I keep thinking of my father's stories about how the Great Depression evolved, and rather than a crash (like everyone hears) it was more of a swoon, taking several years. He went from having "somewhere around a million on paper" to bankruptcy in 1932, moving his wife and my brother (yes, my half-brother is that old) in with my aunt. She was the only one who had a job. By 1933, she had 8 family members living in her in her 1-bedroom bungalow.: my father, wife and child, my grandmother, her sister Margareta, Aunt Elena, Aunt Lydia, and cousin Greta. Fun... Especially since Margareta was going severely crazy by then---my brother tells stories of her standing like a statue in the corner of the dining room, staring fixedly into space, for hours at a time. Creepy.
Hmm, stock crash, dustbowl, a huge famine in the Orient, what else was going on then? What lessons can we learn from then?