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- ISBN13: 9781586487997
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brаחԁ Nеw frοm Publisher. Nο Remainder Mаrk.
Product Description
Tһіѕ title offers a first-person diary tab οf living owing tο tһе Fаחtаѕtіс Depression, wіtһ haunting parallels tο ουr οwח time. Benjamin Roth wаѕ born іח Nеw York City іח 1894. Wһеח tһе stock market crashed іח 1929, һе һаԁ bееח practicing law fοr approximately ten years, largely representing local businesses. Aftеr nearly two years, һе ѕtаrtеԁ tο grasp tһе magnitude οf wһаt һаԁ happened tο American fiscal life, аחԁ һе ѕtаrtеԁ writing down һіѕ impressions іח a diary th… More >>
Tһе Fаחtаѕtіс Depression: A Diary
May 5, 2010 at 9:20 am
Benjamin Roth was nervous to learn the lessons of the Fantastic Depression. He obviously learned them and passed them along to his son, Dan Roth. I am hopeful that my children have learned the lessons from this recent and even continuing nearly depression, and will pass them along to their children. Benjamin Roth wrote on 2/12/1936 “To seek a high or unusual return means greater risk and speculation.” Throughout the book, Roth writes about bank’s fault, nearly on a daily footing; families watching their fortunes disappear, again nearly on a daily footing; and people losing their homes, on a daily footing. SOUND FAMILIAR!!The real inquiry is why. Roth writes his own reasons why, and for the most part, they can be correlated to now, why. This book should be a “must read”.
Rating: 5 / 5
May 5, 2010 at 11:20 am
I’ve always wondered why people who emerged from the Fantastic Depression are so different than my generation (boomer). They are more nervous, cautious, a bit worried, but way more sensible than the carefree, debt-ridden generations that were born after the depression finished. When someone says, “my folks lived owing to the depression” you know what they’re like. Forever changed, savers, and never crazy with investments.
So the chance to read a nunc-pro-tunc tab of what daily life was like to a person living in the Fantastic Depression, it’s a fantastic historical opportunity to enter a time capsule with such granularity and texture that you feel like you are there.
But what’s haunting is the similarities of life then to life today. Phantom ups and downs so the unaware public is being convinced that the worst is over, when in fact, history showed that it was only going to get worse. The government bailouts, and the dread of inflation. In many ways reading this book is like reading today’s papers.
Scary and enlightening – it’s a fantastic piece of american history.
Rating: 5 / 5
May 5, 2010 at 12:34 pm
My favorite book is still David M Kennedy’s Freedom From Dread. I have a fantastic interest in the subject and have read much on the Fantastic Depression. The view from this young, then older, lawyer in a once thriving, then despondent city, is incredible. I question my older relatives about this era and I get nothing of the flavor of Mr. Roth. I loved it highly.
Rating: 5 / 5
May 5, 2010 at 1:32 pm
The stock market sinks to all time levels. Banks, after years of complimentary questionable loans, collapse under the burden of too many defaulted mortgages. The nation is in foreclosure and eventually the banks commence to close. Unemployment rises at alarming rates. Entire industries fall into receivership and the dollar is devalued. The economies of the other nations in the world market commence to mirror the United States. The voters respond by voting a very unpopular Republican out of office and vote in a Democrat who promises exchange.
The year is not 2008. It’s the 1930s and Benjamin Roth, a young conservative attorney in Youngstown, Ohio, starts to keep a diary chronicling the Fantastic Depression. Owing to Roth’s eyes the reader gets a bird’s eye view of the Depression unfolding and the consequences on the national and local levels. Each access is an education. Roth spends the rest of his life reading about economics and evaluating the events of the 1930s with the goal to establish what caused this hurt and how to prevent it from ever happening again.
The Fantastic Depression, A Diary is an education in global economics and fiscal responsibility. Owing to this book, readers gain insight into what happened 90 years ago and what is happening in our people today. Benjamin Roth proves what each high school history teacher has been saying for years, “Those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it.”
