September 1929 Mirrors September 2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Time to compare all of 1929 with this year's economic developments. A terrible similiarity, a perfect mirror, a path well-trod. The news of the Fed trying to save this mess via interest rate cuts irritates me because it ignores the lessons of history. And Bernanke was supposed to be a historian of the Great Crash? He as betrayed us. And even when he refuses to go along, the rulers run right over his toes and he doesn't scream and attack them with tasers. A total whimp.

From the NYT in February, 1929 as the first act of the Great Depression unfolded at this time:

The bottom dropped out of the stock market yesterday, and while there were fitful rallies during the day, stocks at the close were weak and unsettled, with declines of from fractions to more than 19 points through the entire list. Nothing was spared, the good going down with the rest.

Don't we all notice the strong similarties? The world markets had this sudden downwind in late February. Everyone tried to pin the tail of this donkey kong moment on various things but it was simply the opening act in the show called, 'The End of Speculative Bubbles.' Over and over, we see this in history. It is quite remarkable that our present bubble bash is following the 1929 script all the way down the line except for one element: Bernanke is giving away money and re-inflating the bubble. Is he seeking to have it pop in 2009? Just to make it perfectly match? God knows.

In general, when stocks go down, this reflects reality on Main Street. But when the government conspires with bankers to keep the stock market hot, we get a detatched situation and everything flies off the handle. In the present case, are people buying cars without sales? Last week, I saw a story claiming US automakers are no longer offering cut-throat deals on cars. This story caused stocks to rise that day. Like nervous nellies, they rush forwards on the smallest of 'good' news. But that same day, I got a letter from a local dealer who I bought from in the past:

Obviously, the news that sales were great and there was no need for discounting or tricks didn't reach my local dealers! I believe the news was fake. There is a lot of lying going on out there and one has to be very wary to take many stories at face value. The UAW is negotiating with these companies and I can see how they tried to use the news to bluff everyone. The UAW is being asked to eliminate not only some healthcare but pensions! Pensions are dying all over the place. We are supposed to save for our retirements and at the same time, we are supposed to go into debt, buying stuff. This is interesting since the media tells us over and over, the economy is all about consuming so we must consume. The media is filled with ads, begging us to consume. Yet we are supposed to save. And savings are dropping just as many organizations are dropping pensions. The future is dark, to put it mildly.

This is the NYT from April, 1929.

LOANS MUST BE CUT, SAYS RESERVE BOARD, OR IT WILL STEP IN; Warns if Speculation Situation Is Not Righted Voluntarily 'Other Methods' Will Result.

DEFENDS CREDIT POLICY Body Concerned Over Effect of High Money Rate on Foreign Nations and Our Business.

LOAN DROP DISAPPOINTING Members Expected Greater Decline Than $87,000,000 Reported-- Mellon Calls Action Unlikely. Disappointed on Loan Report. Accord on Curbing Speculation. Statement of Policy. Decline of Bank Loans to Brokers. Reducticn of Reserve Bank Credit. Reserve, Credit, Currency and Gold. Reversal of Gold Movements in 1927. Reserve Bank Credit and Money Rates. Recent Credit Policy.

CALL RATE SINKS TO 6%. Drop Laid to Small Demand for Funds and Confidence Mounts.

CHAMBER TO DISCUSS CREDIT. Business Men Plan Round Table Parley at Meeting in Capital.

April 5, 1929, Friday

WASHINGTON, April 4.--Defending its attitude on seeking to provide cheaper money for business and industry by checking the flow of funds to the stock exchanges to finance speculative activities in securities, the Federal Reserve Board in a statement today expressed the ...

Do these headlines look awfully familiar? They are six months before the stock market collapse, the most famous in history. Interest rates were up and the wails for cheap money below the rate of inflation were quite loud. But every time the Fed dropped rates, the wild speculations would surge forwards. The Fed realized at this point, they were dealing with an out of control bubble. Yet if they cut back, the system shuddered and nearly collapsed but the instant they let go even slightly, the bubble would blow up much bigger, rapidly.

