Posted by
Roy Rolling on Monday, September 29, 2008 9:10:21 AM
Nobody reads a nobody. People will only read this if I am well-known. Then, it is too late.
The Second Great Depression and banking failure is eerily similar to the first. Back in the days of the "dust bowl" farming was in the throes of deregulation, too. No longer were farm yields limited by the soil itself because "modern farming" of fertilizers and concentrated planting were giving far better yields. If a farmer did not adopt "modern farming" methods of the early 1900s they were at a competitive disadvantage.
Fast forward to the 1930s when after years of over plowing the same fields and use of fertilizer, the soil was like sand and unable to produce. In fact, it was hard just to keep the depleted soil even on the farm boundaries as wind would blow it away and produce gigantic dust storms engulfing entire counties and states.
So the exaggerated farm yields at the expense of the long-term health of the farm soil came to a crashing halt when "modern farming" methods were "discovered" to be the cause of the death of the farms themselves. Farmers adopted conservative soil-erosion techiques and by slowing the process the long-term health of the soil was maintained.
Now, financial markets have been stripped of most regulation and produced 10 years of phantom yields. But having plowed the same ground of poorer and poorer people, the poor people have been blown away from their mortgage and other financial obligations by the ever-present winds of new products.