2007 was a tough year for America’s microbrewers, firms such as Boston Beer Company, that brew speciality beers. The price of malting barley, used to color and sweeten beer,  nearly doubled after barley farmers in the U.S. planted more fields with corn to take advantage of government subsidies for corn-based ethanol.  The government introduced the subsidies to decrease American reliance on Middle Eastern oil, at a time when crude prices were rising and geopolitical forces threatened to disrupt supplies. That same year, poor weather in Europe severely limited yields of hops, which provide beer with a bitter tang, driving up the prices. Hops prices jumped just as the euro strengthened against the dollar, further jacking up the prices paid by brewers. That same year, SAB Miller and Molson Coors Brewing, the second and third largest brewers in the U.S., merged, creating a behemoth to further pressure profits of small brewers.

Microbrewing might seem like the kind of business that could escape market turbulence–the production technology hasn’t changed in centuries, demand is local, and the business is simple.  Yet even in this

Everyone agrees that the global economy is flying through a patch of extreme turbulence. Recall that Lehman Brothers, which was founded in 1850, successfully weathered the American Civil War, multiple recessions, four financial panics, two world wars, depressions, oil crises, and 9/11. But the storied firm could not survive the seizure of global capital markets in 2008.

The present economic crisis has been so dramatic, that many people think it caused the volatility roiling markets. If the crisis triggered turbulence, according to this line of thinking, then the global economy should return to a period of stability once the worst of the downturn is behind us. Not so fast. Turbulence did not begin on September 9th, 2008. And it will not end when the global economy pulls out of recession. The current economic crisis is not the cause of market turbulence, it is simply the latest symptom of the volatility inherent in global markets.

In January of 2000, I stepped into “the pit” to teach my first class on entrepreneurial management at the Harvard Business School. These were heady days for aspiring entrepreneurs. Some MBA students raised tens of millions of dollars with little more than a business plan. A few recent graduates had founded Internet start-ups and measured their net worth in hundreds of millions of dollars (on paper at least). Some venture capitalists prowled the student haunts hoping to discover the founder of the next amazon or eBay.

My most vivid memory of the dot.com boom is not excitement, but surprise. I was surprised when the