The thing is that this article and the Sequoia "RIP Good Times" slideshow are actually both kind of right.
This "recovery" is completely fragile and we will see what a real Great Depression 2.0 looks like after the dollar collapses. The final trigger could be Greece's pending sovereign bankruptcy, the popping of the tuition bubble, or the S&P downgrade of treasuries. Each of these is absolutely going to happen, Tim Geithner's assurances notwithstanding, though the timeframe is not certain.
So in this sense Sequoia's talk was right, even though they didn't properly articulate the actual upstream driver of the collapse in their slideshow (namely the push for massively expanded minority homeownership in the 2000s).
However, Quigley is also right about his particular point: that we are going to see a return to private companies and a retreat from "going public". Facebook is only the beginning.
While "going public" is thought of as the apotheosis of capitalism, it's really an injection of democracy into an otherwise capitalistic system. All the things people think of as deficiencies of capitalism -- including shortsighted management on a quarterly basis, financial manipulation of stocks, and the like -- are actually problems of democracy, not capitalism.
Think about how dumb VCs can be. Now think about how dumb a braying mob can be. You should be extremely reluctant to sell control of your enterprise to that braying mob. A well run business is about elitism, not democracy, as not all votes can or should count equally -- exhibit A being Steve Jobs.
Currently, US government regulations force disclosure requirements on companies of a certain size, which is why many (but not all) of that size decide to go public.
However, as more and more companies stay private, and as we have a complete collapse in faith in government bonds, we find that a very interesting thing may happen: stocks and bonds, the tools of Wall Street, may be radically reduced in importance.
This will have a tremendous salutary effect as the primary way to create wealth will be to actually start a business and sell a product. This is really the key point that Quigley is making.
This has to happen at some point because the risk-adjusted returns you can get on Wall Street are still higher than entrepreneurship. Once that changes, things will change for the better.
Any currency collapse is never an IF, only a WHEN... however, indeed this would indicate the end of a depression, not its start. Meaning after any kind of collapse, economic activity is bound to pick up... hit the bottom and the only way is up.
This "recovery" is completely fragile and we will see what a real Great Depression 2.0 looks like after the dollar collapses. The final trigger could be Greece's pending sovereign bankruptcy, the popping of the tuition bubble, or the S&P downgrade of treasuries. Each of these is absolutely going to happen, Tim Geithner's assurances notwithstanding, though the timeframe is not certain.
So in this sense Sequoia's talk was right, even though they didn't properly articulate the actual upstream driver of the collapse in their slideshow (namely the push for massively expanded minority homeownership in the 2000s).
However, Quigley is also right about his particular point: that we are going to see a return to private companies and a retreat from "going public". Facebook is only the beginning.
While "going public" is thought of as the apotheosis of capitalism, it's really an injection of democracy into an otherwise capitalistic system. All the things people think of as deficiencies of capitalism -- including shortsighted management on a quarterly basis, financial manipulation of stocks, and the like -- are actually problems of democracy, not capitalism.
Think about how dumb VCs can be. Now think about how dumb a braying mob can be. You should be extremely reluctant to sell control of your enterprise to that braying mob. A well run business is about elitism, not democracy, as not all votes can or should count equally -- exhibit A being Steve Jobs.
Currently, US government regulations force disclosure requirements on companies of a certain size, which is why many (but not all) of that size decide to go public.
However, as more and more companies stay private, and as we have a complete collapse in faith in government bonds, we find that a very interesting thing may happen: stocks and bonds, the tools of Wall Street, may be radically reduced in importance.
This will have a tremendous salutary effect as the primary way to create wealth will be to actually start a business and sell a product. This is really the key point that Quigley is making.
This has to happen at some point because the risk-adjusted returns you can get on Wall Street are still higher than entrepreneurship. Once that changes, things will change for the better.