Here’s a great idea for a business blog.
An anonymous somebody is going back through Depression-era Wall Street Journals day by day and summarizing just what was going on back then. The result is “News from 1930, which tells us what was going on on this date in 1930.
It’s interesting in a history-buff kind of way but also for the parallels between then and now. Including happy talk from the Street:
When this economic and market readjustment has been completed, it will merely be represented by a small curve downward in our steadily mounting curve of prosperity, consumption, production and efficiency …”
As The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle writes regarding her own research with Depression-era publications:
What always surprises me is the optimism of those early depression years—during what may well have been the worst financial crisis in American history, people mostly expect things to get better. This gives me pause whenever I examine our “green shoots”, even though I’m very sure we’ve got much better fiscal and monetary policy than our ancestors did.
Indeed.
I imagine you could find optimism at other sources besides The Wall Street Journal in 1930. The reason is that there had been bad slumps before - most recently to that age, a really sharp and painful one in 1921-22. What nobody anticipated was the length of the slump that started in 1930 and continued until those war orders started coming to U.S. factories from overseas starting around 1938-39.
The reasons for the length of the Depression are a matter of fierce contemporary debate, but there had been panics and severe recessions before, and would be again. One has to ask why the slump of the 1930s lasted longer than in earlier times, when 'greed' and speculation were, if anything, more freely practiced. It raises the question of whether the relatively laissez-faire conditions of earlier days were more conducive to 'sharp but short' economic pain, followed by normally upward rebound - and if the more modern fiscal and monetary policies that existed in 1929 (the Fed had only been chartered in 1913) had the effect of spreading the pain wider and extending its life further. With all the best intentions, of course.
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 26 Jun 2009 at 12:50 PM
Hi, Mark.
Not intending to single out the WSJ here at all--it's just the subject of the blog. We know there were many other sources of wrongheaded optimism in the media and in politics, etc.
#2 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Fri 26 Jun 2009 at 03:30 PM
Ryan -
Fair enough. Thanks for responding. Sadly, there is a perception on the part of this consumer that the WSJ and ideologically kindred news organs are singled out for holding to a higher standard by orthodox press commentators. So criticism of Fox News absent criticism of, say, MSNBC, starts to look like a fig leaf to cover political animus. New York, you know?
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 29 Jun 2009 at 12:35 PM