Rating: 4 / 5
May 5, 2010 at 2:01 pm
. . .in the end it doesn’t deliver.
I was excited about this book as it a new primary source about a pivotal period in economics that remains controversial. While we have many financial statement of the Depression, they were on paper after the events they describe and generally with strong points of view. This is a diary on paper contemporaneously by a man who didn’t know how things would turn out, and wrote to help himself make sense of events rather than to convince others of a preconceived opinions.
The first disappointment is the book contains virtually nothing about life. Only a few period details slip in; learning about the major local banks closing owing to newsboys shouting “Extra” at four o’clock in the daylight; movie theaters cutting costs by eliminating vaudeville acts between features. There is nothing personal, not even personal economics: did he have financial statement frozen at banks, did he hoard cash, what cutbacks did he make when times got terrible, did he use script or trade when banks were clogged? As a result, non-financial history buffs will find nothing of interest, and the book is very dull.
I reflect this led the published reviewers and also M. Stewart to exaggerate the similarities with today’s events. The author records only a few bits of fiscal data: downtown real estate vacancies, prices of half a dozen stocks and capacity utilization at local steel mills. At that superficial level, all business cycles seem the same. Once again, there are a few fascinating bits. The double liability of bank shareholders seemed to be a major impediment to equilibrium and local property taxes based on pre-Depression appraisals forced the flattening of useful buildings. Depending on your politics, you can read this as evidence that government fiscal interference exacerbated the Depression, or that the government should bail bankers out and accept deficits as the price of restoring fiscal health. Another difference that gets noted in passing is holdover personal debts from the 1920s and early 30s meant many of the middle class people the author describes had unenthusiastic net worth as late as the end of the decade, something today they would either discharge owing to personal bankruptcy or settle earlier in one way or another.
The book provides a test of Nassim Taleb’s narrative fallacy. He argues that people define eras after-the-fact, then write histories which ignore everything unrelated to that definition as irrelevant, and thereby present clean produce-and-effect tales of reality that is far more chaotic. This diary has to be considered contrary evidence. The author knows from the beginning that he’s living owing to the Depression, and records the same type of fiscal information and events that figure in the histories. “The depression” is all he ever calls it, although it had many different contemporary designations, and he always dates it from the 1929 stock market crash. He mentions the major national and world events remembered today, and no others. When Germany invades Poland in September 1939 he calls it the “second world war,” an inaccurate description at that date and a term that had not previously been recorded before 1942. In August 1940 he refers to Germany’s “blitzkrieg” against England, although what was later named the “London Blitz” did not commence until the next month. Taleb might argue that is why this diary was published and millions of others ignored, or perhaps that the coherence was introduced in the editing process. But taken at face value, this book says the Depression was a lot like what history books describe.
But, small of the book is concerned with large events. The constants are complaints about how small money he was making practicing law, calculations of how rich you could get if you bought at low prices and sold at high ones, and tales of people who went broke export at high prices and selling at low ones. The reasoning is dreadfully superficial for an intelligent man who spent a decade thinking about things, he drifts from one pompous non-actionable scheme to another, without acknowledging the shifts.
He relies on undefined proper terms, you are held to make “prudent” investments in “first class” securities selling below “intrinsic value” and sell when speculative fever heats up. Of course, if you lose money you bought imprudent second-class securities above intrinsic value all owing to rampant speculation. There is no concept of statistical risk, no scheme of value or equilibrium, no fiscal reasoning; just childish regret that it is impossible to transact at historical prices. Of course, he is not the first person to be tantalized by stock prices going up and down, and how simple it seems to be to make or lose money, but he may be the smartest person to spend ten years thinking and writing about it without digging deeper. He is a perfect illustration for the definition of the stock market addict William Worthington Fowler penned sixty years earlier: “‘If’ and ‘but’ are the most frequent conjunctions in his vocabulary. His whole life is a series of regrets, and weird to say, these regrets are more often for what he might have made, but did not, than for what he has really lost.”
Rating: 2 / 5