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Friday, December 16, 2011

1930s Déjà Vu


Image Source: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images via Guardian.

IMF Chief Christine Lagarde yesterday in Washington raised the spectre of a return of Great Depression conditions in all countries if the world does not help Europe resolve its financial crisis. (Reports: here, here, and here.) One site, looking back on the 1930s, quotes William Shakespeare: "What's past is prologue." Below, a video counting down the world's ten richest countries, based on 2011 IMF data; the non-European entries in that list are presumably Lagarde's top choices to help a beleaguered Europe. Also below, a refresher on just what Lagarde is promising as the alternative.

Image sources below, where not indicated, are from: Millionaire Acts; factoidz; Survival Spot; Everyday Life During the Great Depression; BBC; and Market Nightshift.


Video Source: Youtube.

Stock Market crash, 28 October 1929, 'Black Monday.'

Image Source: FLICKR/ETHAN STOCK via Scientific American.

New York, the American Union Bank went under in 1931.





Chicago.

Toronto, winter in the Great Depression on Yonge Street. Image Source: BlogTO.

Unemployed men march to Bathurst Street Church, Toronto (1930).

Soup kitchen, Canada.

Strikers from unemployment relief camps en route to Eastern Canada (1935?).

Crime rose astronomically during the Depression. Chief of Police, Seattle (1931).

Caption for the above photograph: Police Chief George Kimball of the Seattle Police Department, in 1931. Gambling, murders, and suicides were all part of the ways some Seattleites dealt with the Great Depression. For some, illegal activity proved a profitable way to survive during the crisis, while others found the crisis overwhelming. Click image to enlarge. (Photo courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry)

Family, Alabama (1935).


California (1936).

Migrant workers, Southern California (1937).

Detroit.

Suburbs behind walls. Atlanta (1936).

Britain. Image Source: Guardian via Corbis/Hulton Deutsch Archive.

City-dwellers began growing their own food. Glasgow.

Paris riots (6 February 1934). Image Source: La France dans l'entre deux-guerres.

A run on a bank in Berlin.

Berlin, May Day, support for Communism (1930).

Hitler addresses a rally of German nationalist workers in Frankfurt (1933).

Bank crisis, Vienna (1931).

Collapse of the Kreditanstalt Bank, Vienna (1931).

Chile.

Ukraine.


Unemployed men march from the Esplanade to the Treasury Buildings. Perth, Australia (1931).

Protest on steps of Parliament. Wellington, New Zealand (1932) © Alexander Turnbull Library.

2 comments:

  1. People experienced absolute misery, at the hardship and lost of personal wealth during the great depression, and to point squarely at what happened, imagine the rumors of a depress economy. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? you would try to preserve your wealth that’s what most people would do. Now in this theory you need to know what people used as money. They used Federal Reserve Notes that read. "PAY BEARER ON DEMAND" and "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private, and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury, or at any Federal Reserve Bank". Lawful money meant gold coins. So if you wanted to preserve your wealth you will want to redeem those pieces of paper and get your gold. But the Banks have been COUNTERFEITING LOANS using a scheme called FRACTIONAL RESERVE LENDING. So what does this mean? It means that there were 71.9 billion of those piece of paper "federal reserve notes" that were suppose to be redeemable at any Federal reserve bank for actual gold coins, BUT THERE WERE ONLY 3 BILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF GOLD IN RESERVE. Banks could not counter the amount of notes in circulation because they had been counterfeiting the Notes. There should only have been 3 billions dollars worth of Paper federal reserve notes. But the banks are the government and the government are the banks. We call the JFK assassination a Coup d'etat but the real Coup d'etat began with Woodrow Wilson.

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