All attempts at controlling the flow of new money so it wouldn't cause more wild speculation blew up. Every time the Fed tried to keep things on an even keel, the speculators working on the margin, using leverage would leap into the markets with both feet. There were various schemes for preventing this but they all failed because, I would suggest, the very same people putting forward ideas for curbing speculators were either speculating, themselves or were drinking buddies of speculators. So, to their amazement, everything they did in 1929 helped speculators and ths stock market shot ever higher.

One of the problems facing the people who have their hands on the actual steering wheel of our banking system is, their families, friends and drinking buddies at the club house all want things that are very, very bad for the economy. So they get serviced while the economy goes to hell in a handbasket. This is human nature. The scheme used in the last 70 years was to have an academic economist be in control of the Central Banking system but this is no good since they are selected by the same gang that wants the goodies so they listen to them and not look at raw data telling a different story.

And no one talks to farmers or the guys on the assembly lines. They are to eat dirt and fix everything by dying or at least, having very nasty lives. But alas, when this happens, everything fall apart since they are the fundamental basis of all economics. What a mess, no? Social Security was supposed to buffer us from all this but it has been decimated by the government which used the Social Security savings to run in the red. Every penny in taxes paid in the last 25 years to Social Security went into tax cuts for the rich. There is only a scrap of paper with huge numbers, half a trillion, in a safe. Bush actually looked at it and said, it was nothing but a piece of paper.

But all stocks and bonds are pieces of paper too! And this is lost sight of by the rich who wanted these tax cuts that will curb the ability of the working class to purchase much of anything for the next 50 years!

Here is a NYT headline from the Great Crash of 1929 itself::

The joys of begging, selling apples on street corners as the cold wind blows, losing one's home and finding no work, the pleasures of suicide: even as the post-WWI boom collapsed spectacularily, the NYT talked about 'simplicity'! And yes, the 'greed is good' meme was trotted out on cue but the crash wasn't about greed, it was about the Federal Reserve and money lending across the planet. All it took was on country opting out of the system, in this case, Germany struggling to pay the loans and then giving up, for the whole edifice to collapse. But the sermons about greed were nifty things and they will be trotted out for every collapse including this one.

Free money is always fun. And of course, money isn't made out of thin air except in desperation like we saw during August. A trillion dollars conjoured up in just two weeks...a huge amount of money on anyone's scales. But most of the time, it is created via debts. During the Roaring Twenties, Germany and England were both going bankrupt due to WWI. Germany tried to weasel out of debt by hyper-inflating the mark. Then they created the Renten Mark. These were shares in the rental of German assets which were no longer owned by Germans but by England, France and Belgium, for example. Since all owed the US, the United States was the 'landlord' of Germany. And when Germany was unable to 'pay the rent', the money machine broke down.

Since 'making money' is all about debts, this meant, from 1920 to 1929, Germany's payments to everyone was making 10X or much more, in new money. This huge wave of fresh money was based on the premise, Germany would keep paying interest. Which Germany could not do. So it all collapsed. When this happened, everything depending on future finances due to future German interest payments also vanished in a flash and since everything depended on Germany paying this, the cessation of the payments doomed the entire world banking system. It is very interesting to me that few people at that time, could see the mechanism that triggered that global meltdown.

The moral everyone was supposed to learn in 1929 was, overspending was bad. So everyone slammed their purses shut and the world's economy died. But did these savings from 1929 to 1933 work? Alas! Banks went bankrupt! Because of the cessation of sales, everyone was fired and people couldn't pay their debts so the banks fell, one by one! So savers lost everything unless they detatched themselves from the banking system entirely. So they parked money under matresses. All over the world. And governments discovered a novel way to get at this money: by declaring whole populations to be anathema, traitors, and then looting them, physically! The Jews in Germany were a primary example of this sort of looting expedition.

From Bloomberg:

Morgan Stanley, the world's second- biggest securities firm, reported quarterly earnings that fell short of analysts' estimates because of losses on loans for leveraged buyouts and a decline in fixed-income trading revenue.

