Dick Robertson – If I Ever Get A Job Again (1933)
If I ever get a job again,
I will never be a snob again;
I’ll live within my means,
Carry a dollar in my jeans,
If I ever get a job again.
If I ever get a break again,
Brother, what I’ll do to stake again!
No turning out the light,
Bidding my [...]

In thinking of protectionism, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and what might come next, here are two interesting angles.
Governments with their backs against the wall
Ideally, stabilisation using monetary and fiscal policy, alongside actions by the private sector, should restrain the decline in consumption, and yield conditions which are not too harsh for households. At [...]

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was set up as a reaction to the stock market crash of 1929 to provide oversight of brokerage firms and protect investors. Last month, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., filed to become bank holding companies. Now with the sale of Bear Stearns, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers [...]

When I was a kid (I’m 55 now), I looked forward to holiday dinners because that was when my parents and my grandparents held their traditional “Was FDR a scoundrel or a savior?” debate. My grandparents, who worked for public utilities and, thus, survived the Great Depression with conservative opinions intact, argued for FDR the [...]

If you watch the news at all these days (and a case could definitely be made for avoiding this habit), then you already know that the United States imports way more cheap stuff from China than it sends over there for sale to the Chinese people. That big difference between the huge amount we import [...]

Crime rates should drop during good economic times and rise during bad ones. So very soon if you are walking the streets of New York late at night, you may be at risk of being mugged by gangs of investment bankers, driven to acts of desperate violence by the travails of the credit markets. This [...]

By the time November rolls around, Americans will have heard more economic numbers crunched in more creative ways than anyone ever would have imagined possible. That’s the mathematical formula for recreating any candidate in the image of a populist hero: numbers and more numbers. Bury ‘em in numbers, and if they start asking questions, well, [...]

We are taught in school that the Great Depression was a result of the 1929 stock-market crash, and that the crash was caused by unregulated financial markets or “unfettered capitalism.” Even so-called conservative history teachers and professors tend to share this view, and certainly the leadership of both American political parties accept this myth as [...]

Recently, in an attempt to generate some calm in the wake of the IndyMac Bank failure, I published an article (on another website) about FDIC insurance and how it works. My intent was to settle some of the rampant fear that kicked off the week of July 15, 2008. I work in a bank, and [...]

The recent failure of IndyMac bank came after a week of constant reassurance from its corporate handlers that everything was fine, really, just fine. Then, on Monday, July 14, after a harrowing weekend spent scrambling for solutions to the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mess, George Bush went before press conference cameras to reassure the [...]