Chapter 573: Financial Disaster

One day in May 1927, on the streets of Wall, stock managers in suits and leather shoes hurried to their respective offices with briefcases and hot coffee in their hands, brewing about the upcoming "battle"; In a high-end apartment in Manhattan, wealthy investors sit at the dining table in silk dressing gowns, reading ink-scented newspapers and eating exquisite meals; On a country farm more than 100 kilometers from the New York city, a farmer in a shirt and bib has just eaten breakfast, smoking a low-quality cigar and filling in the numbers on the stock proxy form......

At this moment, the voice of the morning newscaster was heard simultaneously on the radio in the neighborhood and on the radio in the room, and his mood today was obviously not high, and even the opening sentence made many listeners feel bad. Pen | fun | pavilion www. biquge。 Sure enough, the first piece of news was bad news: a few hours ago, the 10,000-ton cruise ship "White Swan" capsized in Cuban waters, nearly half of the more than 700 passengers on board were Americans, and the US Navy ships arrived at the scene after the Cuban ship.

Hearing this news, whether it is a stock manager, an investor or a farmer involved in the stock market, the first thought of many people is not where this disaster will lead the international landscape, but is worried that the stock is about to fall sharply. Telephone lines in New York were quickly congested after the broadcast of the broadcast news, and suffocating tensions were already in place on Wall Street's stock market before it even opened.

In the twenties of the twentieth century, the U.S. financial industry boomed unprecedentedly, and from 1921 to 1926, the Dow Jones Industrial Index tripled, creating many myths of getting rich overnight. Under the huge temptation of making money when entering the market, people have poured into the stock trading market regardless of their occupation, and borrowing and speculating in stocks has become a common phenomenon, even to the point that banks have no money to borrow. Recently, Russia and Turkey have been engaged in a continuous contest in the Caucasus, which has affected the oil exploitation and transportation of the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia, the independence uprising in Egypt has caused the Suez Canal to be closed for a time, the turbulent international situation has made the stock index of Wall Street like a roller coaster, and during the crisis in the Azores, the US stock market has experienced a sharp shock -- learning that the US and British fleets have withdrawn from the conflict zone, The most important strategic stronghold in the Atlantic was thus occupied by the Germans, and the stock price of the New York Stock Exchange fell for 11 consecutive days, and hundreds of millions of dollars evaporated. This was followed by the conclusion of a military alliance agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom, and on the spurred by this major positive news, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stopped falling and recovered, and a considerable number of investors quickly recouped the losses of the previous period. After the U.S. Congress approved the bill to expand the stock market, the stock price began a new round of sharp rise, which attracted a boom in people's investment in the stock market and profit, and also made Americans pay unprecedented attention to various international events.

On the day of the White Swan event, the U.S. stock market fell slightly, but before the market closed, some big investors suddenly threw out the stocks in their hands, and rumors suddenly spread and people panicked. The "White Swan" is a fast cruise ship built after the war, belonging to the White Star Steamship Company under the Morgan consortium, which regularly travels between Europe and North America, and is said to be very familiar with the conditions in the Atlantic, and its capsized position has not deviated from the course, although there is no evidence of German involvement, but it has long been rumored that the Germans have deployed large submarines carrying torpedoes and mines to the east coast of the United States, they can quietly hide under the water, and float up at night to breathe, The fuel and food for the submarine could last the determined German crew for three or four months. The sinking of the "White Swan" this time, or encountering something that should not have been encountered, was attacked in a murderous manner. If the speculation is true, it means that the strong Germans are ready to attack their number one rival, and the psychological panic will greatly shake the confidence of investors to invest in the United States, and once a large amount of capital is withdrawn from the United States, the stock market will inevitably plummet catastrophically.

The day after the day of the White Swan event, the New York stock exchange ushered in a diving day, a large number of shareholders were trapped, and the fall of the stock index exceeded the financial disaster of 1907 -- when the New York Stock Exchange fell by nearly 50 percent from its peak the previous year, and the direct cause of this crisis was the failure of the capitalists to manipulate the shares of the "American Copper Company" and the banks that lent money to this market manipulation were run out. The run then spread to other related banks and trust companies. Within a week, New York City's third-largest trust collapsed, causing fear to spread throughout the city's trusts. With a large number of depositors withdrawing money from regional banks, the panic spread across the country, with several banks and businesses going bankrupt. Without the intervention of financier J-P. Morgan, the panic could have been even more far-reaching. Morgan bet large sums of his own money and persuaded other New York bankers to do the same to strengthen the banking system, and the financial crisis was eased, but it was not long before a major brokerage firm, using shares of the "Tennessee Coal, Railroad Company" as collateral, borrowed large sums of debt to make the crisis worse. It was only when the antitrust President Theodore Roosevelt approved an emergency takeover that the stock price avoided a sharp drop and collapsed. The following year, U.S. Senator Nelson Aldrich established and personally chaired a committee to investigate the crisis and propose future solutions, thus establishing the Federal Reserve System in the United States.