Third-quarter profit from continuing operations dropped 7 percent to $1.47 billion, or $1.38 a share, from $1.59 billion, or $1.50, a year earlier, the New York-based firm said today in a statement. Earnings missed the $1.55-a-share average estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 17 analysts, the first time in at least six quarters that Morgan Stanley failed to surpass expectations.

No matter how Morgan and Stanley hash this mess, a -7% means destruction. If fake inflation is running at 2%, for example, this means M&S lost 9%. If real inflation is counted, it is around 12% loss. If we include the costs M&S (Hahaha, Masoco-Sadism time!) we see a real loss of nearly 15%. This is not pretty and the investors are leaving yet another sinking ship. No matter how cheap loans are, if the investments are in negative territory, the loans redouble and the nervous bankers or whoever is loaning the money means 'margin calls' with frantic demands of instant pay-ups.

Stocks went up today on the happy news that new loans will be cheaper but what new loans? As we see in the 1929 headlines over the course of a year, if loans don't appear, there is no money. And they don't appear for a variety of reasons the top one being, someone isn't paying their bankers off and therefore, the house of cards collapse if there are too many such people.

From Bloomberg:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke opposed a push to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy mortgages higher than $417,000, saying it may undermine efforts to strengthen regulation of the two largest U.S. mortgage finance companies.

A proposal in Congress to increase the limit ``would be ill- advised if it has the practical effect of reducing the incentives to achieve meaningful'' regulatory tightening over the companies, Bernanke said in a Sept. 17 letter to Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

He draws lines in the sand. Then the surges from this financial hurricane flows over the lines, erasing them. Bernanke will back up and draw new lines but this is futile. The propblem isn't the sub-$400,000 homes going belly up, it is all those $600,000+ houses in California, Florida, Virginia and New York that are the problem! A small apartment in Manhattan of less than 500 square feet goes for half a million, easy! Most of the housing there is above one million dollars! And California: last month, Countrywide had several hundred homes in repossession which were over $1 million! These are big bites.

From Bloomberg:

The Bush administration reversed policy, allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest sources of money for U.S. home loans, to expand their investments in an effort to make mortgages easier to get.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight will permit Washington-based Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to boost their loan portfolios by about 2 percent a year beyond a cap of about $1.5 trillion. Just two days ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke in a letter to Representative Barney Frank said easing restrictions on the companies could prove to be ``ill-advised.''

Note how this goes: Bernanke says, 'No', the government says, 'Shut the hell up,' and on it goes. Why have limits? The belief that limits are too limiting infects many people running systems. So they push to infinity. This is why we have crashes and bubbles. They can't help it. The systems set up to stop crashes depend on not allowing bubbles. Since they always allow bubbles, this means they will assist crashes and we see this in action here: even if one party tries to stop things, other people pushe them fowards to the inevitable bad end.

From Bloomberg:

U.S. home starts fell still more last month and consumer prices unexpectedly dropped, validating the Federal Reserve's interest-rate cut to head off a further slowdown in the economy.

The August housing figure points to a greater risk of recession from the downturn in residential real estate caused by increases in credit costs. As inflation recedes, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will have room for more rate reductions after the half- point move yesterday, economists said. The Fed cited the ``potential'' for broader damage to the economy in justifying the first cut since 2003.

Now, I saw Fed stories and news stories crowing that the economy in April and May were 'unexpectedly' good! Now they are cutting rates because August and September's news is bad? The want it both ways. When poofing up the markets, they pretend all is well. But they need cuts in the interest rates so they pretend it is bad. Blowing hot and cold, constantly. This is a characteristic of dying markets.

From the Japan Times:

The balance of financial assets held by households rose 2.9 percent from the previous year to hit a record high ¥1.56 quadrillion as of June 30, due partly to rises in stock prices, the Bank of Japan said Tuesday.

The BOJ's preliminary quarterly reports on flow of fund accounts showed household assets reached their highest level since the central bank began the survey in fiscal 1979.

