The Panic of 1825 by Brad DeLong This Week

The Panic of 1825 by Brad DeLong This Week

This Week Wednesday, April 15, 2009

The Panic of 1825

If you’re not satisfied with Paul Krugman or Nouriel Roubini as your guide to the current turmoil, you can always rely on E.M. Forster. It was Forster who grasped the essential drawback of the Internet long before anyone else, depicting, in his 1909 story "The Machine Stops" a world in which individuals communicate in isolation via machine. It turns out he’s pretty good on 21st-century financial crises, too, mostly because the underlying processes remain so similar to those of a financial crisis he studied. Only the scale has changed.

Forster’s great-aunt Marianne Thornton helped raise him after his father's death, leaving him 8,000 pounds upon her death, when Forster was 8. That legacy gave him the financial cushion to become a writer. So he wrote Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography 1797-1887, stringing her voluminous letters together with scene-setting prose. As it happens, the fortunes of the Thornton family turn on history’s first episode of successful central banking: the Bank of England's intervention in the 1825 financial crisis.

This is fascinating – read the entire piece here: The Panic of 1825 by Brad DeLong

20090415 The Panic of 1825 by Brad DeLong This Week

This Week Wednesday, April 15, 2009

http://www.theweek.com/article/index/95385/The_Panic_of_1825
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Kevin Dayhoff www.kevindayhoff.net http://kevindayhoff.blogspot.com/