This article comes from the official account of "Poker Investor" Wechat. The author is Ma Ye, a poker content team.

Time soon entered 2018, the entire financial market, always feel permeated with a subtle atmosphere.

The financial tsunami 10 years ago may have faded out of many people's memories, but throughout human history, perhaps the only thing we can learn is that in the short term, human beings always feel that they have learned countless lessons, but in the long run, we haven't learned anything.

Chinese history textbooks repeatedly say: "imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, a dying capitalism."

The political textbook says again and again: "the economic crisis is a basic contradiction that capitalism cannot solve."

These predictions about the crisis and demise of capitalism have been repeated over and over for decades, from the father's primary school to his son's college education, the Sino-Soviet alliance to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and to China's becoming the greatest bastion of capitalism and free trade in the world. Capitalism is still thriving.

At a time when many large categories of assets have been hovering at a high level for a long time, speculators can't help but keep it to themselves:Will the next economic crisis come again?

I don't have an answer either. I may be brewing, or it is possible that the worry about the crisis has delayed the arrival of the crisis. Perhaps, looking back on the most famous crisis in the last century, known as "Great Depression", can provide us with a different perspective to look at our own time and space more than 90 years after that crisis.

On October 24, 1929, the biggest economic crisis broke out in the history of capitalism in the United States. After a 10-year bull market, China Finance Online Co Ltd of the United States collapsed and stocks fell from the top into the abyss overnight.

Within a week, Americans lost 10 billion dollars in wealth on the stock exchange, and farmers poured milk into the Mississippi River to destroy "excess" products. At that time, a children's song was popular in New York: "Mellon played the siren and Hoover rang the bell." Wall Street sends a signal that the United States is going to hell! "

When the stock market plummeted in October 1929, neither the stock market investors in the United States nor other stock market investors in the world would have thought that September 3, 1929 was the day when the average stock price was the highest. After the stock market crash, it took a full 25 years for the stock price to return to its 1929 peak.

Panoramic photos of the 1929 crash

The last 10 days of October 1929 gathered a series of famous days in the history of securities.

On October 21, the New York Stock Exchange suffered a big sell-off, selling more than 6 million shares throughout the day, so that the automatic stock market recorder did not record the last trade until 1 hour and 40 minutes after the close.

On October 23, the situation continued to deteriorate, with the New York Times index falling 31 points.

October 24 is the beginning of the stock market disaster, the famous "Black Thursday" in history. As soon as the market opened in the morning, the stock price plummeted like the water that burst the dike, and people sold the shares one after another and changed hands of 12.895 million shares throughout the day. Several major banks in New York quickly formed a "rescue fund", and Richard Weeney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, personally bought shares, hoping to turn the tide. But the building will fall, and it is difficult to support it on its own.

On October 25, President Hoover issued a statement saying that "the basic enterprises of the United States, that is, the production and distribution of goods, are based on sound and prosperity," in an attempt to stimulate a new round of investment. However, after a weekend, all efforts to save the stock market were in vain.

On October 28th, history called "Black Monday". On the same day, the New York Times Index fell 49 points, and the Dow plummeted 38.33 points, or 13% a day. On this day, no one came forward to rescue the market.

On October 29th, the darkest day came. At 10 o'clock in the morning, as soon as the New York Stock Exchange opened, violent selling orders swept in, everyone was selling regardless of price, brokers were surrounded, and the trading floor was in chaos. The Dow Jones index plummeted, so far, the stock index has fallen 22% from a peak of 386 points to 298 points, and the New York Times index is down 41 points. At the close of the day, the stock market set an all-time high of 16.41 million shares. One trader described it as the "worst day" in the 112-year history of the New York Stock Exchange. This is the most famous Black Tuesday in history.

In November, the stock market fell more than ever, sliding to 198 points, down as much as 48%.

In just two weeks from October 29 to November 13, 1929, a total of $30 billion of wealth disappeared, equivalent to the total expenditure of the United States in the first World War.

From September 3 to December 20, the Dow fell nearly 40%; by the end of 1932, the index was down 84%, losing more than 70% of its market value; it was 25 years before it returned to its 1929 high.

