Don Wildman

A stock crash that led to a banking crisis, right?

Right.

And it sounds like these are things that, of course, have happened before, as you mentioned.

I'm curious if we can get down to what really distinguished this from all those prior things and became, as you say, a perfect storm.

Was there a sense, I mean, today we talk about the consumer economy like it's, you know, the weather.

I mean, it's such an of course about how America works.

Was that not understood at that time and discussed the same way?

It was discussed a great deal.

Right.

There had also been factors in industrial America.

Unemployment was reaching a higher level and things like the coal mining industry, textiles, railroads, shipbuilding.

There was an overproduction of goods and underconsumption.

We also often hear these days about the wealth disparity in this country.

That was going on as well at the same time, a large wealth disparity.

60% of Americans at the time were just below the poverty line.

That really startled me, that figure.

But that contributed, of course, to the consumer problem, right?

Does it drive you crazy that the Depression is so often talked about in such generalities, when in fact what we're already getting into is how specific these factors were, and it just so happened that they collided all at the same time?

And what we're establishing is that there are all these different factors of sort of preconditions to this situation that when this crash happened, which was probably more popularly known about just because media was a bigger factor at that time than prior bank crises or other things that happened.

And it's just that ripple effect became a roar, right?