Fear is Good
Gordon Gekko famously quipped “ greed is good ” in his iconic Wall Street 80's movie. The phrase came in the middle of an era of deregulation and liberalization. A phase where "shoot for the fences" was the name of the game. Financial markets then became more of a cumulative distillation of the collective psychological state of its participants. And now, just as then, greed-dominated markets engender euphoria, happiness and (even if only fleeting and paper-based) great wealth. Fear-induced markets are the mirror image of the former, degenerating into panics, wealth destruction and (in some tragic cases) even death . Fear is connected to the negative. It’s why policemen shoot first and find out later. It's how some autocrats gain power over a very fearful electorate. Why politics have become so toxic as of late, and why the youngest generation these days is despairing and gloomy (where 60% of them "experience persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness"