Hoarding Cash After the Crash: Echoes

For President Herbert Hoover, the election year of 1932 would be a rough one. It opened with weak equities markets, declining commodities prices and intensifying anxiety about both economics and politics.

Benjamin Roth, a lawyer from Youngstown, Ohio, noted in his diary: "Even those who invested after 1930 -- after the crash -- at what they considered bargain prices, now find their 'bargains' selling at half price or lower." He added: "Business shows no sign of pick-up. People are already looking toward the next presidential election when a Democrat will probably replace Hoover. In the meanwhile, Hoover adds to his long list of artificial stimulants."

NPR's Monkey See on the hype about Charles Dickens's 200th birthday
Wonkblog on Guinness's contribution to economic research
Free Exchange on the disconnect between modern workers and outdated labor benefits
Megan McArdle on whether inequality will get worse
Matthew Yglesias on the decline of publishing jobs

More than a year and a half after the Dodd-Frank financial reform was enacted into law, many of its provisions are under attack.

Banks have fiercely opposed everything from its proposed limits on proprietary trading to its new rules on derivatives to its regulation of the muni-bond market. Republicans in Congress have opposed much of what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was established to do. Republican presidential candidates have called for the act's repeal. And regulators have missed three-fourths of the law's rulemaking deadlines.

Cable television has lately been bringing the art and science of owning a pawnshop to life -- even for those fortunate enough to experience it only vicariously. But pawning has been integral to Americans' financial lives for centuries.

History Channel's "Pawn Stars" features the oversized Harrison family and their Las Vegas pawnshop, Gold & Silver. Old paper currency, antique pistols, classic guitars and works of art are typical of the items offered up for appraisal there, making the series seem like a less genteel version of "Antiques Roadshow."

American firms have been on the move of late -- and not just to Mexico or China. Most major job relocations are from one U.S. state to another, according to the Department of Labor. And with unemployment remaining stubbornly high, and companies sitting on a lot of cash, states have been competing ever more fiercely to attract new businesses.

Ohio reportedly has offered incentives worth $400 million to Sears to entice the company and its 6,000 employees to move from Illinois. Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia are vying intensely to be the home of a new "ethane cracker" Shell plans to build. The governors of Kansas and Missouri have intervened, personally, in a battle to host the headquarters of AMC Entertainment.

Americans struggling through the Great Depression didn’t have Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to provide a nightly lampooning of the rich, powerful and foolish, but they did have Will Rogers. “I am not a member of any organized political party," he famously observed, "I am a Democrat.”

Born in the Territory of Oklahoma in 1879, Rogers became a working cowboy. In about 1900, he assembled a circus act that performed roping tricks, and took it to New York City theaters, where he headlined in vaudeville for a decade. He started touring nationally, offering witty commentaries on the news, and he began a syndicated "Daily Telegram" which soon ran in 500 newspapers. (His columns are collected here.)

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The Atlantic on 60 years of losing U.S. manufacturing jobs
Washington’s Blog on General Butler and the original 99 percent movement
EconoMonitor on the decline in conspicuous leisure
Center for Economic Policy Research on austerity and anarchy in Europe from 1919-2009

India's ambivalence about modern retailing has brought derision from the West. The government's decision to put off legislation that would have opened India's retail market to foreign investors, announced Dec. 7, led to howls of outrage. On Jan. 10, the government partially reversed course, decreeing that foreigners could own single-brand stores under certain conditions.

Those conditions include obtaining at least 30 percent of the products sold from small Indian manufacturers -- which was unattractive to retailers who gain competitive advantage from their ability to source globally on a large scale. On Jan. 22, the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA said it was putting its entry into the Indian market on hold.

We usually don't think of the U.S. as a monetary union, but early in its history it essentially was. Unlike the crisis-wracked euro zone, the dollar zone survived its first few decades without a major crisis, providing the fragile young republic with a period of relative stability during which it began to congeal culturally, economically, politically and militarily.

European policy makers hoped that the euro would serve as the unifying and integrating force of the European Union much as, they believed, the dollar had for the early U.S. What the Europeans failed to appreciate was that early America's real glue was not its dollar union but its fiscal one.

History is filled with examples of people who achieved fame not because of a major accomplishment, but simply because they were the first to do something. Such is the case of Ida May Fuller, a resident of rural Vermont who became the first beneficiary of a recurring Social Security payment on Jan. 31, 1940.

Fuller was born on Sept. 6, 1874, and attended school in Rutland, Vermont, as a classmate of future President Calvin Coolidge. Known to her family and friends as “Aunt Ida,” she never married or had children, and she lived alone most of her adult life. After working for decades as a teacher and legal secretary, and contributing to Social Security for almost three years, she filed her retirement claim in November 1939.