Morgan Housel

It could also mean that interest rates, you know, the interest rate on the 10-year bond, if it's, you know, 4%.

If it went to 7%, that's worse.

It's not catastrophic.

It'd be a bad recession.

People would lose their job.

Inflation would go up.

All that's true.

But interest rates were 7%, 8% in the 1990s.

You know, we got in the last interest rates have been so preposterously low for the last 25 years that we forget what any sense of normal is.

So right now, I think we kind of have a view that like if interest rates go to five or six percent, that's terrible.

I mean, from the 1960s to the 1990s, they were never anywhere near that low.

And the 1970s, early 1980s, they were 15%, 17%.

And it sucked, but we survived.

And we had a lot less debt than we did back then.

But there are scenarios in which you muddle through that are not catastrophic.

And we actually did that at the end of World War II when debt was about as high as it is right now.

I think we're a little bit higher right now, but as a percentage of GDP about what it is right now.

And if you go back and you read what they said about that in 1945, 1946, they were shitting their pants about it.

And true to your forecast, the prevailing view was there's nothing we can do about this.

It's just too much and this is the end of the empire.