Investors in the West have a poor track record when it comes to the world’s emerging markets. In particular, they have a bad tendency to leave them just when they should love them. This is particularly true today.

If you are like me, you are suddenly realizing that your income did not go up by 0.2%, or any percent, because if it did, it seems like you would have remembered it. And anyway, if my income DID go up, then where in the hell is all of this money?

Like the Bourbons, Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz has learned nothing, and forgotten nothing. Amid five hours of blather on Capitol Hill yesterday about the credit markets’ near-meltdown, Schwartz explained away the demise of his firm with a rationalization that even OPEC ministers no longer believe when trying to explain high oil prices: in his own words, it was “unfounded rumors and attendant speculation.”