Old saw?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Old saw?

Parallels to the Great Depression of the 1930s and to Japan’s recent lost decade are frequently made. Perhaps the best analogy of our current predicament, one gaining ground in recent blog entries and journals, is the Long Depression that began in the United States with the Panic of 1873 and saw an alternation between recovery and collapse that lasted to the threshold of the 20th century.

Much of the economic history of that time sounds as if it could have been taken straight from today's cable financial news shows. Yet the underlying realities of the Long Depression reveal a silver-lining parallel for our future.

In the 1870s, as today, loose lending standards led to a credit, housing, and construction bubble—only this one was in Europe. When cheap American goods began to flood European markets, Europeans began to feel their overextension. The result was that their bubble burst. As with U.S. banks today, the world’s leading banks in London locked up, which in turn collapsed the arcane financial arrangements of U.S. railroads, which forced financier Jay Cooke to suspend the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which led to a U.S. stock market collapse, followed by widespread bank failure and a depression that lasted almost five years in the United States.

A period of boom and bust followed, with the consolidation of vast business empires by tycoons, along with a Bernie Madoff-like scandal in which a character named Ferdinand Ward exploited his friendships with prominent people (including former President Ulysses S. Grant) to fleece the trusting.