In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes. - John Kenneth Galbraith

In the fifteen years following the First World War, and especially in the immediate aftermath, the industrial nations exploited this new freedom in remarkably diverse fashion. The French followed the line of least resistance with, on the whole, the best results. The British followed the line of greatest wounds. The Germans so handled matters, or so yielded to circumstances, as to produce the greatest inflation of modern times. The United States, by a combination of mismanagement and non-management, produced the greatest depression. In all the long history of money, the decade of the 1920s—extended by a few years to the consequences—is perhaps the most instructive.

Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad.

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.