US Recession: Historic Similarities to 1931
Posted by slowsmile on 26th January 2009

I’ve read a few articles concerning comparisons of the present day Financial Crisis in the US with The Great Depression Years. In this comparison among many, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing in the UK Telegraph, walks us through a history, painting a small economic and political picture of what it was like in 1931 America, the similarities as well as differences to the present day crisis - the economic effects, wide civilian suffering with minor regional uprisings, Hoover’s bumbling policies, the Fed’s inadequacy and Roosevelt’s election, intervention and key change of policies. Much of this troubled economic period - in many ways - eerily resembles the Bush-Obama changeover.
In this extract - taken from his article “Bad news: we’re back in 1931. Good news: it’s not 1933 yet.” - Mr. Evans-Pritchard takes us back to those times in a general historic and economic assessment between then and now:
“President Obama faces a happier world. The liberal economic order is still in tact, if fraying at the edges. Capital and ships move freely. North America and Europe talk the same political language. China has so far proved a dependable pillar of the international system.
But then the world seemed benign enough in early 1931. It is the second phase of depression that does terrible things.
Roosevelt took over a country where the economic machinery had completely broken down. The New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade had closed. Thirty-two states had shut their banks. Texas had restricted withdrawals to $10 a day.
Few states could borrow on the bond markets. Illinois and much of the South had stopped paying teachers. Schools closed for months. An army of 25,000 famished war veterans squatting in view of Congress had been charged by troopers of the 3rd US cavalry with naked sabres – led by a Major George Patton.
Armed farmers threatening revolution had laid siege to a string or Prairie cities. A mob had stormed the Nebraska Capitol. Minnesota’s governor was recruiting Communists only for the state militia. Lawyers attempting to enforce foreclosures were shot. More than 100,000 New Yorkers applied to go to the Soviet Union when Moscow advertised for 6,000 skilled workers.
We forget how close America came to open re
volt. Eleanor Roosevelt feared the country was beyond saving. Her husband kept the faith. He channelled the anger against Wall Street, diffusing it. “The practices of the unscrupulous money-changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion,” he began his presidency.
The Fed was an ideological deadweight. Bowing to pressure from Congress it began to purchase bonds in mid-1932 to boost the money supply, but then recoiled, before retreating into pitiful self-justification. A third of the rescue funds in Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation had been embezzled.
Today there has been no such failure of US institutional imagination, even if, as George Soros argues, the Treasury’s policies have been “haphazard and capricious”.
The twin blasts of fiscal and monetary stimulus have been massive. In short order the Fed has slashed rates to zero. It is now conjuring money out of thin air on an industrial scale, buying $600bn of mortgage bonds to force down the cost of home loans, and propping up the commercial paper market to avoid mass corporate default. Ben Bernanke, a Depression junkie, is proceeding with a messianic sense of certainty. The wash of money should ensure that the next 18 months will not mimic the cascade of disasters from late 1931 to early 1933.
It buys time. But it does not solve the deeper problem, which is that a West addicted to Ponzi credit has put off the day of reckoning with ever more extreme monetary policy with each downturn, stealing prosperity from the future.
It will be an extremely delicate task to right the ship again. Central banks will have to extricate themselves from their venture into the bond markets without setting off a bond debacle in 2010 or 2011. Governments will have to map out of a path of Puritan discipline for year after year.
This will be Barack Obama’s grim test of statesmanship.”
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In 1910, in a quiet backwater in Georgia at The Jekyl Island Hunt Club, there was a meeting whose simple purpose was the formation of US The Federal Reserve. Those who attended were: Senator Nelson Aldrich (Nelson Rockefeller’s maternal grandfather); A. Piatt Andrew, Economist and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Frank Vanderlip, President of the National City Bank of New York; Henry P. Norton, President of Morgan’s First National Bank of New York; Paul Moritz Warburg, a German who was partner in the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb Co.; Benjamin Strong, an aid to J. P. Morgan.