Well, this table is going dead. Let's quickly get out. Let's pull out our money. They wanted to be part of the action. And it's, in that sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Animal spirits produce that optimism, that spontaneous urge to invest, and prices rise.
So in this analogy, the pull out of Asia would be akin to these guys here deciding that their luck has run out. If the table suddenly goes cold, a couple of bad rolls, people then decide this place is going down the tubes. And that's what happened in Asia. The herd mentality, particularly in the Asian markets, the herd mentality was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fund manager Thomas Tuttle was among the first to pull out of the most troubled Asian economies in early '97.