In each case, there were warning signals across the land of a coming economic recession, possibly a full-scale depression, and an uneasy Republican administration, only a year or so in office, was wondering what to do for its best friend and principal political client, the business community. In each case a steep decline in second-rank stock issues—a sort of hidden crash, since it didn’t show up in the popular averages—was already under way. In each case speculation continued to flourish, and money was historically tight; and in each case the Federal Reserve, torn between trying to dampen speculation and inflation on the one hand and trying to head off recession on the other, was frantically pressing its various monetary levers to little effect. But there was at least one big difference. Where in 1929 the stock market became the national craze as it had never been before, and in some senses had never quite been since, and interest in it was actually increased by its disintegration, in 1970 the investor mood was one of fatalism, and the decline in trading volume would become as great a problem for Wall Street as the decline in stock prices.
