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Despite The Great Gatsby taking place before the events of the stock market crash the author of the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald hints at the inevitably of the crash and also indirectly blames the American Dream as the cause to the crash. By reading between the lines you can see that Fitzgerald tries to teach his readers of the harsh reality that the American Dream has become corrupted and that if people continue to attempt to pursue it would cause disastrous effects. This was seen four years after the novels release and continues to be seen today not only in American society but throughout the world. Here is a brief history of the 1929 stock market crash.
One thing that is certain about the crash of 1929 is the fact that people were not prepared for it and that it cost them. The truth is that most of the people who suffered the most, during the crash and the subsequent great depression, were the same people who had spent the previous decade spending all the money they had daily on things that they neither needed nor wanted just because everyone else was doing it. These people had been told that success was measured in wealth and that the more you bought, the better off you were. One would think that after almost a century later we would have learned by now but in reality we are the just same people our ancestors were all that time ago.
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS OF 2008
Much like the crash of 1929 people were spending money they didn’t have. Due to a law that was passed by the U.S government back in the 70’s banks were offering people extremely low mortgage rates giving them a false sense that they could afford much bigger homes. What ultimately happened was that the mortgage prices began to increase to more normal levels and people realized they could not afford to pay these kinds of prices. This caused many people to literally take everything they own and abandon their homes leaving whatever they couldn’t take to the banks, who obviously tried to then sell these homes all at the same time in an attempt to break even, causing the value of homes to decline to extremely low levels. This decrease in the value of homes caused many banks to nearly go bankrupt, only to be bailed out by the government. The families who had lost everything also could no longer purchase consumer goods which then caused trillions of dollars, destroying the economy. Although not as bad as in 1929, the financial crisis did prove that people around the world are still trying to pursue a dream that is unrealistic and damaging, not only to themselves but those around them. This is only further highlighted in the U.S’s 20 trillion dollar dept, 987 million of which is credit card debt (source:http://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html). People need to realize that there is more to life then material goods and that they need to save for not only their futures, but for their families’ future. Here is a diagram depicting some of the similarities and differences between the 1929 stock market crash and the 2008 financial crisis.
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