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The Breakdown

Lessons from the Financial History of Pandemics, feat. Jamie Catherwood

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8806 Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jamie Catherwood works at O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, a quantitative long-equity investment firm. More importantly, however, he is the finance history guy on Twitter. His “Financial History: Sunday Reads” curation pieces and longer form articles on his site Investor Amnesia have become required reading for anyone who wants the historical context for current financial issues.  On this episode of The Breakdown, Jamie and NLW discuss: Financial lessons from previous pandemics, including the 14th century bubonic plague; an 1892 Cholera outbreak in Hamburg, Germany; and, of course, 1918  Strange parallels between 1918’s Spanish flu and the currentcCoronavirus crisis, including an increase in the price of oranges  The concept of “Minsky Moments, a key inflection point in bubbles where over-exuberant markets become unwound extremely quickly

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond.

0:12.0

This episode is sponsored by ArisX.com, the Stellar Development Foundation, and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund.

0:20.0

The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

0:22.6

Here's your host, NLW.

0:27.8

Welcome back to The Breakdown.

0:30.0

It is Tuesday, May 19th, and today we have something historical and fun for you guys.

0:36.4

You may not know this, but I was a history major as an

0:39.5

undergrad. I focused on colonial and imperial history, basically. From an American perspective,

0:45.2

from a European perspective, I was always interested in the intersection of cultures, whether it was

0:50.3

positive or whether it was forced, whether it was economic driven, whether it was whatever.

0:56.3

The history of imperial and colonial expansion is the history of globalization in many ways.

1:03.3

So I spent a ton of time thinking about that, and that study has informed my perspective to this

1:08.1

day. So when I came across in mid-2018, someone on Twitter who was

1:13.7

doing financial history but via Twitter, these short little bursts of these are the most

1:18.4

interesting original articles or case studies or literally snippets of newspapers from some

1:25.2

past event that is relevant for some current context, I had to

1:29.1

figure out who this person was. Well, it turns out his name is Jamie Catherwood. He works at

1:34.1

Oshonnessy asset management, but really what he's known for is being the financial history guy

1:39.3

on Twitter. He does a weekly Sunday reads, which is not dissimilar from my Long Read Sunday, except instead

1:46.3

of focusing on the crypto industry and economics kind of more broadly like I do, he focuses on

1:50.9

financial history. For the last couple months, that Sunday Reads has been enormously more focused

1:57.1

on the context and the history of both pandemics and economic crises as we have

...

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