Volume 42, Number 13 · August 10, 1995
The Confidence Men
By Sarah Kerr
Poor Cecily, condemned by her governess to study a tedious textbook, is at least spared the driest chapter, on the collapse of an obscure foreign currency. Miss Prism's notion that such an event could contain any excitement for a healthy ingénue sounds pedantic and absurd. But could she have a point? Certain economic crises, precisely because they occur at an abstract remove, have some of the sickening allure of a horror story, or of a myth in which a merciless god threatens to wipe out a city at some unspecified date in the future. Unlike, for example, hyperinflation—when prices jump so fast that the cost of bread rises by the time you get home from the store, a situation so viscerally unpleasant that even an economic illiterate can grasp its dimensions—this kind of crisis lies sleeping, out of sight. For the time being it may remain safely shut up in the attic; in the end, with luck, it may even prove to have been imaginary. But once awakened it is capable of slipping the lock unnoticed, padding silently down the stairs, and taking a country hostage.
Feature, 5020 words
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