The crash dealt a complete blow to investor confidence, and it was not until 1954 that the US stock market returned to its 1929 level.

At the same time, the chain reaction of the stock market crash triggered an economic crisis, with wild runs, bank closures, factory closures, unemployment, poverty and organized resistance.

In the three years from 1929 to 1933, 5000 banks failed, at least 130000 companies failed and the car industry fell by 95 per cent. In 1929, General Motors Co's production decreased from 5.5 million in 1929 to 2.5 million in 1931. By 1933, total industrial production and national income had plummeted by nearly half.

The economic level has been retrogressed by 10 years. From the fourth quarter of 1929 to the first quarter of 1933, there were 14 consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, with a cumulative negative growth of-68.56%.

In 1929, when the stock market collapsed, the unemployment rate was 2.5%. After that, the unemployment rate rose rapidly, reaching a record 25% in 1933, meaning that one in four people was unemployed.

Unlike previous mini-crises, the economic crisis of 1929 quickly spread from the United States to other industrialized countries. World international trade fell from $68.6 billion in 1929 to $55.6 billion in 1930, $39.7 billion in 1931, $26.9 billion in 1932 and $24.2 billion in 1933.

In the Great Depression, 109371 enterprises went bankrupt, and heavy industry production shrank particularly severely, especially in the steel, automobile, construction and other industries that marked the US economic boom in the 1920s.

According to the estimate of Happiness magazine in September 1932, there were 34 million adult men, women and children in the United States, accounting for about 28% of the country's total population unable to make ends meet (excluding 11 million rural households), and the homeless population reached 2 million. More than 2000 street deaths were recorded in New York alone in 1931. The children born during this period were short in stature and were later called the "depressed generation".

During the crisis, on the one hand, overproduction and tight consumption led to a backlog of goods; on the other hand, ordinary Americans were short of food and clothing and lived in increasing poverty. In order to maintain the price of agricultural products, agricultural capitalists and large farmers destroyed a large number of "surplus" products, used wheat and corn instead of coal as fuel, poured milk into the river and sea, and turned the river into a "milky way".

Due to the general lack of confidence in the future, social morality is further eroded, and cases of theft, brawl and murder emerge one after another. On the day of Roosevelt's inauguration, Hoover sent a message to the new government: "We have come to a dead end, and there is nothing we can do."

From 1929 to 1933, US gross national product fell from $203.6 billion to $141.5 billion, a decline of as much as 30 per cent. The banking system bears the brunt, with 10500 failures, accounting for 49 per cent of all banks.

After 1933, the American economy entered a long period of so-called "special depression".

Despite the "New deal" and other measures to ease the crisis, the recovery of the US economy was still weak, and it was not until 1941, after the outbreak of the second World War, that the US gross national product exceeded that of 1929 before the crisis.

Looking back on this economic crisis, in fact, in that so-called "crazy 1920s", it has secretly planted the seeds.

Seeds of the Crazy Age

In 1920, the capitalist world had its first economic crisis since World War I.

After the crisis, the American economy grew rapidly under the influence of "economic bubbles" such as stocks and bonds, creating a miracle in the history of capitalist economy.

From 1923 to the autumn of 1929, productivity grew by 4% a year. At the same time, the values of the whole American society are changing. Although the traditional Puritan values are still popular in rural areas, great changes have taken place in the dominant moral concepts in cities.

Getting rich has become people's biggest dream, speculation is popular, organized crime and pleasure are prevalent. A considerable number of people indulge in material pleasures all day long, while their spiritual life is so impetuous and vulgar that many American historians call the United States at this time the "era of spiritual hunger" or the "crazy 1920s".

Although the prosperity of the 1920s created a golden period of capitalist development, this prosperity itself lurks profound contradictions and crises.

First of all,American agriculture has been in a state of depression for a long time, and the purchasing power in rural areas is insufficient.Lack of purchasing power is a word that runs through the history of capitalism, which we will talk about later.

The income of farmers accounted for 16% of the total national income in 1919, but only 8.8% of the total national income in 1929. Farmers went bankrupt one after another. At this time, the per capita income of farmers is only about 1% of the national average income.

