"Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version." A Short History of Financial Euphoria, John Kenneth Galbraith

The late John Kenneth Galbraith would have enjoyed this summer. He was no expert on modern credit markets but his analysis of historic bubbles fits our most recent boom and bust episode with uncanny precision.