The stock market

Palo Alto Daily News
Serving Atherton, East Palo Alto, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Portola Valley, Stanford, Sunnyvale, Woodside
Nov.6,2009
Dear Editor: The stock market crash of 1929 was the most devastating crash in U.S. history, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout. Four phrases — Black Thursday, Black Friday, then Black Monday and Black Tuesday — are commonly used to describe this collapse of stock values. But the catastrophic downturn on Oct. 28-29, 1929 precipitated widespread alarm and the onset of an unprecedented and long-lasting economic depression for the United States and the world. This stock market collapse continued for a month.

Today, the only news you see in the headlines is "slight gain in this," "not diving quite as fast in that." Any time the economy stops going down so fast, they say, "oh, recovery." That's recovery? Some little tiny grain of encouraging news makes the headlines, but the huge monumental losses taken by the banks and businesses are hidden in a little 2-inch notice in a column on the financial page. They're trying to keep it out of the headlines because they don't want to scare the public into a panic.

The big corporations fail, business fails, everything fails and it's said the government will pay. Trouble is, the government itself is broke and borrowing the money to pay. And do you know where the U.S. gets this money from?

Ted Rudow III,MA

Palo Alto