William Rees-Mogg: This recession could easily tip into a depression
[William Rees-Mogg is a distinguished journalist. He was Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times before becoming Editor of The Times in 1967, a position he held until 1981.]
Today I am celebrating my 80th birthday, an age that seems less formidable when one has reached it than when one can see it only from afar.
I was born on July 14, 1928, about 15 months before the American boom of the 1920s came to its rather abrupt end. Like everyone else, I am naturally curious to see whether the global credit crunch is going to be a brief interruption in global prosperity, or the prelude to a longer and deeper depression.
I cannot claim to have clear memories of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, which occured when I was 1year old, or of Britain leaving the gold standard in 1931, when I was 3 years old.
I do however, remember newspaper articles about the later stages of the Depression. In the 1930s, my parents read The Times, the Financial Times and the Daily Mail.
I can remember the news stories of the Jarrow march of the unemployed. I also remember discussing with my mother a lead story which reported that farm workers' pay was to be raised 6d (2p) to what would now be £1.50 a week. The depression was a fact of existence in the North Somerset coalfield up to the outbreak of war in 1939.
Fortunately, there has only been one Great Depression in my lifetime, but there has also been a Great Inflation. In 2006 Pickering and Chatto, which I refounded in the 1980s, had the good timing to publish a three-volume History of Financial Disasters, under the general editorship of Mark Duckenfield.
His introduction to the 1929 crash on the New York Stock Exchange makes an important point: “Most of the stock market's loss in value took place in later years as the Depression deepened. Three years after its initial crash and shortly before the 1932 election, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen to 34, a loss of more than 90 per cent in less than three years. The Dow did not return to its 1929 peak of 381 until a quarter of a century later at the end of 1954.”
On that basis, stock markets would get back to their 2007 levels in 2032...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Today I am celebrating my 80th birthday, an age that seems less formidable when one has reached it than when one can see it only from afar.
I was born on July 14, 1928, about 15 months before the American boom of the 1920s came to its rather abrupt end. Like everyone else, I am naturally curious to see whether the global credit crunch is going to be a brief interruption in global prosperity, or the prelude to a longer and deeper depression.
I cannot claim to have clear memories of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, which occured when I was 1year old, or of Britain leaving the gold standard in 1931, when I was 3 years old.
I do however, remember newspaper articles about the later stages of the Depression. In the 1930s, my parents read The Times, the Financial Times and the Daily Mail.
I can remember the news stories of the Jarrow march of the unemployed. I also remember discussing with my mother a lead story which reported that farm workers' pay was to be raised 6d (2p) to what would now be £1.50 a week. The depression was a fact of existence in the North Somerset coalfield up to the outbreak of war in 1939.
Fortunately, there has only been one Great Depression in my lifetime, but there has also been a Great Inflation. In 2006 Pickering and Chatto, which I refounded in the 1980s, had the good timing to publish a three-volume History of Financial Disasters, under the general editorship of Mark Duckenfield.
His introduction to the 1929 crash on the New York Stock Exchange makes an important point: “Most of the stock market's loss in value took place in later years as the Depression deepened. Three years after its initial crash and shortly before the 1932 election, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen to 34, a loss of more than 90 per cent in less than three years. The Dow did not return to its 1929 peak of 381 until a quarter of a century later at the end of 1954.”
On that basis, stock markets would get back to their 2007 levels in 2032...