By Geordie Gwalgen Dent
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2008
Ah, springtime, 1930. U.S. stock markets had slightly recovered from the “Black Tuesday” crash of the year before. Credit was cheap and the Western world was spending freely. Though people had been spooked, optimism reigned again. Few people knew that the entire global economy was on the edge of a precipice and about to begin a slow, brutal, downward spiral that would usher in almost a decade of misery for countless Canadians and others around the world.
If you’ve been following the recent financial news about the “subprime crisis” closely, some of this might sound eerily familiar. This financial fiasco involving thousands of mortgage defaults in the U.S. was considered by many to be a minor bump in the road when it made headlines last August. And now? The U.S. is in recession and there is speculation it will spread to other countries.
