Posted on 03/21/2008 12:38:43 PM PDT by moderatewolverine
No question, Bear Stearns Cos. evokes the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it. Politicians are already making analogies to Herbert Hoover, the demon of that period, and Franklin Roosevelt, the angel.
On March 16, Senator Schumer of New York said on television: "We're in the most serious economic problem we've been in a very long time — much worse than 2001. The president's hands-off attitude is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover in 1929 and 1930."
Within 24 hours, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat of Illinois, was weighing in with his own 1930s comparison. Roosevelt had pulled a country out of Depression and united it; President Bush was doing the opposite, he said.
You get the picture: Mr. Bush is like Hoover, the do-nothing. Democrats are like Roosevelt, the activist.
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
This is not like 1929 and the coming Great Depression. This is still the Great Depression. It never ended.
I thought I read somewhere (probably in an article linked right here on FR), that it was Roosevelt's policies and response to the stock market crash that deepened and lengthened the Great Depression.
Other countries without the FDR handicap pulled out of the depression in the early 1930’s. But at least he made suffering more enjoyable.
It was very complicated for Roosevelt to try to do something when much of what he tried was declared Unconstitutional. There was a serious lack of cash, which sounds like some of this week’s headlines even though $20 trillion has been borrowed now and is still owed—where did it go?.
The man who is most responsible for ending the Great Depression was Adolf Hitler. His rearming of Germany and the corresponding armaments build ups by France, The United Kingdom, and finally The United States; ended the Great Depression.
“... much of what he tried was declared Unconstitutional.”
Yes, like “packing” the Supreme Court with his ideologically compatible cronies.
Apparently, every fool doesn't know this. Like the fools running for the Democrat nomination.
Right on the money!
I was around before WWII and obviously during and after it. WWII not only pulled us out of financial difficulties it gave this country a kick in the ass that got us going.
We were on a path to outstrip the world in just about every area, and we continued that way until the socialists took over the democrat party and started poisoning this country in earnest in the mid 60s. (Especially in the education system.)
The socialist poisioning continues through this day, now with the importation of people who are guaranteed to vote for the socialists(Dems) when they become citizens. - Tom
From http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article2740.html
“As a matter of fact, it was due for a good deal more than that. It began obviously to collapse in the spring and summer of 1926. People who held binders and had failed to get rid of them were defaulting right and left on their payments. One man who had sold acreage early in 1925 for twelve dollars an acre, and had cursed himself for his stupidity when it was resold later in the year for seventeen dollars, and then thirty dollars, and finally sixty dollars an acre, was surprised a year or two afterward to find that the entire series of subsequent purchases was in default, that he could not recover the money still due him, and that his only redress was to take his land back again”
Everything old is new again.....
Thus, Bernanke is doing the OPPOSITE of what the Fed did during the depression. Instead of withholding cash infusions as the Fed did earlier in the 20th century, Bernanke is currently opening the coffers to ailing banks to avoid chaos.
Interesting.
You’ll notice that in the modern era, when we have a recession, they fiddle with the knobs, adjust the interest rates up or down a little, and we motor right on.
Compare that to FDR seizing control of the economy and driving the US into a decade-long crisis that almost destroyed us.
I’m not really a fan of the knob fiddlers, but compared to FDR they are economic geniuses.
Ring a bell. It is a bottom. When the world thinks its meaningless little stock market corrections are the great depression, every panicky silly person has sold whatever they were going to sell.
Hoover raised taxes to strengthen the dollar while Congress passed protectionist legislation that set off a trade war and a global deflationary spiral. Every intervention into the economy begun by Hoover and continued by FDR tended to make the depression last longer. But I wouldn't expect somebody like Schumer to know.
FDR made the Depression worse. He in no way deserves any credit for ending it.
Actually Roosevelts policies kept the Great Depression
going for long that it would have, if he would have
kept out of the economy.
I think Rush did a segment on this a couple yeas ago.
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