(snip)""[T]the stock market became an engine of doom, carrying to destruction the entire nation and, in its wake, the world."
-- Murray Rothbard, America's Great Depression

On Sunday I read where Paul Krugman in the New York Times called this The Third Depression. "We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression," he wrote. As befitting someone trapped in the sensibilities of New York City -- the only city in the world that will ever matter! -- he's several years late to that observation. New York City in general, Wall Street in particular, is a bit like an aging movie star who doesn't realize she's already been replaced by a younger version of herself. If you don't believe that, spend a weekend looking around Washington DC. But that's another story.

This modern stealth depression actually began years ago:


Welcome to the Depression. No, don't drop whatever it is you're doing. Don't get up. It's not going anywhere. It will wait. It's just going to sit over here in the corner and read a magazine while you do whatever it is you need to do.

A Depression doesn't run hot and fierce like some crazed meth burner. A Depression is methodical, purposeful, patient. It will build a shelter out of tree branches and newspaper, light a small, well-contained campfire and wait you out, brother. While you feed on the empty calories of denial and popcorn, it will quietly gather shards of broken dreams and fashion them into a terrible weapon of blunt force reality.

It's a hell of a thing to call this day and age the next Depression. It's dangerous tinfoil-hat territory inhabited mostly by screeching lunatics and volatile nutjobs. But by the time they get squeezed out by reputable folks the whole gig will be up, the circus will have left town.

-- Kevin Depew, The Modern Stealth Depression


It's terrible form to quote yourself in your own articles, but the reason I write in the first place is because nobody else says what I want them to say. The reason I bring this up is because Krugman and all the others who have come late to our depression party almost always fail to put an economic collapse in any useful context; how it feels to someone in a town of 6,000; what it means to see your brother laid off once his economic usefulness to the company runs its course. Okay, so I will.

Despite the seeming enormity of it in retrospect, the stock market crash of 1929 barely even registered for most Americans. The day before the crash, Time Magazine's October 28, 1929, issue was business as usual; national stories, Washington stories, a review of the newest plays opening in Manhattan, a piece on a cat-washing contest in Kingston, North Carolina -- the equivalent of the modern-day YouTube cat video.

A week later, in the wake of the stock market plunge, Time's cover story took an angle as far from crashing share prices as you could get -- a profile of a man named Samuel Insull, the "financial father of the Chicago opera." The crash did make the magazine, of course, second billing in the Business section in a piece titled, "Bankers v. Panic." The next piece, however, was about a $2.5 million investment by a Wall Street investment bank in orchids: "Last week, however, to the orchid industry went 2,500,000 Wall Street dollars, not squandered, but carefully invested."

Heh. Yes, the dream dies hard, doesn't it?

It took a little more than two full years, December 11, 1931, before the New York Bank of the United States would collapse. Surely that would rattle a few cages. Well, no cover play. That was reserved for Dr. James Henry Breasted, "foremost Egyptologist of the US," but the bank collapse did garner a story in the Business section, below a piece on Lorillard Co., then in the news as "the only major industrial concern in the US to resume dividends in 1931." (snip)

(snip)This is quickly turning into some kind of perverse joke, right? I'm beginning to think these people deserve the Depression, dammit. No wonder the country has gone to hell; all anyone cares about is Tugboat Annie, football, and whiskey, just like today; Lady Gaga, football, and whiskey.


And there it is, finally, the point. We're slowly sidling up to The Fear. With wealth and lifestyles evaporating right before our eyes, The Fear is really the only tangible thing we can hold on to. The Fear is always worse than the actualization. The Fear feeds on potentiality, unimaginable potentiality.

Now, there are two ways to look at that. One is to despair over our misfortune at finding ourselves in the wrong place at the right time, taken along for a ride on this wave past the cresting point. The other is to consider what adventures await on the other side. I'm in the second camp, mostly because I'm a defensive pessimist by nature, a present hedonistic, present fatalistic, beaten-down idealist, and also because I understand that despite it all -- the jobs that have vanished, the economic pain, the losing -- we'll continue to live our lives, make families, raise children the best we can, and find ways to make the best of whatever situation we're in.

Today, times are tough for many people. But even now the vast majority of us are carrying on and finding ourselves somehow casually adjusting to changes in lifestyle.

Some years ago I read a recollection piece in the New York Times by a woman who reported that she felt humiliated by her parents' reckless disregard for money during the Great Depression. They didn't have much anyway, but her parents were apparently intent on squandering what little they could accumulate on fancy clothes and cocktail parties. As I remember the story, she asked her mom, "Why on earth are you having a party with things the way they are?" Her mother, without missing a beat, said, "It's times like these when people need parties most of all."

Indeed. The time for preparations and battening down the hatches has passed. It's here. Let's party"(snip)

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