Go back to that magazine article from the summer of 1929. John Raskob, chairman of General Motors' finance arm, telling the readers of the Ladies' Home Journal that anyone could be rich. Fifteen dollars a month. Eighty thousand dollars in twenty years. "Everybody Ought to Be Rich." It ran just weeks before the floor gave way. And here's what you can see now that Raskob couldn't — he wasn't describing a healthy economy that happened to crash. He was describing the crash. He just didn't know it yet.
That's the whole turn this course has been building toward. If you had to say, in one breath, what was actually underneath all of this — you already know. It was never the crash. The crash was just the trigger. The gun had been loaded for years. By the car bought on credit, with the payment that wouldn't fall when the paycheck did. By the farmer drowning a decade early, while the cities looked away. By a central bank built as a firewall that mistook standing still for safety. Prosperity and fragility weren't opposites. They were the same thing, turned to catch a different light.
So the next time something looks permanently, gloriously healthy — you'll do what Irving Fisher couldn't, standing in 1929 with his permanently high plateau and his fortune about to vanish. You won't take the surface at its word. You'll look underneath it. You'll ask what the prosperity is resting on, and whether the thing holding it up is the same thing that could bring it down. That habit is yours now. You carry it out of here.
That habit is yours now.