The Class of 1982 was special in graduating at the very inception of what has become a nearly 40-year bull market in credit, which is mostly a story of monetary and regulatory policy.

When the books are written 100 years from now, they will explain this period as a hyperinflation that our HBS-trained leaders in government and finance managed to trap mostly in financial assets, all the while counter-intuitively justifying their money-creation activities based on a theoretical potential to leak gradually out to the broader economy. Hyperinflation here to maybe generate useful inflation there, but really useful primarily in creating robber-barrons and oligarchs, who perpetuate the system through 'soft bribery' and 'reputation laundering' described in the article.

This article and the speeches etc. discussed in it should be a clarion call for folks to accelerate imagining what will come next, which may well go beyond increasingly cosmopolitan admissions and instruction at HBS.