Although the Americans had a very painful lesson in that financial crisis, the temptation of the stock market to get rich is too great, and the continuous bull market has attracted more and more entrants, and the United States has almost reached the point of national stock speculation, many people mortgage real estate and even borrow at high interest rates, and the bubble in the stock market has already reached a worrying point, and the "white swan incident" has become the needle that bursts the bubble. In the following half month, the U.S. stock market continued to fall, and the decline was close to the 1907 stock market crash, and the U.S. government's preliminary investigation into the cause of the sinking of the "White Swan" was released, but it failed to reverse the decline. In order to dispel the public panic caused by the stock market crash, the leading bankers of Wall Street met to discuss a solution, and they decided to operate in a similar way to the 1907 panic, that is, to buy a large number of blue chips at a level above the market price, but this practice only halted the decline in the stock market for a short time while the investors continued to take a wait-and-see attitude. As the German Navy made an "untimely" display of naval prowess on Kaiser Wilhelm II's coronation day, rumors swirled again, the confidence of American investors was shaken again, stock indices continued to fall, and the financial crisis gradually spread to Europe.

Since the end of the war, the United States and Britain have gradually established a close economic and trade alliance to jointly counter Germany's aggressive expansionist posture, and the British stock market has naturally become the hardest hit area. Beginning in May 1927, the London Police Force had to keep an eye on the balconies of high-rise buildings to prevent frustrated stock speculators from committing suicide by jumping off buildings, but this did not solve the problem. With the bursting of the financial bubble, the real economy of Britain began to be catastrophically affected, the first batch of factories that closed down could not maintain operations due to the rupture of the capital chain, due to the rapid decline of domestic consumption and foreign export markets, more and more factories were forced to lay off workers and reduce production due to the failure to receive orders, and the economy fell into depression, except for the military industry and related industries were spared by military orders, the industry generally fell into recession.

There was no direct evidence that the White Swan event off Cuban waters was linked to the German Navy, and in fact, there was a considerable economic bubble in the post-war boom, and the main stock indices of the Berliner Stock Exchange began to dive high in the third month after the US financial crisis. In just two weeks, enough money to rebuild a high seas fleet evaporated on the stock exchange, while German industry was also devastated, with a wave of factory closures beginning in the north, which was highly dependent on international trade, and then gradually spreading to the east and south, and the confidence of the German people was hit hard for the first time since the end of the war, and the economic catastrophe was blamed on the continued expansion of armaments by the United States government and the greed of the American people in the stock market. And indignant at the deliberate framing of the actions of public opinion by the Americans. Of course, at this time, the anti-American sentiment of the German people was not enough to push the country to the brink of war, and the two countries were still important trading partners of each other, even after the White Swan event and the American financial crisis, there were still dozens of transoceanic cruise ships to and from the European and American continents, and in order to reduce the heavy burden caused by huge military expenditures and use more government funds to change the economic difficulties, the two governments strengthened diplomatic consultations in an attempt to change the tense atmosphere of the arms race.

The financial disaster has swept Europe and the United States, and even the world's great powers such as Germany have not been spared, and Asian countries with relatively weak economic foundations are even less likely to stay out of the situation. Japan's empty treasury as a result of its shipbuilding race, armament expansion, and foreign aggression has suffered the most profound negative impact; its exports have plummeted by 80 percent, its traditional foreign trade, which is mainly raw silk, is facing a collapse, the wharves and warehouses in all major ports are full of unsalable goods, a large number of banks and factories have closed down in batches, and the Japanese Government has no choice but to avoid economic collapse through the militarization of the national economy. Under the premise of economic monopoly, Japanese enterprises maintained monopolistic high prices in the domestic market, while dumping them at low prices externally in order to obtain the necessary foreign exchange for the purchase of strategic resources, resulting in a sharp decline in the living standards of the Japanese people and an unprecedentedly high willingness to expand and colonize abroad. After occupying Northeast China, in order to plunder more wealth from the rich North China and even Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the Japanese army ignored the secret agreement between the United States and Japan and brazenly crossed the line of the Great Wall and attacked southward, which triggered an unprecedented diplomatic protest by the US government since the Japanese invasion of China.

(End of chapter)