There’s less than 10 days to go until our 250th national birthday celebration on July 4, so I’m running out of time. This is my continuing overview from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters of the entire financial history of the United States. In my judgment, this can be summarized in just three words: boom, bubble, bust. I recently described in Part 1, which you can read by clicking here, my perspective of the first century of American independence. Part 2, which you can read by clicking here, covered the next half-century to 1926. This is Part 3, getting us up to our 200th birthday in 1976.
By the time of the bicentennial, the U.S. had experienced 33 boom-bubble-and-bust cycles consuming, with recoveries, about two-thirds of its then-200 years of existence, one cycle every three years. For better or for worse, financial volatility was firmly baked into our culture. Continue reading
This is a shameless plug to sell a book I wrote some years back. It has nothing to do with Sin City, other than I ended my 20 years as a referee of youth soccer here after becoming New to Las Vegas.