Frederick Lewis Allen - The Big Bull Market 汉译

The Big Bull Market was dead. Billions of dollars’ worth of profits and paper profits – had disappeared. The grocer, the window-cleaner and the seamstress had lost their capital. In every town there were families which had suddenly dropped from showy affluence into debt. Investors who had dreamed of retiring to live on their fortunes now found themselves back once more at the very beginning of the long road to riches. Day by day the newspapers printed the grim report of suicides.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Coolidge-Hoover Prosperity was not yet dead, but it was dying. Under the impact of the shock of panic, a multitude of ills which hitherto had passed unnoticed or had been offset by stock-market optimism began to beset the body economic, as poisons seep through the human system when a vital organ has ceased to function normally. Although the liquidation of nearly 3 billion dollars of brokers’ loans contracted credit, and Reserve Banks lowered the rediscount rate, and the way in which the larger banks and corporations of the country had survived the emergency without a single failure of large proportions offered real encouragement, nevertheless the poisons were there: over production of capital; over-ambitious expansion of business concerns; overproduction of commodities under the stimulus of installment buying and buying with stock-market profits; the maintenance of an artificial price level for many commodities; the depressed condition of European trade. No matter how many soothsayers of high finance proclaimed that all was well, no matter how earnestly the president set to work to repair the damage with soft words and White House conferences, a major depression was inevitably under way.

Nor was that all. Prosperity is more than an economic condition; it is a state of mind. The Big Bull Market had been more than a climax of a business cycle; it had been the climax of a cycle in American mass thinking and mass emotion. There was hardly a man or woman in the country whose attitude toward life had not been affected by it in some degree and was not now affected by the sudden and brutal shattering of hope. With the Big Bull Market gone, and prosperity going, Americans were soon to find themselves living in an altered world which called for new adjustments, new ideas, new habits of thought and a new order of values. The psychological climate was changing; the ever-shifting currents of American life were turning into new channels.

The post-war decade had come to its close. An era had ended.