Wow! What a HORRIBLE depression! A growing economy for 66 months! Growing FOREX reserves! Growing financial assets! Growing trade percentage! Everything, up and up and up! Such pain! Of course, this bounty is strictly for the Samurai class. The workers get not one rice grain of benefits.

More Japan Times:

Individual assets held in cash and deposits totaled ¥778.41 trillion, up 0.6 percent from a year earlier. That amount was the first year-on-year increase since the July-September quarter of 2004, on the back of rises in the money supply.

The ratio of cash and deposits to total household assets stood at 50.0, down 1.2 percentage points from a year earlier. The percentage of investment trusts expanded to a record-high 5.0 percent from 3.7 percent a year before, with the balance surging 39.2 percent on year.

Since the working class is being ravaged, the stats can look bad. This is deliberate. While the upper classes amass money and power, the lower classes lose money and power. And the political system doesn't allow much chance for the workers to have any say at all. After WWII, it was rigged this way. With US blessings and help.

From the NYT:

More broadly, while most people liked Mr. Abe and believed him to be smart, the Japanese news media often called him “Kuuki ga Yomenai” or, for short, “K. Y.” “Kuuki” means “air” and “yomenai” means “cannot read.” Not being able to read the air means that you don’t know that your guest wants another cup of tea or that you should be serving cold tea because it is a hot day. Reading the air is an essential trait for a Japanese politician.

This shortcoming put Mr. Abe at a severe disadvantage compared with his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi. Mr. Koizumi is famous not only for being the master of reading the air but also for his unmatched ability to ignore the advice of the political elite. I would call this the “sonnano kankeinei” style. The catchphrase of a popular Japanese comedian whose routine has spread widely on YouTube, sonnano kankeinei is a crude way of saying, “So what? I don’t care.” It would be an uncommon attitude for a politician even in America, and in Japan was simply unprecedented.

It was a tough act to follow, and Mr. Abe tried to read the air but ended up following too much advice and yielding to the various centers of power and special interests to which his Liberal Democratic Party has owed its 50-year near monopoly. The result, unsurprisingly, was wishy-washy, ineffective policy.

This very stupid article in the NYT irritates me. It pretends the crimes and messes of Koizumi happened suddenly under Abe. Koizumi and Abe are figureheads. The real powers in Japan haven't changed since, since, since...1865. This includes the Emperor and any wives unable to have many babies due to freaking out. Since when did Koizumi, the guy who started riots in China and South Korea when he worshipped Japanese war criminals, not serve the ruling powers? And Abe doesn't care who he insults or trods on, none of them cared.

The situation in China became very grave indeed and the LDP drones had to snarl and snap and pretend to apologize while doing this in the most insulting way possible but since the Chinese and Koreans are both also Asians, unlike the US, they figured this out instantly and retaliated, loudly, until the Japanese made semi-, sort of abject apologies but then the Japanese withdrew this when talking to each other and they forgot, there are ears in the walls so relations continue to flounder as the Japanese try to undo WWII. I have demanded the US be more vigorous in going after these guys excusing war crimes but then, we are run by war criminals. Hell.

The LDP has set up the FOREX superfund and the Fortress America scheme and this has been running for the last decade. The Fortress Japan business is very old. It sometimes is battered down but it springs back, ever stronger. This is why Japan is exporting cars here and we are not exporting cars to them.

From Bloomberg:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s Global Alpha hedge fund fell 2.8 percent in the first two weeks of September, adding to last month's record decline on losses from currency and stock trades.

The drop brought the fund's year-to-date decline to 34.9 percent, said two Goldman investors, who asked not to be identified because the returns aren't public. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index gained 0.8 percent in the month through Sept. 14. The fund lost 22.5 percent in August.

Global Alpha is ``actively working'' to make investment changes more quickly, limit borrowing and rank debt as a higher risk, according to a letter sent to clients yesterday by Mark Carhart and Raymond Iwanowski, the 41-year-old co-managers of the fund in New York. They said they expect ``fewer and smaller participants in the quant space,'' in which managers make investment decisions using complex computer models.

Arrrooo! Another hell hound rolls over and the legs go stiff as it dies! In this case, it is a hydra-headed hell hound. Time to visit yet another interesting site filled with glorious financial fun!

