the worldwide real estate bubble and its aftermath.

This is an anxiety driven world - the whole world is driven by anxiety. It is anxiety about the aftermath of the global financial crisis; it's anxiety about inequality and about computers replacing jobs.

With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then,
And new-born infant, died.
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.

They say it was a shocking sight,
After the field was won,
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun;
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.

The theme is absolutely important. We don't realize how much of our lives are absolutely random.

[Meanwhile, the financial froth of speculative bubbles--and their dangers--are another enduring legacy of the Greenspan era.] Irrational exuberance really is still with us, ... risk that in 2010 or even 2015, the stock market will be lower still in real, inflation-corrected terms, than it was in 2005.

It's very hard to forecast turning points, ... glamour cities.