“Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know probably that would be going too far but I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be.” – Janet Yellen, Former Federal Reserve chairwoman

With those words, Janet Yellen, now the Secretary of the Treasury and facing an even worse crisis than the one referenced above, put investors around the world on notice, though probably not in the way she intended. In the past, such smug assurances from public officials have been enough to send contrarian villagers heading for the safety of the nearby woods. The informed student of financial history knows that panics, manias, crashes, and collapses are as common to investment markets as hurricanes to Caribbean beaches. To think that suddenly we have banished their recurrence for ‘our lifetimes’ smacks of the kind of misguided hubris that contributed directly to the 2008 meltdown and subsequent untold financial hardship. Just about the time most everyone comes to the conclusion nothing could go wrong, everything goes wrong …… and in a hurry, as we have discovered over the course of the past two years.