Second, there is an extremely uneven redistribution of industrial growth and social wealth in the United States.

Industrial growth is mainly concentrated in some emerging industrial sectors, while old industrial sectors such as mining and shipbuilding are underemployed, and there is a production reduction crisis in textile, leather and other industries, resulting in a large number of workers losing their jobs. During this period, the trend of merger prevailed, and social wealth was more and more concentrated in the hands of a small number of people.

The 16 largest plutocrats in the United States control 53% of the country's gross national product, and the national income of the country is occupied by the richest 5% of the population; on the other hand, about 60% of American families are still struggling with a living standard of about $2000 a year, which is barely enough to eat and wear.

To make matters worse, 21% of households earn less than $1000 a year. In addition, the potential crisis in the balance of payments has also deepened the potential crisis in the US economy. The growing economic capacity and supply of the United States far exceeds the demand for affordability at home and abroad.

All this heralds a big crisis.

October 24, 1929 is an unforgettable day in the history of American securities.

Almost all of the 1100 members of the New York Stock Exchange were present, more than 300 more than usual. As soon as the market opened, traders ran back and forth like crazy, but still couldn't keep up with the fall in share prices.

In just a few minutes, 1.6 million shares were sold, and all the good and bad stocks were not spared. The trend is further intensified because it is technically impossible to deliver the market in time. Messages sent by telegram and telephone were so frequent that the crowd was so crowded that the exchange of messages was delayed for more than an hour, so Baltimore's 10:30 instruction did not appear on Wall Street teletypewriters until 11:30. As a result, everyone was scared.

Winston Churchill, then a journalist and later prime minister, wrote a story in the Daily Telegraph based on his live interview: "I saw these people." Automatically sell several large bundles of stocks, which have depreciated by half or 2%, but have not found a person who is brave enough to accept this reliable wealth. This wealth is sold by others. By 12:00, losses had reached $6 billion, and two bankers and a broker had committed suicide because of bankruptcy!

At 01:30 in the afternoon, a proud, depressed man hurried into the building at 23 Wall Street, where Morgan Bank is located. He was Charles Michelle, the president of the National City Bank, the most powerful bank in the world at that time.

In the face of the avalanche collapse of the stock market, Charles Michelle quickly contacted some big bankers and formed a financial "joint venture" desperately to buy stocks, trying to stop the crazy decline. That afternoon, although they did not spend millions of dollars to buy shares on the exchange, they only slightly halted the sharp decline. In the past, we have encountered this kind of situation.They only need to spend a few dollars to buy some shares to ease the decline, but this time it failed.Millions of dollars was a huge sum in 1929, but it went into the sea like a mud cow. Then the sign showed the number of checkouts: in just one afternoon, the number of shares sold tripled than usual, which is unprecedented in history.

Four hours after the New York Stock Exchange closed, the newspaper reported astonishing news: 12894650 shares were traded that day. This is what people later call "."Tragic Thursday". Everyone is convinced that the difficult days are over and are rejoiced at the good operation of the exchange on the 25th. However, it fell again on the 26th, 28th and 29th, bringing the crisis of the stock market crash to a climax.

On Tuesday, October 29th, 1929, at 10:00, the Wall Street Exchange opened. In the first three minutes of opening, 650000 shares of American Steel were ready to be sold at $179each, but could not find a buyer, compared with the asking price of $205on the 24th.

The fall in the shares of American steel companies began the collapse of the market.

Shares of Westin fell $2 a minute, while shares of ITT fell $17 in a quarter of an hour. By 10:30, 3259800 shares had been sold, resulting in a loss of $2 billion.

From early September to mid-November, the total market value of stocks on the New York Stock Exchange lost $30 billion. However, this is only the beginning of the disaster, the collapse of the stock market brought about the most destructive Great Depression and crisis in American history, and paralyzed the American economy. Banks that speculated on stocks with residents' personal savings went bankrupt: 659 in 1929, 1352 in 1930 and 2294 in 1931.

Gross national income fell from 88 billion yuan in 1929 to $40 billion from 1932 to mid-1933.

