of the world. His followers are full of questions. How will the Earth perish? Will there be a mighty wind? What will happen to homes? “Well, naturally they will be swept away and consuméd by the fire that dances on the Jeroboam,” he replies. “Serve them bloody well right!”
The skit sends up the millenarian sects of medieval Europe whose adherents believed they were living in the “end times” or “last days”. It could as fittingly be aimed at many investors today. A strain of millenarian thinking has been common since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers ten years ago this month. Its devotees, too, rail against a discredited priesthood and its vices—in this case, central bankers and quantitative easing (QE). They also maintain that a reckoning is due.
Perhaps it is. As the crisis that followed the…
