Echoes >> Economic history with Stephen Mihm
This Week in the Great Depression: Echoes
Welcome to "This Week in the Great Depression." It's the fall of 1931, and Britain just weeks ago abandoned the gold standard. Nervous dollar holders have made a raid on U.S. bullion, with almost $450 million earmarked for shipment in less than a month.
Rumors from Berlin suggest that the Soviet Union is about to default on many millions in deutsch mark debt for equipment and materiel shipped east in the 1920s. Worse, Germany's guarantees against nonpayment are worthless, as its coffers are nearly empty. Apparently, the USSR won't transfer any funds that are due to the U.K., France and the U.S. either. Britain's Malayalam Plantations recently announced they had begun closing all their rubber estates in South India due to low prices, keeping their "valuable European staff" while dismissing local workers who had tended their 19,000-acre sites.
A Trading Technology that Transformed Wall Street: Echoes
On Nov. 15, 1867, Wall Street experienced an important -- arguably its most important -- technological breakthrough, as the first stock ticker went “online.”
Stock symbols, volume and price were typed into a machine and then relayed over telegraph wires to tickers, which printed the information onto thin strips of paper, called ticker tape.
The Greatest Economic Innovator You've Never Heard Of: Echoes
It's difficult in today's world to turn the volume any higher on the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation. Virtually every organization -- from Alcoa to Al Qaeda, from Zipcar to Zenith Bank -- has made those attributes part of its strategy. Vision statements from businesses, churches, schools and NGOs often sound as though their authors were channeling Joseph Schumpeter.
Amid the paeans to Steve Jobs after his death -- the special issues of magazines, TV tributes, superficial comparisons to Edison and so on -- I'd like to call attention to another American original, now almost forgotten, who would be celebrating his 98th birthday this week: Malcolm Purcell McLean.
The Jobs and Wozniak of Georgian England: Echoes
With the death of Steve Jobs, and the publication of Walter Isaacson's much-hyped biography of him, everyone is talking about entrepreneurship and design.
The media describe Jobs as an innovative visionary, whose love of the clean-cut Modern look of the German Bauhaus inspired him to remake the geeky beige desktop computer into a user-friendly object of desire. Isaacson argues that by extending that design philosophy to all of Apple's products -- from the iMac to the iPod, the iPhone to the iPad -- Jobs became the most important entrepreneur in the most important industry of the early 21st century.
Remember the CWA, A Government Jobs Program That Worked: Echoes
What do you do when you've lost your job and winter is coming? That's the dilemma now facing more than 13 million Americans who are out of work. It's also the dilemma that faced more than 10 million Americans in November 1933.
By then, the Great Depression was four years old, the nation's new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been in office for seven months, and the U.S. was about to enter one of the worst winters in its history.
How Populist Outrage Gave Birth to the Federal Reserve: Echoes
This week marked the 104th anniversary of the night that ultimately gave birth to the Federal Reserve.
On Nov. 2, 1907, John Pierpont Morgan assembled the presidents of several prominent trust companies in the library of his Fifth Avenue mansion. The illiquidity of their firms had caused what is known today as the Panic of 1907. Morgan forced those rich and powerful men to wait and worry, and by the next morning he had strong-armed them into an agreement that ended the crisis.
Welcome to the New Echoes Blog: Stephen Mihm
History doesn’t repeat itself. Sometimes, though, it rhymes.
That idea animates our revamped "Echoes" blog, dedicated to the history of economics, business, finance and, above all, capitalism. Our contributors will aim to unearth parallels between past and present, highlighting how the economic crises of our own era are perhaps not as unique as we think.
A Note to Echoes Readers
Thanks for visiting Echoes, Bloomberg View's economic history blog. We'll be on a brief break, then starting up again in early November. Please check back then.
A Trade-In for the Corporate-Income Tax: Echoes
Taxes wear out. Like a new car, they start out fresh and shiny (if lacking that new-car smell). After a few years, things start to go wrong. Eventually, as failures become more frequent and repairs less durable, the time arrives for a trade-in.
We have reached that point with the corporate-income tax. With more than 100 years under its belt, it had a pretty good run. Over the years, it raised a lot of money, regulated some unsavory business practices and helped make the tax system more progressive.
Is Warren Buffett the New Andrew Mellon? Not Quite: Amity Shlaes
Andrew Mellon would back it. That's the recent analysis of the "Buffett Rule," a plan to reform the tax law that would require top earners, including those who make much of their money from investments, to pay the same percentage of their earnings as those in the middle class do.
The rule was suggested by Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., this summer in an op-ed in the New York Times. "My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress," the so-called Oracle of Omaha wrote. "It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice." President Barack Obama has since endorsed the idea.