As the dominoes fall (or wobble) in the wave of financial contagion sweeping the crypto industry, one of the starkest lessons is that no matter the potential of a new technology, you can’t beat the leverage cycle. It’s a lesson investors in traditional finance have repeatedly had to learn and relearn over the past 25 years as digital tech and data science worked their way into Wall Street and periodically fueled moments of excessive debt-fueled speculation. One pattern seen in various blowups – from Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1998, to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, to the financial crisis of ... (full story)