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Originally Posted by Enoch Root
Strongly disagree.
I vividly remember 9/11, as it unfolded on our screens right before our eyes. Digesting the consequences as it unfolded, we all agreed that the world had changed forever - that people would stop travelling, completely stop flying, and that our western way of life was under an attack of war.
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After 9/11 people were saying irony was dead. Maybe even comedy itself. How could the world ever return to normal after an event like that?
Today, the only enduring consequence for most of us is we have to stand in long lines at airports and take our shoes off.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch Root
Basically, the same story can be told with every global crisis. Every single time, there are many who predict that the world as we know it is over. And every single time, normalcy returns, and the markets eventually set new highs.
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A few days after the 2004 tsunami I was at a party talking with some journalist friends. Of course it was the topic of the moment. A staggering calamity, with almost a quarter million dead (though at the time people feared that number was much higher). It was a natural disaster on a scale nobody of our generation had witnessed before. The world was in shock. Everything had changed.
But the journalists predicted that within a couple months it would be out of the news, and in a couple years most people would barely remember the tsunami. And of course they were right.
The pandemic is obviously having more of a personal impact on more people in North America and Europe than the 2004 tsunami did. And the economic fallout will last years. But like every other disaster that felt unprecedented and world-changing at the time, we'll move on and put it behind us.