The Dow Jones Industrial average of 30 stocks fell from a peak of 452 in September 1929 to 58 on July 8, 1932. The famous General Electric stock fell from a high of 396 yuan to $8. In total, the face value of stocks and bonds has fallen by 90%. Countless "millionaires" have been wiped out. Some people who have lost hope of survival have finally come to a dead end.

No other event in American history has caused so much anxiety as the crash of 1929 that even people born after 1929 are so worried that even their children talk about it.

The United States successfully survived the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, the two world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and many deadly conflicts. Americans survived the Chicago fires, the San Francisco earthquake and fire, the Los Angeles earthquake, countless weaker earthquakes, and dozens of hurricanes, large and small. Americans survived typhoid fever, tuberculosis, polio, droughts, floods, riots, strikes and Valentine's Day massacres.

But looking back on the stock market crash of 1929, Americans still freak out.

It was the worst collective fear in history, and millions of people stopped buying stocks and making profits the way they used to be.

Deep in the minds of many people is the idea that there will be another crash in the stock market, which will devour people's life savings, and that idiots who buy stocks will wander the streets, wear ragged blankets, sleep in homeless centers and eat cold beans. Hawking Apple Inc and pencils on the street.

During the decade or so of the Great Depression, money was scarce and jobs were even scarcer. Stores go bankrupt and employees lose their jobs and salaries, which means they can't afford to buy anything, so more stores go bankrupt and more employees lose their salaries.

The economy is in a state of tension and the company cannot make a profit. Once a company fails to make a profit, the share price falls and stagnates.

Most historians will tell you that although the Great crash of 1929 is often attributed to the Great Depression, the Great Depression was not actually caused by the Great crash of 1929. At that time, only a very small number of Americans owned stocks, and the vast majority did not lose a penny in the crash.

Therefore, the stock market crash is only an important catalytic factor, in fact, a more important factor is: institutional issues.

To be exact, the emergence of capitalism from that day on, there was a fundamental problem: insufficient purchasing power.

According to an economic equation: profit = commodity selling price-wage-other cost, that is, commodity selling price = profit + wage + other cost can be reversed. This equation applies to any enterprise.

In fact, "other costs" are goods made by other companies. So when all the enterprises are put together for discussion, there are commodity selling prices = profits + wages. This shows that if all production is carried out in capitalized enterprises, there must be a problem: wages buy not only all goods, but also profits can be added to the purchase before production and marketing can be balanced.

This leads to a second corollary: the principle of decreasing propensity to consume.

Although people who make more money spend more, proportionally, people with a monthly salary of 2000 yuan are bound to spend their income. People with a monthly salary of 6000 yuan can save up to one or two thousand yuan, and when they earn 100,000 yuan a month, they can save tens of thousands of yuan a month. By the time I earn one million dollars a month, although there is already a lot of luxury consumption, it may account for 20 to 30 percent of the total income.

For people with higher incomes, consumption tends to stagnate. In terms of material comforts, Bill Gates may not have a clear gap with a large domestic real estate developer.

At first glance, this is a good thing, rich people do not spend, how good, for society to save resources.

However, this is put together with the first point, and the problem arises. Profits are concentrated in the hands of the minority, while wages are distributed in the hands of the majority.

Wages are basically spent, but most of the profits are not spent, which is bound to create such a situation: the price of goods > the consumption of the boss + the consumption of the workers. It is impossible to sell all the goods in this system.

What if I can't sell it? The boss's first reaction was to reduce production and avoid losses.

The purpose of reducing production is not to make less, but to pay less. Workers naturally don't buy things without wages. As a result, from the perspective of society as a whole, the proportion of reduction in purchasing power is higher than that of goods. Bosses in various industries can only subconsciously lay off staff and limit production.

If such a vicious turn goes on, the economy will collapse.

This is the principle of the economic crisis of 1929. As long as anyone has a foothold in the system to solve the problem, the problem cannot be avoided.

Of course, the problem was not serious before industrialization. In the years when there was no industrialization, personal productivity was very low, but personal consumption had a floor, and people could not starve to death. Therefore, no matter how much surplus products are, it is not a big deal. Digging some gold mines and fighting a few battles at home will be enough to supply demand.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the industrial revolution was completed and immediately merged with capitalism. From then on, workers can produce far more materials than their basic needs, and human beings begin to worry about overproduction-albeit painful.

