This post is for the history dorks like me.
The two articles linked below examine how today's economic meltdown is more similar to the global and American depression in 1873, with a real estate collapse and credit freeze, than it is to the 1929 crash. Both articles are really interesting.
The Chronicle of Higher Education article does a great job of showing how the 1873 crisis was surprisingly a trans-atlantic phenomenon, aided by US economic growth into the global marketplace but based upon European lending policies (read: China's growth and US lending today). At the end, it makes some tentative but interesting predictions for our current situation.
The NYTimes article does a great job of explaining the 1873 Panic from a more domestic perspective, complete with links to old primary documents from that era, as well as some political ramifications of that collapse.
While not metioned in the NYTimes article, I think its interesting that the market recovery to the 1873 collapse coincided in 1877-78 with a troop draw-down of American occupation forces in the post-Civil War southern states. And, that this was soon followed by a shift in military attention to a much earlier but similarly regarded war on terror: the tragic Indian wars in the western states/territories. In these events, do we have our Iraqi 'horizon-line' and our possible shift of military resources to Afghanistan? If so, is there a military-economic lesson to be taken from it?
Finally, in a remarkably related cultural analysis, movie critic A.O. Scott takes a look back at the movie 'Wall Street' by Oliver Stone in this short video post. His analysis is excellent. Seeing some of these clips (the greed speech is incredible) makes me even more excited for this weekend's release of 'W.'!
PS. Last weekend, Bri and I went to see Bill Maher's 'Religulous.' Worth seeing, me thinks, not only for the laughs but for the interesting and important questions he raises.
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