Thursday, October 30, 2008

It's The Economy...Stupid!

I have been wading through the the emotional mess that has been "the economy" the past year and it seems like every other minute the roller coaster of falling house prices, stock prices,rising food costs, and every other black hole would make a normal person ready to roll up into a ball and start sucking their thumb. But it all seems familiar. Didn't Bill Clinton find his true political footing when he stated to all those unemployed shipyard workers that,"he felt their pain"? And what about Ronald Regan and "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Has our collective memory gotten so weak that we can't see that we are perpetuating this continual problem with our economy? What makes us go from one economic bubble to another,always expecting that this one is really not like the last? So, being saddled with this desire to understand where this all started I looked backwards. What can the past tell us about the present(HISTORY)? Here are a few things that popped up. I was casting about looking for some period when the U.S. economy had seen a similiar set of circumstances with bank failures. Of course there was the S&L failures of the 1980's. But was this the first time? Check out the Panic of 1907. It is almost like somone read this as a scrpit and said, "Hey, lets try this again!" Another interesting moment came when the,as some would argue, the Great Depression really took off when the Austrian National Bank failed. Now, one can look at these examples and say,"Well,they're similar,but look, there are alot of differences in the way we do business now." O.K., I agree that maybe they don't match exactly, but look at how our politicians and our economic leaders have responded to the situation we have now. I have heard many times that Ben Bernahke is "a student of the Great Depression" and is not going to allow the same systems to collapse. If he needs to see the way out of this mess by examing the failures of the government during the Depression or the Panic of 1907,wouldn't that make the case for a repeat of previous mistakes. I mean, how would you know what to do if you didn't know what it looked like from before? So, as you might tell from this first blog, I LOVE HISTORY!!! I cannot understand why anyone would not! I want to remind everyone out there that we are creating new and wonderful worlds,but we still live in this one and every day we make history,we live history,and we should remember history.