Around 1825, the first economic crisis broke out in Britain. As factories cut production and shut down, the price of machinery and equipment fell to about the same as scrap iron.

However, at this time, Britain is a unique industrial country in the world, and other European countries are not competitors when it competes, so Britain can strive to expand its market and solve the problem through foreign dumping. So the crisis passed for a year or two, followed by more than a decade of prosperity.

By the time of the crisis of 1837, things were different. Not only Britain learned to produce with machines, but also Germany, France and the United States followed suit to start industry. Britain can no longer find a market for its old friends, so the crisis has lasted for a long time, lasting six years, and the size of industry in all countries has shrunk by more than half. The trend of economic contraction did not recover until 1843. The boom years that followed the crisis lasted only four years, and another crisis broke out in 1847.

The crisis of 1847 was extraordinary, first of all, it lasted longer than the boom years, which was a great social and psychological blow-ordinary people felt that they had nothing to look forward to.

Second, this crisis has not spared any country, as long as all the countries that have entered capitalism have collapsed and lost their jobs, and the scale of machinery, steel and other emerging industries has been reduced to 1/3 or less.

What finally eased the crisis?

Speaking of which, the first reason for the relief of the crisis is actually very funny, and that is the gold mine.

Gold was discovered in San Francisco in 1848 and in Melbourne in 1851. At that time, both places were in a state of anarchy, and the gold mines were not too deep, so they could dig ore directly without too much investment. You can look for gold in the riverbed without even digging a hole.

So poor men from all over the world swarmed in, hoping to turn around overnight. The former is therefore called "San Francisco" by the Chinese, while the latter is "New Jinshan".

American cowboys have knives and guns. Australia has always been a place of exile of prisoners, and its residents are extremely ferocious. such a place, whether it is the landlords who first occupied the ore vein or the consortia that followed, cannot turn the gold mine into a source of money for a few people. I can only watch nearly a million heroes make a fortune.

Many seagoing ships went to America and Australia, and at night half of the low-paid sailors fled to search for gold, and the captain woke up unable to leave the ship.

What good is this gold rush for the world? There is no good. Gold cannot be eaten or worn. From the point of view of the whole world, there is no more grain and no more cotton yarn, but thousands of strong people are less engaged in production. It does more harm than good.

But what good is the gold rush for the capitalist world? Save your life.

What capitalism lacks is demand, and the source of demand is that consumers have enough money.

In the era of the gold standard, gold is purchasing power!

Of course, according to the above-mentioned principle of declining consumption, if the gold is concentrated in the hands of a few big miners, it will only add a collection of gold bricks to the castle of the rich, and will not increase much purchasing power.

But it so happens that the gold mines of Australia and America are scattered among countless gold prospectors in the wilderness, and the gold they take out is resounding purchasing power.

It's as if God hired these people to inject hard currency into capitalism, so there was a boom in purchases and sales, and the economic crisis eased all of a sudden.

It sounds good to ease the crisis with God-given gold, but it's actually a bullshit thing. The reason is the same as above. Gold cannot be eaten or clothed. On the contrary, it consumes labor. It can actually ease the crisis and promote prosperity.

This shows that the problem of the economic crisis is not material at all, but human beings find awkwardness for themselves. Gold saves the world, reflecting the absurdity of capitalism.

A gold mine can be saved for a while, but not forever. Slowly, the shallow layer of gold began to decrease, and the mining area gradually established an "order". Gold panning turned into gold mining for a small number of people to get rich and most people to sell coolies. Such gold mines, even if they continue to produce gold, are not as effective as they were then. But capitalism, whose industrial capacity has multiplied several times, still needs external purchasing power. What should we do?

In fact, there is a bigger gold mine in the world: the East.

After the era of great navigation, Europeans discovered America, where civilization was low, mining capacity was poor, and many of the minerals that had long been exhausted in Eurasia remained completely untouched. So Europe has got a huge amount of gold from America-to buy more Chinese goods.

