[url]http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/722075/posts[/url]
LEXINGTON, Mass. -- In a well-manicured Boston retirement community, Charles P. Kindleberger has watched the
stock-market turmoil unfold during the past two years with a sense that he has seen it all before.
Mr. Kindleberger, a retired economist, wrote the 1978 economics classic "Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of
Financial Crises." The book, required reading for many Wall Street trainees and students of economic history, documents four centuries
of boom-and-bust financial cycles. It ranges from a fleeting bubble in the market for Dutch tulips in 1636, to rampant speculation and
subsequent collapses in railroad shares in 1847 and 1857, to the Depression in the 1930s, to the rise and fall of Japan's property
market in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
At the age of 91, Mr. Kindleberger, who taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 33 years, is one of the few
retirees unshaken by the current market turbulence -- with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 18% from the start of the year,
despite Wednesday's big rally. "I'm ashamed to say I enjoy the decline in the stock market," he says. "It is what we call schadenfreude, a
joy in the troubles of others." Mr. Kindleberger is gloating because he warned readers in the foreword of the third edition of "Manias,
Panics, and Crashes," released in 1996, of what looked "suspiciously like a bubble in technology stocks." Paul Samuelson, a colleague
and Nobel prize-winning economist, admonished readers on the book's cover, "Sometime in the next five years you may kick yourself for
not reading and re-reading Kindleberger's [book]."
"It is one of the most important books for people on Wall Street to read," says Richard Sylla, who teaches a course on financial history
at New York University's Stern School of Business and has his students spend two weeks examining the book.