- Did you ever talk to the elders of your family? About
how they or others came to financial ruin in the bad old days of the
Great Depression?
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- If you did, what could you have found out? Following
the Crash of October, 1929, the stock market by April, 1930, recovered
by fifty per cent, typical of horrendous bear markets. This was among
talk that a fresh prosperity was just around the corner. And that now
was the time to invest in American business for "the long haul".
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- BUT, who ever mentions there was an even worse, faster-developing
Crash in 1937? Stock prices did not return to 1929 levels until 36 years
later. Did all the victims of 1929 live that long?
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- The accepted pundits did not and do not bother to point
out some key facts.
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- [1] The gap between the ultra rich and the common folks
had become the greatest ever(like now). The income and assets of the aristocracy
in the 1920s had gone UP AND UP. The wages of the ordinary people, however,
had become stagnant if not declining (like now). Farm prices, if anything,
had leveled off or had gone down in the 1920s and into the 1930s (like
now).
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- [2] Ordinary workers and small business people were urged
to own their own home. In good times, that would seem to be a great idea.
In many city communities, there sprung up block after block of individual
residences. As you looked down some streets, you could see row after row
also of two-flats and three-flats, supposedly income producing buildings.
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- The properties had five-year, so-called Canadian-style
mortgages, typical of the era. Who bothered to think about what would
happen if the mortgage had to be rolled over or renewed in bad times?
Who realized how would-be owners would be pressured to pay up the mortgage
if the bank or mortgage company went under?
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- [3] There were plenty of newspapers supposedly competing
with one another. But, they all relied for their existence on advertisers.
The small amount paid by readers could not, by itself, keep the publications
going. One subject was generally taboo. They did NOT publish pictures,
if they had any, of the very wealthy, or if they did, were obligated to
show them in a good light, smiling. And, they did NOT condemn the Establishment,
the elite, for taking financial advantage of ordinary workers, small business
folks, and yeoman farmers.
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- [4] There were plenty of community banks. And the big
banks were "downtown". In some cities, you could see three different
banks on the same street corners. The banks took deposits at the same
time they sold corporate securities and mortgage bonds(after years of
being prohibited, banks through their holdings firms or even directly,
now sell such).. Chicago, for example, was a center to banks selling "Gold
Bonds". That is, mortgage paper, the interest on which was payable
in gold per month or per quarter. Some workers because they worked on
several jobs were able to save up enough to buy such bonds and used the
proceeds toward their rent on their flat.
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- [5] For investing in American business, some workers
and small business folks found it convenient to buy shares in Investment
Trusts. That was the name for the middle-men who, in turn, bought shares
in stock. Few bothered to read the contracts which had a lot of technical
legal details.
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- Here are some of the consequences and follow up details:
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- === Some common folks put their family money into Wall
Street as a result of the market "recovery" of the Spring of
1930. With a background as an engineer and developer for the super rich
worldwide, President Herbert Hoover made statements he ought to have known
were most likely mere puffing and false. He said words to the effect that,
following the 1929 Crash, the American economy was on a sound and solid
basis. Perhaps the present generation does not like to study history.
Too many young folks think this Hoover was "the head of the FBI".
This nonsense and lack of knowledge just causes the gap between the generations
to be wider than usual.
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- === Those who re-invested in the "market recovery"
of 1930, or failed to get the Hell out of Wall Street, as time went on,
saw their stocks lose 90 per cent or more of their value or become entirely
worthless. Unlike the direct purchase of stock, those who bought shares
in Investment Trusts most often lost everything. The fine print of the
contracts (if they were even shown or given a contract) stated there is
a redemption clause. That meant, if too many investors tried to redeem
their shares in the Investment Trust, the entity was frozen up. Thereafter,
any investors left in the investment pool got zero; they could not transact
in, out, or redeem. The Investment Trusts went into all manner of legal
snarls for years and years, and receiverships, and some just plain disappeared.
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- If you listened carefully to the family elders, you heard
them curse the "downtown banks". And even worse hollaring was
against the "stinking Investment Trusts". When President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt declared a Bank Holiday in 1933, he ended up ruining
the community banks in favor of the "downtown banks" which survived.
After World War Two, what sprung up as middlemen in stock purchasing were
called MUTUAL FUNDS.. The term Investment Trust had become a dirty word.
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- By the 1990s, the Mutual Funds had multiplied like locusts,
tens of thousands of them. Like the infamous Investment Trusts, their
alter ego and ghosts arisen >from the dead, Mutual Funds had the rotten
redemption clause. Like in the 1920s and early 1930s, who bothered in
the 1990s and thereafter, to read the contract about what could cause
the Mutual Funds, formerly Investment Trusts, to be frozen up? Certainly
the oil-soaked, spy-riddled monopoly press are not about to discuss this
aspect of Mutual Funds, which are heavy advertisers and financially interwoven
with the print and electronic media.