Here is their homepage:

Welcome to our site! PARADIGM Global Advisors, LLC is an SEC registered investment advisor and also is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ("CFTC") as a Commodity Pool Operator and Commodity Trading Advisor and is a member of the US National Futures Association.

As a highly regulated company, we are required to make you aware of certain disclosures before you gain access to our site. Therefore, please carefully review and consider the following information:

THE RISK OF LOSS IN TRADING FUTURES CONTRACTS AND OPTIONS THEREON AND INVESTING IN HEDGE FUNDS CAN BE SUBSTANTIAL. YOU SHOULD THEREFORE CAREFULLY CONSIDER WHETHER SUCH TRADING AND INVESTING IS SUITABLE FOR YOU IN LIGHT OF YOUR FINANCIAL CONDITION.

THE HIGH DEGREE OF LEVERAGE THAT IS OFTEN OBTAINABLE IN SUCH TRADING AND INVESTING CAN WORK AGAINST YOU AS WELL AS FOR YOU. THE USE OF LEVERAGE CAN LEAD TO LARGE LOSSES AS WELL AS GAINS. IN SOME CASES, ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS LIKE HEDGE FUNDS AND MANAGED FUTURES ACCOUNTS ARE SUBJECT TO SUBSTANTIAL CHARGES FOR MANAGEMENT AND ADVISORY FEES. IT MAY BE NECESSARY FOR THOSE ACCOUNTS THAT ARE SUBJECT TO THESE CHARGES TO MAKE SUBSTANTIAL TRADING PROFITS TO AVOID DEPLETION OR EXHAUSTION OF THEIR ASSETS. THIS BRIEF STATEMENT CANNOT DISCLOSE ALL OF THE RISKS AND OTHER

SIGNIFICANT ASPECTS OF TRADING AND INVESTING IN HEDGE FUNDS AND MANAGED FUTURES. THEREFORE, YOU SHOULD CAREFULLY CONSIDER ALL THE INFORMATION ON THIS SITE, INCLUDING THE FORM ADV II AND CONSULT WITH YOUR OWN COUNSEL AND FINANCIAL ADVISORS TO DETERMINE WHETHER SUCH TRADING IS APPROPRIATE FOR YOU IN LIGHT OF YOUR FINANCIAL CONDITION.

Their lawyers covered all bases. In big letters. Note the 'substantial fees' part: this is why hedge funds exist. To part fools from money. And the 'make substantial trading PROFITS to avoid depletion or exhaustion...' part. Hahaha. So, selling in a down market is profitable? I guess if it is someone else's money!

Here is a very old SEC warning about hedge funds...from 2002!

Hedging Your Bets:
A Heads Up on Hedge Funds and Funds of Hedge Funds

What are hedge funds?

Like mutual funds, hedge funds pool investors' money and invest those funds in financial instruments in an effort to make a positive return. Many hedge funds seek to profit in all kinds of markets by pursuing leveraging and other speculative investment practices that may increase the risk of investment loss.

Unlike mutual funds, however, hedge funds are not required to register with the SEC. Hedge funds typically issue securities in “private offerings” that are not registered with the SEC under the Securities Act of 1933. In addition, hedge funds are not required to make periodic reports under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. But hedge funds are subject to the same prohibitions against fraud as are other market participants, and their managers have the same fiduciary duties as other investment advisers.

What are "funds of hedge funds?"

A fund of hedge funds is an investment company that invests in hedge funds -- rather than investing in individual securities. Some funds of hedge funds register their securities with the SEC. These funds of hedge funds must provide investors with a prospectus and must file certain reports quarterly with the SEC.

Note: Not all funds of hedge funds register with the SEC.

So why wasn't this talked about by the media back then? Eh? Hello...the fund of funds is funny money supreme. Hell hounds buying up hell puppies by the ream. And now they are reaming out investors who joined these ventures. And note the SEC warning that these guys are basically pirates who run off shore businesses in pirate coves in the Caribbean. Also note the date above: 1933 Securities Act! The thingie Congress and Roosevelt put into law to prevent hedge funds and hell hounds from spawning and ravaging the banking and investment systems! Wow. And the prohibition against fraud: some were outright fraud. The others are more devious.

