Again and again, we read about the terrible calamity and the $7 trillion in asset value that’s been lost in the stock market. It’s comforting, though to read about how much worse it was in 1929. Karen Blumenthal wrote yesterday in the WSJ about how back then, banks eagerly loaned money to people to buy stock, and when the values plunged, the loans were called in. It was panic and that’s why the legend of people jumping off buildings was true. There was no FDIC insurance so nothing could be saved.
Amidst this terrible calamity, unemployment shot up to 25 percent, and there was no unemployment insurance either. Like John McCain said just a few months back, the president at the time Herbert Hoover, declared “the fundamental business of the country…is on a sound and prosperous basis.” He’d live to regret those words.
But the most important part of Blumenthal’s story came at the end, and had nothing to do with the stock market. It was about what makes her truly rich. She wrote that for more than a decade, she’s been going to her local elementary school to tutor. She spends time reading “to children who own no books of their own, whose families can’t afford school supplies and who have never been to a dentist. For the price of 45 minutes a week, I return to my desk feeling as wealthy as any one person needs to be.”
God bless her for her wisdom and grace.
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