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The Morgan Housel Podcast

The Lifecycle of Greed and Fear

The Morgan Housel Podcast

Morgan Housel

Business

4.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2023

⏱️ 12 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

All greed starts with an innocent idea: that you are right, deserve to be right, and are owed something for the efforts you put into establishing your beliefs and opinions. It’s a reasonable feeling. But it sets off a chain reaction that leads to an inevitable boom-and-bust cycle. This episode explores one of the most important topics in investing: the lifecycle of greed and fear, and why it cannot, and will not, ever go away.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome back and a quick note before we get going. This podcast I think this is episode 20.

0:14.0

And I've been working on this podcast for about four months now.

0:17.0

It started with no plan, no vision, just hack it together and see what happens.

0:22.0

And I think it is already roughly the same size in

0:26.4

terms of audience as my blog that I've been working on full time for 15 years. I don't know if that says something good

0:34.9

about the podcast or something embarrassing about the blog, but I'm grateful for all of you

0:40.3

for listening. This has really been fun. I have a new book coming out in November. It's called

0:45.9

Same as Ever. It's about things that never change. Things that no matter what the future holds for us, no matter who wins the next election or what the next big

0:56.2

technology is, what is guaranteed to be a part of our future.

1:01.6

And I want to talk about one of those things today.

1:04.0

This is actually not in the book, but it easily could have been.

1:07.0

Maybe it even should have been.

1:09.0

And it's the life cycle of greed and fear.

1:12.0

Now, for decades... It's the life cycle of greed and fear.

1:14.0

Now for decades, economists and politicians and philosophers have been toying with the idea of how do you eliminate the boom bus cycle in economies?

1:26.4

How do you make a good healthy economy that just kind of grows the same amount every year and it doesn't have these wild swings of

1:36.0

booming bubble to crippling crash, how do you just spread things out evenly?

1:41.0

And I think it's become so clear that the answer to that question is you

1:46.9

cannot. You cannot do it. Because one of the things that will never change has always been the same and will never change going forward is the life cycle of greed and fear that is just an innate part of human nature that we cannot fix. I think understanding where it comes from is really important because if you view every bubble and every bust, every crazy stock market and every recession as a flaw of

2:16.3

human nature, it kind of makes you cynical and you look around and you just don't understand

2:21.4

what's happening.

2:22.1

Whereas I think if you

...

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