Quote of the Day (Andrew Mellon, on How to Cope with the Depression)

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” – Andrew Mellon (1855-1937), Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon to Herbert Hoover, recounted in the latter’s Memoirs of Herbert Hoover (1952)

This statement sounds rather Leninist, doesn’t it? Only it came, oddly enough, from the man who, until that time, had been acclaimed, in many quarters, America’s “greatest secretary of the treasury since Alexander Hamilton.” It was his advice to Hoover on how to cope with the Great Crash of 1929 and the resulting worldwide economic collapse.

Despite heroic attempts to revive his reputation, notably by economic columnist and historian Amity Schlaes, Andrew Mellon—an uber-capitalist ever before he became the nation’s most powerful financial officer during the go-go years of the Roaring Twenties—has never recovered from the hit he took during the Great Depression. 

Neither, for all his constant, earnest, but ideologically hidebound attempts to cope with the crisis, has Herbert Hoover’s, one of the three Presidents Mellon served--the others being Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Predicting Presidential reputations during a current administration is dicey and often ideologically skewed, but I strongly believe that George W. Bush’s has likewise also taken a fall from which it will never recover. He has looked terribly insignificant—almost physically shrunken—throughout this crisis.

Furthermore, unlike Hoover, he and his administration had ample history to realize the perils of unrestrained markets. Yet, while the Democrats are to some extent complicit in this mess for expanding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and for repealing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, the President remains responsible for not sounding the alarm and, in fact, for deregulating even more than prior administrations.

You’d think that a President with approval ratings in the 20s wouldn’t have much further to drop, but right now Bush’s Presidential “stock” has plummeted further and faster than Wall Street’s. Don’t expect him to get into the next Republican convention unless he wears a fake moustache and tries a different name. 

The latter option, incidentally, has been tried before, by Boston's charming rascal mayor James Michael Curley, who at the 1932 Democratic Convention, upon being shut out of the Massachusetts delegation, got himself named to the Puerto Rican delegation as "Jaime Miguel Curleo." Only in America, folks!