In his seminal The World in Depression, 1929–1939, Charles Kindleberger argued that the Great Depression was not caused by the 1929 crash but by an interregnum between British and US hegemons.
No country large enough or mature enough was able to step into international finance as the lender and consumer of last resort.
The British economy was fading fast, and the US was not yet ready to carry the load. So economies splintered and entered a trade death spiral.
Let’s turn to today’s stock market bubble. TME asks whether it is 1995 or 2000. 