Will the world end up in the 1930s again with mass unemployment and out of control inflation and wars???

Question

Will the world end up in the 1930s again with mass unemployment and out of control inflation and wars???

Answer 1

I agree,

none of these people ie Blair and Brown have ever lived normal lives so how can they even imagine what it's like to be in our shoes. Why do they all have to get involved in every other countries business?

I'm surprised we haven't put our fists up to Russia yet. When do other countries help us out?

  

Answer 2

The parallels are not very close.

There was high unemployment in the 1930s and that was due largely to a collapse of the capitalist financial system, operating through stock exchanges.  But the fault lay not in the system but in the way speculators had taken over and lost sight of the real economic condition of industry and agriculture.  Productivity had been falling for some years and there was a shortage of purchasing power after WW1.  That was mainly the fault of the French and their insistence upon reparations from Germany.  The result was a gradual loss of output in Europe combined with the withdrawal of wartime contracts from industry in USA.

However, there was no inflation in the 1930s.  Generally, after 1929, prices fell for most commodities and services.  It was cheaper to buy a house in 1936 than it had been in 1926, and the same was true for agricultural produce.  Prices for cars fell but that was mainly the result of improving production methods and falling wage rates.

The war of 1939-45 was another direct result of the French insistence on reducing Germany to an impoverished, backward economy.  The Treaty of Versailles imposed such indignities and poverties on Germany and Austria that their rebellion was inevitable, and the rise of Hitler was almost predictable. French foreign policy policy had and has a lot to answer for in that period.  There is nothing equivalent today.

So, to answer your qustion, the circumstances of the 1930s are not equivalent to those affecting world trade today.  Now we have a near-monopoly in the supply of oil via OPEC, a failure of public (tax) policy in Europe and USA so that foodstuffs are being converted into vehicle fuel instead of being available for human consumption, and a failure of the financial system from excessive lending against high risk, especially in the USA mortgage market.  It now appears that all western banks participated in the same high risk business, either by direct lending or by speculation in derivative financial instruments.

It need not be out of control and application of international economic measures could bring it back on track.  The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer seems not to think so, but he has an agenda which seems to be broader than the wellbeing of ordinary people.

Answer 3

We are nearly there, good old Gordon Brown and his cronies!

Answer 4

Well, Britain has a failing liberal government that is more concerned about jetting around the world to butt into other people's problems than it is in looking after its home affair. America has a neo-con isolationist president who isn't interested in any part of the world that he doesn't own or bomb, and there is a sleeping giant in Asia waiting for its chance muscle in on everybody else's territory the first chance that it can get.

I can certainly see the parallels.