For todays post, another comic strip from the collection of rough drafts by an unknown late 1880s / early 1890s aspiring cartoonist (Click here for prior example). Titled Pride and Its Face, its depiction of an overconfident stock investor and his downfall represents a theme that must have been current at that time.

"Well, good bye, Heapkins, I guess I'll stop around to my brokers and see how many thousands I'm in today."

Heapkins: "I wonder how many thousands he did make today."

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