Like the story about Nick and Tom the other day: the whole story about how good debt is hinged on the concept that returns on investments with hedge funds of hedge funds would run about 8% a year. We see today, they can be -7%. This is never included in these stories begging people to go into debt. I wonder, hahaha, why.

The SEC again:

What protections do I have if I purchase a hedge fund?

Hedge fund investors do not receive all of the federal and state law protections that commonly apply to most registered investments. For example, you won't get the same level of disclosures from a hedge fund that you'll get from registered investments. Without the disclosures that the securities laws require for most registered investments, it can be quite difficult to verify representations you may receive from a hedge fund. You should also be aware that, while the SEC may conduct examinations of any hedge fund manager that is registered as an investment adviser under the Investment Advisers Act, the SEC and other securities regulators generally have limited ability to check routinely on hedge fund activities

Yup: investors beware. The SEC can't protect them from rabid dogs or pirates. By 2005, hedge funds and their cruel captain Hooks had weakened SEC laws to the point of nearly total uselessness. And then all hell broke loose. Many investors were assured, joining these pirates in the Caribbean would mean no taxes, not supervision and no controls. No one warned them about crocodiles and the fact that Captian Hook is prone to rape. And no one listened to Tinker Bell (me).

From a Sept. 2003 SEC report about hedge funds:

****************************************************************************************

This report is a complaint by the SEC about its inability to control the pirates and hell hounds. The result of this report was obvious: the SEC was cut back even further, continuously including up to this very summer when it was painfully obvious that this whole business was totally out of control, totally dangerous for the US and utterly unprincipled.

But the schemers making money off of all this are also our ruling elites who are, for the most part, traitors. They refuse to see what they are doing wrong and indeed, insist on doing wrong and will taser anyone daring to stop them from doing evil to our great nation. So here we are, watching the Federal Reserve destroy the remaining reserves, destory the dollar, destroy our nation, killing off savers while rewarding wild speculators on Wall Street... and the SEC tried their best to warn us about all this only the media ignored these reports, these press releases.

How sad this all is. The request for regulation! Right now, even as we fall apart, the guys messing with our heads are screaming that they can't make money if there are regulators! Their magic wands wilt! They need a dark cave to do magic! We have to trust them! Trust!

Right.

From Market Watch today:

Most hedge fund strategies lost money last month as the effect of the credit crisis swept through the $1.7 trillion industry, according to firms that track manager performance.

Funds run by firms including SAC Capital, Red Kite and Third Point were among those affected.
An index of hedge fund managers run by Credit Suisse (and Tremont Capital Management fell 1.53% in August, leaving it up 7.03% so far in 2007, the firms said on Monday.

All the different strategies tracked by Credit Suisse and Tremont lost money last month, including managers with a short bias, who mostly bet on declines in the price of securities, the firms noted.

"Subprime mortgage contagion led to a widespread sell-off that swept equities, commodities and low-grade credit markets," Oliver Schupp, president of the Credit Suisse Index Co., said in a statement.

The halls of history echo with the footsteps of skeletons stalking the living.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Comments

[David]

The release of Greenspan's book right before the rate cut has made for some interesting interviews. The 60 minutes interview got a lot of attention, but I like this one Jon Stewart did yesterday. Jon Stewart's simple, layman-style questions end up bringing up a few basic flaws in our economy I haven't ever seen Greenspan directly confronted with before. Although Greenspan comes up with passable politically correct answers I guess.

Link to 7 minute interview, split onto 2 lines to fit this column:

http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/videos
/most_recent/index.jhtml?playVideo=102970

[blues]

I have a neighbor who insanely launched into some kind of dead-of-night home construction at three in the morning. I was tempted to just call the cops, but they seldom do much, and when they do anything, it's so often worse than if they had not.

