“The wheel is come full circle,” says Shakespeare’s Edmund when confronted with the carnage surrounding him at the end of King Lear. The notion of a wheel of fortune has endured since antiquity. There are good times and bad times. There are bull markets and bear markets. There is boom and bust, a pattern chancellor Gordon Brown said he was going to eliminate.
Commodities, for instance, are very prone to secular bull markets, or supercycles. In 1947, Edward Dewey and Edwin Dakin published a book called. It is now out of print; but Dewey