Aside, perhaps, from weddings and other similarly familial occasions, which at least offer up an excuse for the sentimental among us to unwittingly collude with greetings cards manufacturers, all anniversaries have a tendency towards self-fulfilment. And so, as we ‘celebrate' the day exactly a year after the stock market crash of 2008, which as coincidental serendipity has it, falls exactly eighty years from the onset of the Great Depression of nineteen-thirty-nine, we can be forgiven to ponder if the U.S., and therefore the rest of us, teeters on the brink on another similar catastrophe?

It was two o'clock in the afternoon on the 24^th of October, nineteen twenty-nine, when Richard Whitney, the boss of the New York Stock Exchange, elbowed his way across a panic-stricken trading floor and proceeded to blow one-hundred-and-thirty-million bucks belonging to Wall Street's richest men in an effort to put a stop to the free-fall. It worked for a day. Moreover, it also worked to signal the real start of the financial crash. Suddenly, the old remedies no longer worked; they called it Black Thursday - the day when faith and liquidity ran out of the market. By the time it reached rock bottom in nineteen thirty-two, the Dow Jones had lost nine tenths of its value, spelling disaster, not just for investors, but an apocalyptic nightmare also for millions of citizens.    

When we look at the Dow this time around, the fall which we saw last year that took it from a high of fourteen thousand to six thousand two hundred this year, largely by dint of an infinitely more globalised marketplace, amounts to a rate of descent much faster than it managed in nineteen twenty-nine.

Yet for all the similarities, the recent turmoil contains one fundamental difference: the Great Depression started with a stock market crash. Our problems, eight decades later, cut straight to the chase with a bank crisis. It wasn't until December tenth, nineteen thirty, that a run on the Bronx branch of the Bank of the United States gave rise to the unpalatable conclusion that most of its collateral was tied up in bad mortgages. Next day, the bank was allowed to fail. Debt and deflations followed, as eventually - two years later - nearly half of all U.S. banks had collapsed. Then, unlike today, there was no FDIC deposit insurance scheme: if your bank closed, your money went with it. How different now, when the spiraling cost of bank failures to the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fund is estimated to stand at $25bn, acting as a chilling indication of how more than 100 US banks have now failed this year, with forecasters expect there are more to come.

IT'S NOT OVER TILL IT'S OVER

Eighty years later, in the wake of Lehman Bothers et al, and faced with another catastrophic meltdown, the authorities acted swiftly, printing money, spending it and shoring up the banks, all the time totally underplaying the fundamental contradiction inherent in the free market being bailed out by the state. And while President Obama is talking tough on bankers' pay, his faltering efforts to regulate the industry is troubling those even at the centre of power.

However, there's one particularly chilling parallel with the thirties that remains ominous: the collapse of global trade. In nineteen-thirty, America passed the Smoot-Hawley Act - raising U.S. tariffs on imported goods to record levels, thus ensuing retaliatory measures by its trading partners that reduced American exports and imports by more than half. Three years later, trade had contracted by one-third of its pre-crash level, and the world economy virtually unravelled. Even as protectionism kicked in, America, in essence, found itself importing crisis via the monetary system, defending the value of the dollar by constantly depressing its own economy. Those counties that devalued first, recovered first.

It's sobering, therefore, to consider how after last year's meltdown, global trade collapsed even faster than it did in the nineteen-thirties. With currencies, there is no more gold standard. And that means the danger still remains that counties will still try protectionism - or devaluation - to compete their way out of crisis.

On Wall Street today - buoyed up by billions of dollars of public money, the laws of unintended consequence has exercised little more effect than to stimulate a new bull-run, creating record profits for the banks, where they're certainly not thinking about nineteen-thirty-nine. Yet unemployment currently stands at 10%, and the recovery looks fragile. Whether we're really taking heed that catastrophic breakdowns require significant social and economic changes, the jury remain out.

At the moment, it looks like the remedy consists of little more than a whole lot of hope and a wholly bigger lot of fast money, which as coincidence has it, is precisely what caused the problem in the first place. Wall Street has already clawed back around half its losses from last year. But it's worth remembering, in the Autumn of nineteen-thirty - exactly eighty years ago - that's also what it looked like then.

Happy Anniversary!