Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons, Part 05: “A Warning to Panic Breeders”
For today’s reminders of why Wall Street can’t be trusted on their word alone to learn from past mistakes - following are more cartoons showing past mistakes Wall Street failed to learn from…
The first two cartoons below were published in the New York City comic periodical, The Picayune, following the Panic of 1857. Below, The Game of Panic, by Mortimer “Doesticks” Thomson, in the October 10th, 1857 issue.
Click on any picture, to see an enlarged version.
And next, in the October 31st, 1857 issue, Authentic Portrait of the Panic, by Frank “Triangle” Bellew.
Skipping closer to modern times, is Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T. McCutcheon‘s 1912 depiction of then President-Elect Woodrow Wilson, warning Wall Street to not start a false financial panic for their personal benefit. Titled A Warning to Panic Breeders, this example is as was later reprinted in the January 1913 issue of Cartoons Magazine.
Click here to find both the prior Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons entries, and related I.T.C.H. posts. This series will continue, while the debate on financial reforms continues in Congress (except Mondays and holidays, on which I already had other material planned).
Series Refrain: Bank frauds and Wall Street swindles, resulting in economic ruin for everyone else, were regular and frequent occurrences prior to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s institution of laws designed to prevent further Great Depressions. These regulations worked until, starting in the 1980s, conservatives began dismantling those protections, stating that we’d be better off with an unfettered and unregulated market, free to do whatever it wants. Wall Street firms swore at that time, that they’d learned the lessons of the Great Depression, and could be trusted to not engage in dangerous practices.
Bull****!
If there is one lesson from the various economic collapses throughout history, it’s that human greed is eternal. There will always be selfish fools, who grab for themselves without care for the damage they inflict on others.
Doug Wheeler
financial reform
BellewSr
NYPicayune
— Doug
[...] for the New York comic periodical The Picayune, published October 31, 1857. For comparison, click here to see that earlier Bellew cartoon, titled Authentic Portrait of the Panic. Additionally [...]