Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is an oral history of the Great Depression, including people from all walks of life describing what they did, from the demonstrations and riots of the out-of-work to Goldman Sachs executives talking about what’s going on. Studs Terkel was a Chicago radio host and he recorded all these interviews long after the Depression and played them on the radio in the 1970s.
Sprague, the author of the History of Crises, was the first chaired Professor at Harvard Business School and his book is a classic narrative of the national banking era. So, during the Civil War the government passes an act which charters national banks: 1865-1914 is the national banking era. All the panics in this era are to do with checking accounts. Then, in 1914, the Fed comes into existence and the next panic, of course, is the Great Depression.
So, we have made some progress. The current crisis isn’t as bad as the Great Depression. The Studs Terkel book, Hard Times, is an oral history of the Great Depression, including people from all walks of life describing what they did, from the demonstrations and riots of the out-of-work to Goldman Sachs executives talking about what’s going on. Studs Terkel was a Chicago radio host and he recorded all these interviews long after the Depression and played them on the radio in the 1970s. There are interviews with people who spent the time as hobos, people from the Works Progress Administration. There was 25 per cent unemployment in the Great Depression, whereas now it’s ten per cent. So, there is a group of people, like you and me, who are doing fine and then a large group of invisible people who aren’t doing fine.
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Gary B Gorton is an American economist and Professor of Management and Finance at Yale University. He is a former member of the Moody’s Investors Services Academic Advisory Panel and former director of the research programme on banks and the economy for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He has taught at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and previously worked as an economist and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. During 1994 he was the Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England. He has been a member of the New York Federal Reserve Bank Financial Advisory Roundtable since January 2009. He is an expert in stock and futures markets, banking and asset pricing. He has been an editor of The Review of Economic Studies.
