Long Depression
21
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12
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11
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Search complete. 21 mentions across 12 episodes found for "Long Depression".
Oct 5, 2026
Jeff CowieGUEST
And, and now there's people in the streets, there's food riots, there's, you know, it's, it's a disaster in, in 1873.
Jeff CowieGUEST
This, people called it the Great Depression or the Long Depression before we had the Great Depression, uh, of, of the 1930s.
Jeff CowieGUEST
It, it was enormous, and so I, I, I really do think that the structural issues, uh, provide the shift wh- uh, in the opening for the Democrats to begin to push through.
Bob CrawfordHOST
So we hear about the w- the scandals of the...
Brandon LightlyGUEST
The problem is all of them would've been also pretty bad.
Brandon LightlyGUEST
H- Like, how do we restore profitability in the beginning of the 21st century, getting out of the Great Depression and the Long Depression? Wars.
JamesGUEST
Yeah.
Brandon LightlyGUEST
Like, we just-
John MerrimanHOST
And so this is very important.
John MerrimanHOST
And just another point, until ten years ago, people still talked about the Long Depression.
John MerrimanHOST
And that was a very unfortunate term because it gave the sense that the depression that gripped Europe between 1873, 1874, and the mid-1890s was in any way comparable to the Great Depression in industrialized countries and in not so industrialized countries, but the industrial depression from 1929.
John MerrimanHOST
In the case of the US, the US doesn't really get out of it until the massive arms production following Pearl Harbor and World War II.
Jose MiguelGUEST
So in terms of the Great Depression, the first thing to take into account, just to step back a little bit more in the history, and I'll give it super brief.
Jose MiguelGUEST
So you have the Long Depression, which was the end of the 19th century, where you had this event where under the Grant administration, they demonetized silver.
Jose MiguelGUEST
So before that event, silver and gold were both used as money in the U.S. after only gold could be used for taxes.
Jose MiguelGUEST
The end result was a massive depression that lasted for more than 20 years.
Jose MiguelGUEST
But they got pretty close to it using ledgers, paper ledgers, as well as as well as even whiskey, bourbon in particular.
Jose MiguelGUEST
was used as a way to just keep the record, you know, store a value and just ledgers, paper ledgers for keeping who owes who what, for what transactions.
Jose MiguelGUEST
And that's how the U.S. managed to get through the Long Depression.
Jose MiguelGUEST
It was the Yukon Gold Rush, as well as the development and expansion of the steam turbine, which drastically increased the amount of energy you could get out of coal.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
It ushered in what was long called the Great Depression.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
We now just call it the Long Depression because the Great Depression was deeper.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
But the Long Depression that came after 1873 is still the longest in American history.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
It was exacerbated by all sorts of silly things afterwards.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
And obviously, the US didn't have a central bank, so it couldn't manage the economic cycle so well.
Peter St OngeGUEST
Now, you can also compare it to past episodes.
Peter St OngeGUEST
So probably the most famous episode of ongoing deflation in U.S. history anyway is the so-called Long Depression.
Peter St OngeGUEST
I believe it was the 1870s, maybe early 1880s.
Peter St OngeGUEST
And that was about a 10 or 15 year period where prices were falling every single year.
Peter St OngeGUEST
It was also the golden age of really humanity.
Peter St OngeGUEST
Everything was invented in that long depression.
Peter St OngeGUEST
Magnetism, computers, vacuum tubes, every single thing that Elon Musk does, robots, all of it, right? All of it, helicopters, airplanes, like you name it, it was all invented in this very, very small window that was dominated by the long deflation.
Peter St OngeGUEST
And so if you look through history, in fact, periods of deflation are economically healthier.
BeauHOST
All right, what else we got? On this day in 1869, Black Friday, panic on Wall Street after investors Jay Gould and James Fisk attempt to corner the gold market.
BeauHOST
Do you remember we talked about the Long Depression beginning in the 1870s, 1872, 1873? There's a big Wall Street crash, obviously not the same as the Wall Street crash in 1929.
BeauHOST
There's been more than one crash on Wall Street.
BeauHOST
So there's a long depression started during the presidency of Ulysses S.
BeauHOST
Grant.
BeauHOST
But yeah, beginning with a Black Friday.
Ben CarlsonHOST
meaning the cost of living was 28% higher in 1940 than it was at the onset of the 19th century.
Ben CarlsonHOST
And it's crazy, the worst bout of deflation was the Panic of 1873, which they called the Long Depression.
Ben CarlsonHOST
I think it was originally called the Great Depression, then they changed it to the Long Depression after the Great Depression came along.
Ben CarlsonHOST
Prices fell 40% over two decades.
Ben CarlsonHOST
Chart off, please.
Ben CarlsonHOST
Inflation itself isn't necessarily good, but it's the lesser of two evils when compared to deflation.
Ben CarlsonHOST
Deflation means lower wage growth and a shrinking economy.
Ben CarlsonHOST
So luckily, I'd studied a little bit this long depression.
M.P. PellicerHOST
Western miners branded the measure the Crime of 73.
M.P. PellicerHOST
It began a long contraction of the nation's money supply and the so-called Long Depression.
M.P. PellicerHOST
which opened that year and lasted until 1879.
M.P. PellicerHOST
The era of vast fortunes coined from silver and sold to a guaranteed buyer, the federal government was over.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
It actually created, I think, like, in a very physical way, the United States as it is today, but all this debt, you know, eventually came due and, and many of these railways were completely idiotic, almost every single one of them bankrupt, and it caused a massive, um, I mean, a depression.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
It was called the Great Depression until the actual Great Depression came, and we now call that 1870s crash The Long Depression.
Peter Thal LarsenHOST
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
Still the longest in US history.
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