What follows might be helpful...

From - Arie van Gemeren, CFA via LinkedIn

In 33 AD, Rome experienced its first financial crisis. The story should terrify every leveraged real estate investor today.

Roman senators had discovered the "infinite money glitch": Borrow against your estates to buy more estates. Use those as collateral for more loans. Repeat until you own half of Italy.

Sounds like BBB ?

For a decade, it worked brilliantly. Then Emperor Tiberius enforced an old banking law. Suddenly, lenders needed to back their loans with Italian land. So they called in their debts.

All of them. At once.

What followed was financial contagion:

Day 1: Loans get called
Day 3: Everyone's selling, nobody's buying
Day 5: Property prices collapse
Day 7: Credit markets freeze completely

Tacitus wrote: "Credit was gone, and property could not be sold even at ruinous losses."

Rome's entire aristocracy faced bankruptcy. Commerce stopped. The empire's financial system was dying.

Tiberius faced the same choice every leader faces in crisis: Let it burn clean, or bail it out.

He chose bailout. Because why not?

100 million sesterces injected into the banking system. Interest-free loans for three years.

History's first quantitative easing. In ancient Rome.

It worked... temporarily:
→ Credit markets unfroze
→ Property transactions resumed
→ Crisis "ended"

But Rome never recovered its financial dynamism. The precedent was set:

When things get bad enough, government will intervene.

Within a generation: Nero debased the currency
Within a century: Chronic inflation
Within three centuries: Empire collapsed

The pattern NEVER changes:

Leverage
→ Trigger
→ Collapse
→ Bailout
→ Moral hazard
→ Bigger crisis

Rome 33 AD. John Law's France. America 1837, 1907, 2008, 2020.

Same playbook. Exponentially bigger numbers.

My latest deep dive explores how a crisis 2,000 years ago wrote the script every central banker still follows today: https://lnkd.in/gHyx39cR

They will print. They always print. The question is: Are you positioned for what comes next?

P.S. - Roman senators who survived swore off leverage forever. The ones who didn't? They were leveraged 10:1 on Italian farmland. Some lessons are truly timeless.