Recession and depression
Depressions become a political event. There are those who do well in such times and want to preserve the depression. There are others too rich or poor to know that there is a depression underway. And there are those politicians who either invoke ancient ideology irrelevant to the moment, pretending to know what to do and figuring that no one will notice that they don’t, and a few who know that in a crisis the people will rally to those who actually care and plan.
One of these latter politicians was Lenin. Russia was utterly shattered. The leaders didn’t care. Lenin did and knew what to do. He famously said that you can’t make a pie without breaking the crust. To speed things up, he ordered bakeries to bake only crusts for breaking, forgetting the pie. But there was little to be done with Russia.
In Germany, a leader emerged who recognized that unemployment was the heart of the problem and presented fascism as the solution, along with something vital: someone to blame. He nationalized the economy while leaving business in place, and nominated the Jews as the villains, to wild applause.
These are the people who come out of depressions. The successful are monsters; the decent can’t control the forces that depressions unleash. Roosevelt’s New Deal helped some but didn’t change the reality. World War II offered the greatest stimulus package of all time. Depressions create desperate people hungry for everything — above all, some hope for a future. Hitler and Lenin were one kind of leader; Roosevelt and the other European leaders were another kind. In the end, the solution was not found by the Federal Reserve but the military.
World War II did not end the depression, save for in the United States. Europe was once again in depression. China and Japan were ruined. When I was a child, the words “Made in Japan” brought laughter and the expectation of cheap and trashy goods. The solution came because the Americans feared the Soviets and created aid packages for allies and the right to sell cheap goods to the U.S. The skilled workers of Eurasia were either led into a generational depression by the Soviets or into recovery by the Americans. Again, depressions and the possibility of war went hand in hand.
