mcgrew's Journal: More Hoover (damn!)

I wrote about some similarities between 1929 and now, and as I don't want to update the old sm62704 journals I'm adding a brief journal here.

I was reading the paper; well OK it isn't paper any more, it's the Chicago Tribune online, but I was shocked at some news that bears on that journal. It seems that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson echoed Herbert Hoovers words shortly before the Great Depression. The Chicago tribune quotes Paulson:

In Washington, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who refused to toss a financial lifeline to Lehman, was unapologetic as the Bush administration signaled strongly that Wall Street shouldn't expect more rescues from Washington.

The American people should remain confident in the "soundness and resilience in the American financial system," Paulson told reporters at the White House.

In 1931 in his book Only Yesterday (the the entire book is hosted at virginia.edu), historian Frederick Lewis Allen says (and the emphasis here is mine):

Things looked somewhat better on Friday and Saturday. Trading was still on an enormous scale, but prices for the most part held. At the very moment when the bankers' pool was cautiously disposing of as much as possible of the stock which it had accumulated on Thursday and was thus preparing for future emergencies, traders who had sold out higher up were coming back into the market again with new purchases, in the hope that the bottom had been reached. (Hadn't they often been told that "the time to buy is when things look blackest"?) The newspapers carried a very pretty series of reassuring statements from the occupants of the seats of the mighty; Herbert Hoover himself, in a White House statement, pointed out that "the fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis." But toward the close of Saturday's session prices began to slip again. And on Monday the rout was under way once more.

While my government is fearing the terrorists halfway around the world and their incindiary bombs, we citizens are being terrorized by the terrorists on Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

The new President, whoever he may be, might be spared the "new Hoover" moniker, because it's possible the whole thing will come crashing down before the election.

If it does you can probably count on an Obama landslide.

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Offtopic for this journal entry, but I want to thank you for the kind comments in the "Ralph" Journal. I'd have responded to all of them individually, but as my karma is merely "good" as opposed to the "excellent" karma at the sm62704, I can only post 25 comments in a 24 hour period, and I used most of those 25 responding to comments that responded to comments.

Again, thank you for your sympathies. News of Richard Wright's death was in today's Tribune as well; my sympathies go out to his friends and family. Pink Floyd has been one of my favorite bands for decades.