How to steer clear of Ponzi schemes (American Public Media: Marketplace)
With so many smart people duped by a seemingly sound investment operation, how can we detect a Ponzi scheme in the future? Marketplace’s Mitchell Hartman talks to Tess Vigeland about how to identify a sketchy deal.
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Aim for Answers
The Depression Is Going to Be Awesome from GOOD Magazine.
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“Aim for Answers”
From The Big Money: Benjamin Roth’s chilling chronicle of hard times. Roth was a lawyer living and working in Youngstown, Ohio during the depression and he kept a journal during that time. This is the first installment from the summer of 1931.
June 5, 1931. Immediately after the 1929 crash the speculators rushed in to buy “bargains” but were badly mistaken because the market kept going down and down even tho’ industrial leaders kept on assuring the people that everything was fine and the worst was over. At the present time the newspapers are urging people to buy these “bargains” but opinion is much divided as to whether or not the bottom has been reached. Read more
The second installment of Roth’s Diary.
Life During the Great Depression, based on an interview of Jay Spencer
Federal Writers’ Project: Interview Excerpts: Excerpts from interviews with about a dozen men and women who weathered the Great Depression and the difficult years of the 1930s.
Studs Terkel : Conversations with America: Terkel interviewed hundreds of people across the United States for his book on the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1973, he selected several interviews …
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JOB DESPERATION IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Les Loken talks about his desperation to earn a living after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. This is an older version (2003) of the video posted already about the Depression. This one has more details, because his memory was better then.
Video Details:
These two video clips represent early New Deal policy. The first is a radio address delivered some time after the collapse of the London Gold Conference of 1933. The conference had been set up under the outgoing Hoover administration. A leaked communication from President Roosevelt ended the conference. In it, Roosevelt indicated he did not support a quick return to the traditional gold standard and that domestic considerations outweighed international.
New Deal policy favored “reflation,” essentially raising prices and wages back to the pre-Depression level. This was to be done by various mechanisms including raising the price of gold and the cartel-like codes of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Part of the idea was to relieve the burden of debtors (hence, references in the first clip to assistance to those whose mortgages were in default). Gold policy was based on theories that people really thought in gold terms (money was seen as just a representation of gold) and therefore raising the price of gold would lift all prices proportionally.
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In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?
Should we close the hole? I believe in personal money holes.
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Paul Krugman makes some really strong arguments concerning government spending in times of economic crisis. He compares the crisis now with that of two other episodes in history: Roosevelt’s reductions in 1937 and Japan’s fiscal decisions in 1996-97.
What made fiscal austerity such a bad idea both in Roosevelt’s America and in 1990s Japan were special circumstances: in both cases the government pulled back in the face of a liquidity trap, a situation in which the monetary authority had cut interest rates as far as it could, yet the economy was still operating far below capacity.
The bottom line, then, is that people who think that fiscal expansion today is bad for future generations have got it exactly wrong. The best course of action, both for today’s workers and for their children, is to do whatever it takes to get this economy on the road to recovery.
["Deficits and the Future" Paul Krugman, THE NEW YORK TIMES]
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