hadas-malin

"For 10 years I have longed for normalcy but it does not seem so destined. My generation has already lived through war, boom and panic, but evidently we still have some excitement ahead of us." -- from the diary of Benjamin Roth, September 12, 1939. Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio when the Great Depression broke out. In 1931, he began keeping a diary, recording the economic chaos around him and trying to make sense of it. His story is dry, dispassionate, and fascinating. I can't help but read this through the last few years, and a few things jump out as a result. We do seem to be following the same pattern of events, with our current bumpy recovery feeling a lot like the mid-thirties. (If the parallels hold, we have some more hard times ahead.) But I can also see how much worse things were the last time around, when the credit system was frozen and there was simply no money to be had. It becomes a lot easier to justify the bailout efforts when you see what happened to a financial system that was allowed to collapse.

2022-09-06 05:40