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Here's a series of quotes from Gordon's
Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power
Banks began borrowing money from the Federal Reserve through the discount window at 5 percent and lending it to brokers. The Federal Reserve could have stopped this any time it wanted to, and there is little doubt that Benjamin Strong would have done exactly that. But, leaderless, the bank used only what it called "moral suasion" to urge the commercial banks to end the practice. [pg. 313]
All markets, however, bear and bull alike, finally run out of steam, and by December stocks were moving upward, although on much reduced volume. By year's end, while many of the high-flying stocks had been savaged, some market sectors — such as airplane manufacturers, department stores, and steel companies — actually showed gains for the year. It was widely thought the crash had been only a severe correction for a much overbought market. In January 1930 the New York Times thought the biggest news story of 1929 had been Admiral Byrd's flight over the South Pole. [pg. 318]
George Harrison, who had succeeded Benjamin Strong as governor of the New York Federal Reserve, had followed his predecessor's advice on dealing with such a situation when Strong had noted that "we have the power to deal with such an emergency instantly by flooding the Street with money." [pg. 319]
But George Harrison did not have anything like the influence Strong had had with the other Federal Reserve banks, and he was criticized by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, among others, for overstepping his bounds. The Federal Reserve as a whole did not move decisively to add liquidity to the banking system nationally, a serious mistake. [pg. 319]
Gordon's
Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power
The result was a largely unnoticed (at the time) cycle. American investment banks aggressively pushed highly profitable loans and underwritings in Europe. Europe used the proceeds to finance imports from the United States, and Germany used them to fund reparations to the Allied Powers. The allied Powers then used the reparations to repay their war loans to the United States. [pg. 311]
The turn of the 20th century also saw the flexible provision of power, as detailed in Gordon's Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power
Every schoolchild knows that Edison invented, or made substantial contributions to, the phonograph, the stock ticker, the telephone (along with important mechanical improvements to Bell's original machine, Edison also coined the word hello,) movies, and, of course, electric lights. [pg. 302]
... One problem was that if there was a leakage of current under the pavement, horses would conduct it through their shoes and panic. Many of Edison's on-the-fly solutions were patentable, and he applied for no fewer than 102 patents in 1882, the most in any one year, as he was building his systems. [pg. 303]
... For one thing, it changed the very shape of factories. Steam engines are very inefficient in terms of the amount of energy in the fuel that is converted into work-doing energy. And the smaller they are, the more inefficient. So nineteenth-century factories were tall, with a shaft running up the side of the building, from which horizontal shafts on each floor took power. It was important that these shafts be as short as possible. [pg. 307]
... But small electric motors are just as efficient as large ones (more so in some ways), so it made sense, once the price of electricity dropped sufficiently, to power each machine separately by electricity, eliminating the need for shafts to transmit power. (An electric motor is exactly the same mechanism as an electric generator, only working backward. The first uses electricity to produce power, the latter uses power to produce electricity.) Once freed from the need to connect machinery to the shaft from the steam engine, factories began to spread out horizontally on one level [pg. 307]
... [Though the battery] It also allowed many people, such as women and the elderly, to use automobiles unassisted. [pg. 309]
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