Irish Times: IN A LONG and distinguished career, economist and commentator John Kenneth Galbraith authored almost 50 books. Indeed, he was still writing into his 80s when he penned A Short History of Financial Euphoria in 1990. It is a lucid, sometimes hilarious, little book, in which he describes vividly the recurring cycles of financial euphoria, frenzy and collapse from the Dutch tulip mania in the 17th century to the Wall Street crashes of 1929 and 1987. He only just missed witnessing the …