It's really interesting that our old 9/11 conspiracy buddy, Webster G. Tarpley, put out a stupendous article on the "great" depressions in a paper he released in 1996 (It won a "StudyWeb award"):

http://www.tarpley.net/29crash.htm

The verdict of history must be that the Federal Reserve has utterly failed to deliver on these promises. The most potent political argument against this arrangement is that it has been a resounding failure. Far from making financial crises impossible, the Fed has brought us one Great Depression, and it is about to bring us a super-depression, a worldwide disintegration.

I go along with Tarpley, sort of by default. When I was a small one, I had the honor to know a few of the survivors of the "1929" depression. They all said the same things: Never trust the hot-shots. And they all had lived in shantytowns ("Hoovervilles"). And they all "rode the rails." This riding of the rails was not a casual lifestyle! The most important thing was to always insert a "chock" in the sliding boxcar door; neglect this and you would probably die in some forgotten boxcar left for months on some forgotten side rail. I have a fine friend (Maure) who insists that any woman who did this would be raped immediately. But I know that many women did ride the rails.

The street savvy survivors were unanimous in claiming that the depression did not begin with some dramatic "curtain closing" in 1929, but was rather a very slow, grinding process. Essentially, the factories locked all the workers out, and it looked like an employer's "strike" to the hobos. We still have some factories. I even went to pick up some stuff at our "lower middle class" factory village called "Bay State" today. It was noon, and a hundred cars of all description were parked with doors open, and factory workers munching their sandwiches.

Honestly, I think the thing that scares me the most is that we no longer have any railroads to speak of. Maybe the internets will be the next great steel road. With brutal "internet bulls" guarding everything, and beating the hell out of any caught unawares!

[DeVaul]

My grandfather was one of these so-called "brutal internet bullies" back during the depression. Actually, his job was to crawl up into grain cars and check for fires caused by spontaneous combustion - a very dangerous job. He carried a crowbar with him to deal with hobos and others who he found on the trains he inspected.

He was a golf pro when he lost his job at the local country club after the crash. He was lucky to find a job with the railway. He earned 10 cents an hour for ten hours a day for six days a week. Six dollars a week.

That was much better than being homeless, even if it was slave wages. He had a wife and daughter. Half his pay went to pay the loan on his T-model Ford and the other half (three dollars) went to pay for food and rent. There were no new clothes.

When he told me this, I was amazed that he was paying 12 dollars a month on a car and that it was half his salary. I suspect he needed the car or could not sell it or something. He did not like to waste money.

I wish I had asked him but I was only 12 and I had used up all my questions for that day. He put a limit on how many questions I could ask him each day. Fortunately, if I went over the limit, I was not tasered. I just had to pick up gumballs out in his yard and bag them.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I love your story, DeVaul. My grandpa didn't like too many questions. He gave me books, lots of books. 'Look it up yourself, you lazy child,' this old Victorian born right after the Civil War would tell me.

[D. F. Facti]

"I haven't ever seen Greenspan directly confronted with before."

I did. Once. It was in front of a combined House/Senate panel convened and chaired, I do believe, by Sen. Grassley of Iowa.

The topic? Long-term Capital Management of Greenwich, CT, founded by Noble laureate Myron Scholes, as in Black-Scholes Options Model, and John Meriwether, formerly of Salomon Brothers, forced to resign therefrom because his firm had attempted to corner the market in Treasury bonds.

A corn pone Congressman from Alabama or Mississippi and even Grassley gave Greenspan and NY Fed Chairman Wm McDonough hell.

As to the Great Depression not just owing its origins to 1929 - from what I heard - all too true.

My father worked for $1.00 a day plus room and board, so he was one of the lucky ones. My great grandfather lost everything when the bank failed.

He and all the otheres who lived through it NEVER trusted the fast talkers, and had damned little regard for most of the bankers. They were DEATH on debt. Paid cash for everything whever they could - or they did without.

My generation? A sorry sight. Fortunately, I have very little to zero debt. And I DO blame Greenspan and his ilk.

Hang 'em high. TRAITORS to our country and to most of the world.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Thanks for the memories, Facti.