By the time the industrial revolution broke out in the early 19th century, most of the tens of thousands of tons of gold and silver that Europe got from America had flowed to the east. The gold and silver eventually flowed into China, adding to the strength of China's equally capitalized industry and commerce and continuing to circulate in China's handicrafts and commerce.

This is the essence of the war waged by the great powers, because in order to open up China's import market and earn this money, every silver or two that China spends is life-saving purchasing power for Western industrial capitalism.

The two huge markets, China and India, extended the lives of the Western world for more than a hundred years, and after the purchasing power of the two big countries in the East was renewed, 1929 was also approaching.

Of course, from a capitalist point of view, the profits of capitalists cannot balance their purchasing power without adding to the purchase. Capitalists certainly cannot consume so much profit by extravagant consumption, but capitalists can still invest.

The so-called investment means that capitalists use their accumulated profits to hire people and buy things, so as to expand production capacity and improve the quality of production. If capitalists are willing to invest without saving money, the economic crisis can also be alleviated.

However, the goal of investment is not to invest, nor is it to create more goods. The ultimate goal is to make a profit, that is, to sell the goods. Therefore, once there is a change and the market shrinks a little bit, the tendency to invest will weaken.

If investment is reduced, so will the wages of the workers. This is a mutually reinforcing process. If the economic sector is left to make its own decisions, the fragile balance can easily turn into an avalanche.

In fact, in the long run, investment is to create greater productivity for capitalists, which is bound to cause more serious surplus.

Therefore, simply encouraging capitalists to invest cannot solve the problem, and there must be a condition that "we have to invest". Investment can be a factor in alleviating the economic crisis.

Scientific and technological progress is such a suitable condition. Once new technologies to promote production emerge in society, all capitalists are worried that others will adopt them first and they will be eliminated. Therefore, whether there is an expected market or not, it must be invested.

Investment confidence, or investment pressure, is maintained and will not easily fall into the trap of cyclical decline. Until technological progress spreads to the whole society. In fact, it is also a strange phenomenon that technological progress does not bring benefits to society by promoting production, but through the pressure to "have to" invest to ensure that society does not collapse. This big twist is the problem with capitalism.

The industrial revolution not only transformed production, but also brought standardized experimental conditions to scientific research. So the 19th century was an era of great progress in science and technology. The investment is small, and the progress is obvious. Decades after the first industrial revolution represented by steam engine, the second industrial revolution represented by internal combustion engine and electric power began to sprout. The whip of scientific and technological progress always pulls capitalists to invest, so supply and demand are always balanced. If the crisis lasts for a year or two, new technology can come to the rescue.

Gold mines that can be panned for gold, new rich colonies brought about by industrial armies, and a continuous investment boom brought about by scientific and technological progress.

Taken together, these three factors are the reason why capitalism mixes from 1848 to 1914. The crisis of 1848 dragged on for more than half a century.

But there are also hidden dangers under the healthy skin of capitalism-all three factors to avoid the crisis are beginning to weaken.

First of all, when it comes to gold deposits, it is inevitable that shallow gold deposits are mined less and less. This is why there are so many gold deposits in the new world-the old world has been mined out. But there are fewer and fewer shallow gold mines in the New World, and the empire is becoming more and more powerful. as a result, most of the newly discovered gold mines are dominated by a small number of people.

For example, the British dispatched 400000 troops to fight the Boer War for South African gold mines. How can hard-earned gold mines allow you poor people to dig randomly? The result must be a rich and powerful horse enclosure, with large capital invested in expensive machine mining. The resulting gold does not boost purchasing power as the gold rush of 1848 did, but only aggravates the income division of society. The gold mine doesn't work anymore.

Colonial growth has also gone wrong. The earth is so big that we cannot discover a new continent in a few years, still less can we expect to conquer a market like China with a population of 400 million every few years. But industrialization and surplus products doubled every few decades, until the colonies did not have any industries, and when the gold and silver earned by the Eastern countries over the past few hundred years dried up. Where can we find an external market for capitalism?

By the end of the 19th century, decent colonies had been developed. Only the interior of Africa is still blank. But the African population has been plundered by the slave trade, and the rest of the population is poor and scattered, with little decent purchasing power. So Africa is the last piece of undivided land outside Antarctica.

