[ExI] abandoning hope

[Spike]

> > > >Abandon hope all ye who enter here
> > >
> > >No, damn it!
> > >
> > >"Abandon ALL hope, ye who enter here."
> > >
> > >Actually, it is "*any* hope".
> > >
> > >Stefano Vaj
> 
> 
> Ja, there was meaning lost in translation.  Dante was urging hell-goers to
> abandon irrational exuberance.  ... spike


This comment came from an experience a couple weeks ago on a plane heading
east.  I was reading Greenspan's Age of Turbulence, which isn't a comedy,
but I got to hee hawing over one passage, the other passengers found out I
am a maniac.  The passage is on page 176, where he was talking about an
address he made to the American Enterprise Institute on 5 December 1996.  If
you recall the headlines of 6 December, Greenspan was quoted as having
uttered the market slaying two words "irrational exuberance."  I took a
whooping that day, and didn't appreciate it at all.

In the book, he gives a complete transcript of that speech and what was
going on at that gathering.  The dinner was delayed so they were bringing
out cocktails beforehand.  It was a very dense, wonky, economics
professorish speech.  Afterwards he seriously wondered what, if anything,
the guests had taken from his talk.  From that transcript on pages 176 and
177 of Turbulence, it is clear he absolutely was not in any way suggesting
that the stock market was overvalued.  The press people in attendance
latched onto those two words in a speech that was all over the intellectual
map, wrote headlines with "irrational exuberance" and took scandalous,
figuratively violent, liberties with the content of Greenspan's speech,
which smacked down the market.

For some odd reason I found this hilarious.

spike