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the Crash of 1929
Oct. 20th, 2010 06:03 pm"The Crash of 1929" on American Experience's program page, where you can watch online
I saw this program on DVR last night (I have a slew of AE programs saved up I watch occasionally). It's short (~ an hour) and informative. I enjoyed it both for the interviews (some children or grandchildren of central figures, a few brokers from 1929 still living when they were filmed) and for the period film, both news/documentary and cinematic, that was used to illustrate the central role that the stock market had in terms of peoples' attitudes about wealth.
I thought they did a good job of describing the belief in "permanent prosperity" that attached to the boom of the post WWI American economy. They also showed how people were convinced that one could get something for nothing by playing the market while buying on margin (a behaviour not without its parallels in the recent crisis of "no credit/bad credit" home mortgages). As the late JK Galbraith puts it at one point in the program, the financial system is cyclical--you have crashes about every 20-25 years, the amount of time, he trenchantly observes, that it takes to grow a new population of suckers...
And they did well, I thought, discussing the roles that major actors in the market played in buildup of the bubble and in the crisis, and paralleling that story line with the effect on ordinary people, using Julius (Groucho) Marx as an example of the sort of small investor who got excited about stocks without really understanding anything about the market and lost everything he had by selling on margin.
I saw this program on DVR last night (I have a slew of AE programs saved up I watch occasionally). It's short (~ an hour) and informative. I enjoyed it both for the interviews (some children or grandchildren of central figures, a few brokers from 1929 still living when they were filmed) and for the period film, both news/documentary and cinematic, that was used to illustrate the central role that the stock market had in terms of peoples' attitudes about wealth.
I thought they did a good job of describing the belief in "permanent prosperity" that attached to the boom of the post WWI American economy. They also showed how people were convinced that one could get something for nothing by playing the market while buying on margin (a behaviour not without its parallels in the recent crisis of "no credit/bad credit" home mortgages). As the late JK Galbraith puts it at one point in the program, the financial system is cyclical--you have crashes about every 20-25 years, the amount of time, he trenchantly observes, that it takes to grow a new population of suckers...
And they did well, I thought, discussing the roles that major actors in the market played in buildup of the bubble and in the crisis, and paralleling that story line with the effect on ordinary people, using Julius (Groucho) Marx as an example of the sort of small investor who got excited about stocks without really understanding anything about the market and lost everything he had by selling on margin.
