Peter Goodman: The Steroid Years

So apt a description, so fitting a comparison (sluggers and bankers), that I’ll not add anything myself…

From the New York Times:

The last two decades may yet go down as the Steroid Years, a phrase that stretches well beyond the white lines of the baseball diamond to encompass the technology bubble of the 1990s and the housing bubble that came on its heels. Not for nothing, we have learned, did the phrase “on steroids” insinuate itself into the supersize vernacular of the age itself, the endlessly repeated way of describing scale and intensity.

So much really was pumped up, in ultimately unhealthy fashion.

Thanks to steroids, we got the thrilling summer of 1998, when Mr. McGwire shattered the single-season home run mark. Thanks to pumped-up credit, we enjoyed household finances that seemed wonderfully solid as housing prices rose, only to set up a wave of foreclosures and joblessness.

Peter Goodman nailed it.

Sources:

Sluggers and Bankers in the Strikeout Era (NYT)