Such land was carved up by hungry powers after 1870. Because the division is too fast, so many people who sign the agreement simply do not have time to inspect the site, nor do they know whether the place to be divided is a mountain or a river, so they can only draw horizontal and vertical lines on the map. Looking at the world map now, most of the borders of Africa are connected by straight lines, which is the relic of that era.

Even the original colonies could not hold up. Originally, the governments of the Qing Dynasty, Ottoman Turkey, Persia and Mexico were used to being compradors and their positions as agents of the colonial powers began to stabilize from the turmoil at the beginning of the colonial aggression.

As a result, around 1910, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 drove out the emperor, Turkey threw the Sultan in a cage as a puppet, the Persian Parliament drove out the king, and the Mexicans launched the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to come to power. even India, which has always been clever, has seen national strikes and demonstrations.The gathering of revolutions shows that the great powers have squeezed the colonies dry.Hey, what's the next step?

And, of course, the investment brought about by technological progress. ButTechnological growth is no longer reliable.. The previous statement that technology promotes investment has an implicit premise that technology itself is not an investment. Otherwise, if the market fluctuates a little, the willingness to invest will decline, and scientific and technological progress will slow down. Naturally, it will be impossible to force capital to continue to spend profits, and the purchasing power gap will come back.

In the 19th century, the threshold of science and technology was low, and it was not very expensive to engage in scientific and technological development, and a few enthusiasts could start work by saving a small workshop directly. Karl Benz, who made the first car, filled in the cost of developing the car with his wife's dowry and jewelry; Edison worked as a telegrapher and was able to develop the first patent.

In any era, there is no shortage of technology otaku thrift to play with machines, since the development of industrial technology does not cost much money, otaku play to a higher level, the 19th century natural breakthroughs in science and technology, forcing all capitalists to invest hard, objectively make up for the gap in purchasing power.

Around 1900, the situation changed. There are more and more kinds of science and technology, and the cost of science and technology development is rolling up. Although the Wright brothers are also technical nerds, they are also bicycle manufacturers and very wealthy factory owners. They built their own wind tunnel to test various wings, which led to a test flight of the plane in 1903.

Although Marconi developed the radio at his own expense, his mother was a British aristocrat and his father was a super property owner. How rich is his family? Marconi experimented with radio, communicating for several kilometers, and the transmitter and receiver were still on the boundaries of his country villa. Only such rich people can afford to play with scientific research. It shows that scientific research is getting farther and farther away from individuals.

Edison fought alone when he was young, but when he got rich, he had to rely on large consortia in order to build a laboratory with hundreds of engineers, known as high achiever. His laboratory in Monroe Park lost $4 million in a fire, or $600 million now.

This kind of scientific research activity itself is the super investment behavior of enterprises. Personal interest and technology no longer play a leading role, and the will of enterprises is the engine of scientific research breakthroughs.

After the 20th century, scientific research has also become an investment, and enterprises must consider whether they can make money before investing-if there is no market, high technology will also lose money. Therefore, in the 19th century, scientific research breakthroughs promoted investment, and scientific research at the beginning of the 20th century itself was investment, which was naturally suppressed by market demand.

Scientific research, especially the basic scientific research which is far away from the products, is also stuck in the strange circle of insufficient market. Once the market fluctuates, it will slow down with investment. In the end, the problem comes back to the dead knot of insufficient consumption and insufficient market.

Capitalism in the late 19th century walked on three legs and flourished. As a result, in the 20th century, all three legs were crippled. Will the economic crisis be far behind?

Before the full outbreak of the economic crisis, everyone dragged their crippled legs and tried to grab a crutch in the hands of other powers-new colonies to increase external purchasing power and hang around for a few more years. A more direct idea is to simply wipe out other capitalist powers and increase their own markets by reducing the supply of others. Either of these ideas means war. The two were implemented together? in 1914, the world war began.

The process of the first World War did not say much, only the results. In terms of increasing colonies, defeated Germany surrendered some of the backcountry in the African Pacific Ocean. From the point of view of wiping out industry, northern France and Belgium were left in ruins.

