Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, the Events of 1929 and 2008

Professor Speers

English 309 8am

17 September 2013

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, The Events of 1929 and 2008

        "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” said the great philosopher George Santayana.  This quote could not ring more true when comparing the stock market crash of 1929 to the problems that caused the Great Recession of 2008.  Although most of us were not alive in 1929, does not mean we should not learn about the basic principles that caused the market crash of 1929.  If we would remember or learn from the past we might have been able to avoid the Great Recession of 2008.  Some of the problems like public not heeding to predictions, unethical business practices, and buying too much on credit can be linked to both the Crash of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008.

        In the years leading up to 1929, people thought that the good times were never going to end.  They believed life was going to be nothing but one big party, “blue skies”, and making easy money.  Very view people made the prediction that sometime it was all going to come crashing down and come to an end.  From the PBS movie, The Crash of 1929, Rodger Babson, an economist, predicted a terrible crash of the market was on the horizon.  Babson also said that the popular stock, RCA, must be inflated because it cannot be worth the price it was being bought and sold at.  The American people blew his warning off and some went as far as calling him unpatriotic for thinking and expressing his ideas like that.  Peter Schiff, much like Rodger Babson, made bold predictions about the market to fellow Americans.  Peter made his prediction in 2006 about the Great Recession of 2008.

In August 2006, Schiff, the self-confident president of the Connecticut-based brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, warned viewers on CNBC that the U.S. economy would be hampered by "too much consumption and borrowing and not enough production and savings."

Schiff new the market was not going in the right direction two years before the 2008 fall.  The common folk along with professional annalist on news channels were making fun of him; some called him a Communist.  As it turned out Peters predictions were correct.

        As stated in The Crash Of 1929, many of the big investors such as Charles Mitchell, JP Morgan, and others worked together in order to trick the public and make more money.  They would pool their money together to buy up one certain stock quickly.  To the public this stock would then appear to be like a growing and attractive investment option.  Mitchell, Morgan, and the others would then sell off the stock one the price got as high as they thought, essentially they inflated stocks.  Although this was legal it was still not ethical to do to the American public.  Unethical practices yet repeated in the years leading up to the Great Recession.  Lenders were lending too much money for homes then the debtor would be able to make payments on.  The American people were not protected or educated on the lending process and were ultimately hung with all of their debt.