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- === Who in the press tells you about the supposed brokerage
insurance, SIPC, not having sufficient reserves if a bunch of stockbrokers
go bust in a bad downturn in business. And so you think the U.S. Treasury
stands behind SIPC? Oh yeah?
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- === "Gold Bonds" became a great scandal of
the 1930s. Who corruptly covered it all up? Why, Joseph P. Kennedy, first
boss of the newly-then-formed U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
and "Founding Father" of the Kennedy clan. Gold Bonds were
based on mortgages. Real estate, being the only free market in America,
went down in price when the bubble burst. Nowadays there are shares on
the Big Board of Fannie Mae, a huge mortgage pool (sort of like "Gold
Bonds" though not paying in the precious metral). Some have the false
impression that Fannie Mae is a Federal Government agency and supposedly
in a mortgage foreclosure crisis, would be bailed out by the U.S. Treasury.
Not so.
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- === In the 1930s, when real estate prices collapsed,
the market price of many properties was lower than the mortgage. So, some
would-be owners of individual residences, or apartment buildings, left
a note inside their abandoned property for the mortgage company. "Goodbye,
mortgage company, nice knowing you. Here is the key." The would-be
owner could most often at the time purchase a similar property nearby,
for cash, if they still had any, at much less than the mortgage on their
then current item. The press whores now cannot discuss such things. After
all, the Sunday edition of most newspapers have a large real estate section.
Telling the truth about real estate, then as now, is bad for business.
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- === In recent years, a swarm of mortgage companies have
shown up >from No Where. They urge owners to suck all the equity out
of their property through re-doing the mortgage or adding another pile
of bricks on their head through a second mortgage. The liars and whores
of the press advertising these mortgage peddlers, do not bother to inquire
who they are. Some of them (certainly not all of them) are purveyors of
criminal offshore loot, proceeds of gangster enterprises too often jointly
with corrupt tax collectors, plain old-fashioned mobsters some in bed
(as we have shown in other situations) with judges and other public office
holders. The dirty money is being laundered as "mortgage lending".
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- === In the 1930s, the enterprising tenant could live
in an apartment for a time without paying. So many apartment buildings
were partly vacant, that the landlords offered three-month concessions.
That meant, you could live there for the first three months for free.
There were plenty unemployed to move you elsewhere, in the dark of night,
when the rent freebie expired. (Is more of that coming back, such as with
the overbuilding of condominium buildings?).
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- === When banks collapsed in the 1930s, some of the bank
presidents opened the Safe Deposit Box vault and looted the contents of
some of the deposit boxes. After all, the Deposit Box Companies were then,
and are now, completely separate entities housed within the bank building.
Few, if any, know this. The vault companies generally carry no theft insurance.
And what box holders wants to report to the police or the FBI that some
jewels, some gold coins, and other valuables are missing from their deposit
box? And can you PROVE what was in the box? Do husbands really want
their estranged or legally separated or divorced wives or ex-wives to
know what was kept in that deposit box? Do corrupt politicians want tax
collectors to know what the public office holder has siphoned off some
public agency's funds? Hey, do you think highly corrupt IRS officials
want to divulge what is in THEIR safe deposit box?
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- Two examples. A top Illinois state official was criminally
prosecuted when his estranged wife blew the whistle on fifty thousand
dollars kept in his safe deposit box apparently embezzled from his state
office. A Mayor of Chicago took bribes in the hundreds of thousands of
dollars in the form of diamonds. This loot somehow disappeared from his
deposit box when he croaked. Who could prove what?
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- === Gotten rich during the Great Depression era from
the looted deposit boxes, some banker's families after World War Two used
these funds to establish a form of competitors to banks, called Savings
and Loan Associations, appealing to home ownership and such.
Good references: "The Rich and The Super Rich"
by Ferdinand Lundberg, Lyle Stuart Publishers, 1968, reprinted in paperback
in later years. "The Great Crash- 1929" by Kenneth Galbraith.
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- Can America's secretive PRIVATE central bank, the Federal
Reserve, keep pumping up the stock market? Are they actually now reversing
position, and selling short against the unsuspecting American common
people? That is, having made the market go up, secretly profitting from
making it go down? Is the Federal Reserve technically bankrupt? What is
the treasonous history of J.P. Morgan & Company? Study also Part One
of this series.
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- More coming.
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- Stay tuned.
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