Originally, the victorious countries still wanted to tear down German industry, but they were afraid that Germany would revolutionize and join the Soviet Union, so they did not.

As a result, there are no fewer industrial countries in the world, and there are still so many markets. By the time the capitalist powers make up for the machines lost in the war, the economic crisis will not escape.

So, in 1929, only 10 years after the end of the world war, the real economic crisis came as promised. The destructive power is so powerful that the world war is just a rehearsal.

In a few months, the level of American industry fell back to the 19th century, when the banking industry went bankrupt, 41 billion deposits were run on 6 billion cash, and presidential bills could not be exchanged for paper money. The number of unemployed in Germany plus half of the unemployed accounts for 2% of the total. During World War I, Britain clenched its teeth against the gold standard and had to abolish it when the Great Depression came. From 1929 to 1933, the whole world thought capitalism was coming to an end.

The textbook will tell you that it was Roosevelt's New deal that pulled the United States out of the economic crisis. You believe that? I don't believe it anyway.

The real antidote to the economic crisis of 1929 was World War II.

War is cruel to the belligerent, but happy to the spectator.

In the final analysis, the economic crisis is a serious imbalance between "supply and demand," and war is an effective way to solve the imbalance between supply and demand. War creates a continuous demand for weapons, ammunition, vehicles, medicine, and other equipment, manpower, and capital. What's more, it is further magnified because the war destroyed the supply capacity.

On July 7, 1937, Japan began its full-scale invasion of China. In 1938, the second World War fully began, and almost all countries in Europe, Asia and Africa were involved in the war. Only the United States, which was alone in South America, was able to stay away from the war.

The war led to a rapid growth in the demand for manufactured goods, the surplus production capacity of the United States was rapidly digested, and even supply fell short of demand, exports continued to increase, employment continued to rise, and the economy returned to the channel of rapid growth. The United States entered the fastest growth period in history, of which the average GDP growth rate reached an eye-popping 17% for three consecutive years from 41 to 43.

The huge destructive power of the second World War almost destroyed the whole of Europe and Asia. With the end of the war in 1945, overseas demand dropped rapidly, and the US economy returned to negative growth. In order to avoid a new economic crisis, the United States began to implement the Marshall Plan in 1948 to help European countries rebuild after the war, and a large part of the assistance provided by the Marshall Plan It is used by Europeans to import industrial products and raw materials from the United States.

The United States was the biggest winner of the second World War. The United States not only won the war in the end, but also made war money economically. According to statistics, at the end of the second World War, the gold owned by the United States accounted for more than 75% of the total official gold reserves of all countries in the world at that time, and almost all the gold in the world flowed to the United States through the mechanism of war. The rise of the United States is standing on the shoulders of war-torn Europe and Asia, and this is the real driving force for the United States to come out of the Great Depression.

Although we all feel that central banks around the world have learned enough from the economic crisis of 1929, has the core variable that triggered that crisis changed now?

Think about it and be terrified.

Why inflation in the United States has not been able to rise after several rounds of QE in 2008? it is not precisely because money is concentrated in the hands of the rich, the rich are richer, the poor are poorer, and the so-called middle class continues to degenerate into the poor, so purchasing power has been unable to rise. Inflation has been hovering at a low level since purchasing power failed.

At the same time, many of the laws that dominate the third technology, such as Moore's Law in the semiconductor industry, are gradually approaching their limits. except for a few areas, we have not produced such revolutionary theories as relativity and quantum mechanics in decades.

On the contrary, various Ponzi schemes and debt crises are beginning to show signs of spreading, whether in China or the United States.

If China can still use administrative means to forcibly solve and regulate markets such as P2P credit, then it is hard to say in the United States.

At the end of 2016, more than 41 million Americans owed $1.4 trillion in federal student loans, almost all credit card loans and car loans combined. About 8.1 million Americans are still defaulting on their debts, which adds up to more than 38 states.

There are so many loans that there are not enough sugar dads in the United States.

Perhaps human beings have enough ability to slow down the economic cycle, but what is coming, what cannot escape can not escape. (editor: Wang Mengyan)