I was startled by this quotation from the first quarter of the 16th century because I read it just after having read Malcolm Gladwell's piece on the Enron disaster in What the Dog Saw. There he suggests that the wildly dangerous accounting practices that lead to the downfalll of the company and the imprisonment of its leader were not really thought of as nefarious while they were being accounted. Essentially they were living off the promise of future returns that of course never came.

 

I guess we never learn from the past.