The overall consequences are always difficult to apprehend

Eighty years later, the crash of October 1929 remains the epitome of financial crises. Its magnitude, its seriousness and its painful consequences, it remains engraved in the collective subconscious of investors and savers, yet quick to forget the unfortunate episodes. Analysts and strategists live so in the spectre of the "Black Thursday" of October 24, 1929 - which resulted in the world economy in the great depression in the early 1930 - they have not manqué to draw a parallel with the recent turbulence that shook the financial system.

In the aftermath of the bankruptcy of the Investment Bank Lehman Brothers, Wall Street flagship and symbol of the sophistication of financial engineering, which nearly precipitate fall across the global banking sector, the former boss of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan did not hesitate to evoke "an event that occurs once all the fifty years, probably once a century"as even the crisis as "the most serious since the end of the second world war". Echoes, the American economist Paul Krugman, known for his work on international trade in imperfect competition and geographical economics, did not hesitate to say: "we have the party in 1929 and now we are in 1930."For those who received the Nobel Prize in 2008, the recent crisis would never be a modern version of the wave of Bank panics that swept the United States three generations ago, pushing the real economy in a huge recession and its images of poverty attendant immortalized by John Steinbeck novel ("the grapes of Wrath") and the film John Ford Schroeder.

Be wary of reconciliations

However, experience shows that it is always difficult to refer to the past history and economy. Reconciliations between the current crisis and the turn of the 1930s are obvious. Of course, stock debacles springs are similar, but the nature of the activities from the growth in the period before the two episodes of stock market crash is quite different. In the 1920s, it was the automobile industry growing with the emergence of mass by the Ford T production. In the 2000s, the engine has been provided by the boom in real estate, encouraged by a strong incentive credit policy. In both cases, the real economy has been marked by a disconnect between the evolution of productivity gains and the progression of the wage income. But -do applied in 1929 gave way to a pragmatic, fast and efficient state interventionism. The mechanisms that led to the great depression of the 1930s were, admittedly, widely analyzed since. And not only by the economist John Galbraith, that these works were made famous in the 1970s. If central banks, which, as hit of blindness, remained the weapon at the foot in 1929, are this time also agreed quickly to the first rank of which Federal Reserve American, is that the latter is precisely chaired by Ben Bernanke, author of an essay on the great depression in which he develops the idea that it is the responsibility of the monetary authorities and policies to maintain the stability of the financial system. What they have done.

The question that arises today, it is whether how long will the global economy recover from the crisis when it comes to cross. The overall consequences are always difficult to apprehend. Despite the break with the laissez-faire that Keynesian policies adopted by President Roosevelt after his election in 1932, the United States will be more than ten years to find their level of production of before the crisis, which will lead, you know, on the tragedy of the second world war.

What are the consequences

Today, economists want to believe that the consequences of the current crisis will be less serious than those of 1929. For Joseph Stiglitz, crowned by the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001 for his work on the information asymmetry, the world now of the tools needed for fiscal and monetary policy "to avoid an another great depression".But one thing is sure, the journalist and historian Pierre Stéphany says in the book he has just devoted to the crisis of 1929 (1), as "at the end of the tunnel where it sank in 1929, the society that it is discovered was no longer the same (...), gives all think that it will nor the crisis of 2009 come out to repeat the same ruts".