This time it’s different

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Stiffen your sinews if you hear this one.

A laundry list of times everyone agreed it was different, but it wasn’t:

• The elimination of boom and bust — © Gordon Brown, April 2000.
• How you value businesses without reference to cashflow or profitability — © every investment banker ever, in the run-up to the dotcom bust in 2000
• We have efficiently allocated risk to those best placed to bear it through credit derivatives — © every investment banker ever, in the run-up to the global financial crisis, 2004-8
• Mark-to-market accounting of future income streams in a market that doesn’t exist yet is sensible — © Arthur Andersen Jeff Skilling and the crazy gang at Enron, continually up to October 2001
• The Singularity is definitely going to happen, and the universe will wake up, rewriting the laws of physics as we know them etc. © Ray Kurzweil, 2005.
• Software is eating the world: © Marc Andreessen, 2009
• The machines are going to take over, breed us in slimy pods as battery fuel for Skynet which the machines will need because um they just will. Look! Chess-playing supercomputers! —© Daniel Susskind, A World Without Work

See also

• The dog in the night time
• Technological unemployment