The dubious physician on the financial mess:

Inflation altered our conception of wealth and how it is made, and in the process altered our behaviour, I would say for the worse. It has made us more shifty than thrifty…[N]ever has the need for speculation become quite as deeply entrenched in the popular psyche, including mine, as it is now, and inflation is at the origin of this. Never before has personal financial stability or survival depended so much, as it does now, upon speculation.

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(h/t d.a.w.)