The
political class provided the professionals with the tools they
needed to do the job. This mode of collaboration may well be the
most important lesson of this crisis.
III. Case Study - Wall Street, October 1929
Also published by United Press International (UPI)
Claud Cockburn, writing for the "Times of London" from New-York,
described the irrational exuberance that gripped the nation just
prior to the Great Depression.
As Europe wallowed in post-war malaise, America seemed to have
discovered a new economy, the secret of uninterrupted growth and
prosperity, the fount of transforming technology:
"The atmosphere of the great boom was savagely exciting, but there
were times when a person with my European background felt alarmingly
lonely. He would have liked to believe, as these people believed, in
the eternal upswing of the big bull market or else to meet just one
person with whom he might discuss some general doubts without being
regarded as an imbecile or a person of deliberately evil intent—some
kind of anarchist, perhaps."
The greatest analysts with the most impeccable credentials and track
records failed to predict the forthcoming crash and the
unprecedented economic depression that followed it. Irving Fisher, a
preeminent economist, who, according to his biographer-son, Irving
Norton Fisher, lost the equivalent of $140 million in today's money
in the crash, made a series of soothing predictions.
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