Status Updates From When Everyone Knows That Ev...

"blunt speech generates common knowledge but innuendos don’t. ..off-record indirect speech is a rational strategy to make common knowledge of relationship-threatening propositions plausibly deniable. ..wording is not an arbitrary social ritual but is predictable from strategic considerations, in particular the proportion of sympathetic and unsympathetic hearers and the costs/benefits of either catching the drift.

"it’s only so long that an asset can levitate in midair suspended by nothing but common expectation. Bubbles pop when a market starts running out of the greater fools who don’t want to miss out on the next big thing, or when a reason for doubt itself becomes common knowledge..[, sending investors to] exits, each desperate to sell out of fear that others are selling it out of fear that still others are selling it.