The season slowly drew to a close, the in-crowd was reluctantly heading home to face the music, and Liam Clancy woke up to the realization the fun was over. The bars and restaurants, apart from their loyal expat hardies, were almost empty and the previously bustling streets and shopping centres had lost their hum.
It did not require much imagination to come to the conclusion he could not spend the rest of his life as a not so rich playboy, drinking and fucking as though there were no tomorrows. If he was to survive he needed to save money, it was difficult to know what could come next. It was time to put his experience to work, get some form of income.
His first priority was to quit the cash hungry hotel, however good the deal was. The exodus of holiday makers coupled with the collapse of the property market meant he had little difficulty in finding a spacious apartment; an apartment overlooking the sea on the resort’s main avenue, rented from a desperate cash strapped English estate agent. To complete his image he picked up a second-hand BMW sports model from another unhappy expat. Liam then bought a decent printer and put his laptop to work to produce a business card:
Liam Clancy
Financial Consultant
Piso 3° 330 ave del Duque de Ahumada
Marbella 29600
He felt pleased with himself; it looked convincing — at least to the budding consultant. He then remembered to add his mobile telephone number and email address and printed a few of dozen cards. He then set out to spread them around the expat circuit to get the ball rolling.
Within a month Clancy had found a Spanish girlfriend — less costly to maintain than the blonds. With Dolores, an out of work post graduate law student, he was soon making fast progress with his Spanish. A little more application and he would be reasonable fluent. On the other hand fee paying clients, amongst the distressed or confused members of the English speaking expat community, were more difficult to find. Although a great many worried Brits found themselves in difficulties, or out of their depth, as their homes, mortgages and investments were threatened by the growing financial crisis, they were still hesitatant to pay a consultant.
Encouraging the story he had been a successful trader, retiring to live on his fabulous bonuses, he was soon meeting people he would have never normally met in Dublin. He readjusted his technique, discovering the disadvantages of being tight lipped, whilst hinting his partner, Dolores, was a lawyer. He then joined forces with another young Irishman in difficulties with his holiday home leasing business and together they convinced homeowners, those who would listen, to accept a more realistic view of the property market. Get out if you can, the advised, and if you can’t then lease. They advertised in the UK and forced their clients into slashing rents. Weather the storm and don’t panic was their trademark.
Liam had taken time to catch up on his financial history and recognized that sooner or later things would surely improve; for those with sufficient cash reserves there was no point in panicking as people had done in the crash of the twenties, even if the recession they were now experiencing was the worst for sixty years.
Much was spoken of the great crash of 1929, which, like the economic crisis of 2008, had hit the world after almost a decade of optimism and prosperity. The event that triggered the Great Depression, known as Black Thursday, took place on October 24, 1929, when Wall Street was submerged by a wave of panic selling.
When markets opened the following Monday morning, selling recommenced and in a couple of days the market had crashed by twenty five percent. The roaring Twenties together with the speculative boom in which Americans had borrowed heavily to play the stock market came to a sudden end. Millions caught up in the panic rushed to sell their stocks, but there were few if any buyers.
Banks that had invested their customers’ savings in the stock market collapsed causing a chain reaction of bankruptcies. By 1933, eleven thousand of the twenty five thousand American banks had failed. The contagion spread to businesses, which were either wiped out or forced to lay off their workers in swaths, slashing the wages of those who remained. Sales collapsed, first luxury goods, then essentials, as unemployment spread to all sectors of the economy.
To compound the disaster decades overgrazing and the combined effects of a drought grass hit the Great Plains. Parched grasslands were transformed into dustbowls; exposed topsoil was swept in violent dust storms that destroyed everything in their paths. In the past farmers had been safe in economic crises as they could at least feed themselves, but with the ecological disaster farmers were without crops. Those who suffered most were the small farmers already heavily in debt when banks seized their farms leaving them homeless and jobless.
Millions of jobless took to the road, wandering across America in the hope of finding work, the luckier of them in cars, others on freight trains and many on foot. Many of the newly impoverished farmers came from Oklahoma and Arkansas and headed west to California where they were known as Okies and Arkies, their hardships immortalized in Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.
The effects of the depression were felt in almost every country, by both rich and poor. Personal incomes, tax revenues, profits and prices fell with international trade reduced to a trickle. Unemployment in the US rose to twenty five percent in many countries by more than thirty percent.
The Great Depression was to last almost a decade. In 1932, Herbert Hoover, blamed for the dire straights in which the country found itself, was beaten in a landslide election that brought Franklin D. Roosevelt to power. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, a programme designed to combat the effects of the depression, but which did not prevent it lasting all through the thirties.
The UK fared somewhat better, where by 1937 unemployment had fallen to one and a half million, but it was only when war broke out in 1939 did unemployment finally come to an end with mobilization and the war effort. In the US however, the economy did not recover until the bombing of Pearl Harbour when the US finally entered into World War II. Men and women were put to work for the production of armaments, ships and planes, whilst farmers returned to their land to produce food for the home front and overseas.
Were they facing a repeat of the Great Depression? That was the burning question. The incertainty weighed heavy, a crash of the same magnitude would have catastrophic consequences in a world more so much more complexe and unpredictable.
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