Historian sees complex debt schemes key in many US downturns

[salvorhardin]

Since the financial market collapse of 2008, hardly a news cycle has churned without reference to the Great Recession being the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

For some, those two bad-debt calamities loom as the dark anomalies in the brighter story of America's long ascent to economic superpower.

Not so, says Scott Reynolds Nelson, a history professor at the College of William and Mary.

The 2008 meltdown was just the latest in a long line of financial crashes caused by Americans' knack for embracing complex credit schemes to meet a ravenous hunger for capital, Nelson writes in his new book, "A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters."

...

"The bank was saved and the people were ruined," Nelson quotes political economist William Gouge as saying in an 1833 work, "The Curse of Paper-Money and Banking," of actions taken by the Second Bank of the United States amid the Panic of 1819.

Full story: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-rt-books-deadbeats-review-correctedl2e8k5e4y-20120905,0,5509580,full.story

[orpupilofnature57]

1. Narcissistic Fibrosis.

[salvorhardin]

3. Can I interest you in some real estate in Florida?

[orpupilofnature57]

6. No, but where's the Alan Greenspans in your

Guru's chronological journey through American history ? " I THOUGHT THEY WOULD POLICE THEMSELVES " thats the mantra through history thats let charlatans use the public to play " Winner take all " Enablers and opportunists put us where we are .not credit schemes.I've never been to florida, and as time goes on I want to visit it and them less.

[nebenaube]

2. I must be dense...

I didn't get a thing of use from that article.

[socialist_n_TN]

4. It's pretty simple really........

if you're a Marxist. The rate of profit falls because of modernized production techniques. Capital flows where it can make the most profit and that turns out to NOT be investment in more production, but in fancy, legal or semi-legal gambling, i.e., the stock market or some equivalent. Eventually the bets are lost and the fictitious capital (debt) gets eaten up in the bust and the working class gets screwed by the crash.

[orpupilofnature57]

5. It's like a virus

[HiPointDem]

7. slight correction. the field with the most profit in a downturn is crime, and that's exactly

what they 'invest' in, criminal frauds they dream up to steal money from the peons.

[xchrom]

8. Well said. Nt