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Industrial production’s annual average fell nearly 46% from 1929 to 1932. Over the same period, bank suspensions surged from 659 in 1929 to 1,350 in 1930 and 2,293 in 1931, before the banking system’s final breakdown pushed the 1933 total to 4,000.

That sequence explains how an ordinary recession became the Great Depression. The October 1929 crash damaged household wealth, business confidence and demand for credit-financed goods. The decisive escalation arrived in fall 1930, when regional banking panics began destroying deposits and cutting borrowers off from credit. Each round of failures forced asset sales, intensified deflation and weakened surviving banks, creating a feedback loop between finance and the industrial economy.

The crisis became national in fall 1931. Britain’s departure from the gold standard triggered fears that the United States might follow, producing simultaneous withdrawals of currency and gold. The Federal Reserve raised rates to defend the dollar’s gold parity while production, prices and the banking system were already contracting. By March 1933, the system had reached the point where Roosevelt suspended banking transactions nationwide and reopened only institutions judged sound enough to survive.

What we learn from this recession is that bank failures can turn a severe downturn into a depression when they destroy money, credit and confidence faster than policy can replace them.

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The early trading histories of Facebook and SpaceX could hardly look more different—until you zoom out.

I indexed both stocks to 100 at their first public close and aligned them by trading session. Facebook immediately unraveled after its 2012 debut, falling roughly 32% within its first 12 sessions. SpaceX initially did the exact opposite, surging nearly 50% before the IPO excitement began wearing off.

From there, SPCX sank almost day after day.

By the 31st trading session, Facebook stood at 80.5 on the indexed chart. SpaceX stood at 84.1. Despite taking completely different routes, both had lost approximately one-fifth of their value relative to their first closing prices.

That is what makes the comparison interesting.

Facebook’s collapse was driven by concerns that its enormous valuation could not be justified as users shifted from desktop computers to mobile devices, where the company had not yet demonstrated a convincing advertising model. Investors were were questioning whether its popularity could produce enough profit.

SpaceX faces a similar distinction. Nobody seriously disputes that it is an extraordinary company. The question is whether Starlink, Starship, launch services and its other ambitions can generate enough cash flow to support the valuation placed on the business at its IPO.

A great company and a great stock are not automatically the same thing—especially when the starting valuation already assumes years of exceptional execution.

The Facebook analogy is therefore bullish, but only conditionally. Facebook recovered because the company proved the market wrong, built mobile advertising into a massive profit engine and produced financial results that eventually made its original valuation look small.

SpaceX now needs its own version of that transition.

The chart shows that SPCX’s decline is not unprecedented. It does not show that the eventual recovery is guaranteed. Facebook became one of the greatest post-IPO success stories in market history because the underlying business grew into—and eventually far beyond—the hype.

Thirty trading sessions into its public life, SpaceX has reached almost the exact same place.

What happens next will depend less on the resemblance between the charts and more on whether the resemblance eventually extends to the fundamentals.

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Could Henry Ford have caused a U.S. recession?

In 1927, the question was not ridiculous. Ford was among the largest industrial companies in the world, and the Model T sat at the center of a vast network of workers, steelmakers, parts suppliers, dealers and transport companies. Yet the car had become outdated as General Motors offered consumers more models, colors and annual upgrades. Ford finally produced its last Model T on May 26, then shut its plants for roughly six months to retool for the Model A.

The timing created a compelling story, although the chronology weakens it. The recession began in November 1926, six months before Ford stopped production. Total industrial output had already lost momentum, while Chevrolet and other manufacturers captured customers Ford temporarily surrendered. Recent research finds no clear structural break in aggregate activity when the shutdown occurred and concludes that the implied Ford shock was much larger than the recession itself.

Ford’s shutdown still mattered. It intensified weakness in one of America’s most economically connected industries and made a mild downturn easier to see. The recession ended in November 1927, just before the Model A’s December debut and the renewed expansion that carried the economy toward 1929.

What we learn from this recession is that a dominant company can magnify a business-cycle downturn, but even an industrial giant rarely creates an economy-wide recession by itself.

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Blend Labs is currently the only stock I own—and it has not treated me kindly.

My average price is $2.65 per share, leaving me down roughly 33%. With the stock around $1.80, the obvious temptation is to lower my cost basis. Before committing more capital, however, I wanted to revisit the thesis from the ground up.

The latest 10-Q shows a company that is considerably healthier than its stock chart suggests, although it is still far from bulletproof.

First-quarter revenue increased 15% year over year to $30.8 million. Mortgage Suite revenue grew 18%, while Consumer Banking Suite revenue advanced 12%. That matters because Blend’s improvement is no longer entirely dependent on one product or an immediate housing-market rebound.

The underlying economics also look increasingly software-like. Gross margin expanded to roughly 76%, including 79% for the software platform. Blend’s operating loss narrowed from $8 million to $5.1 million, while the company generated $7.3 million in quarterly free cash flow.

In other words, the business is moving toward self-sufficiency.

Blend also has approximately $59 million in cash and marketable securities, with little conventional financial debt. I do not see an immediate liquidity crisis or a serious risk that the company suddenly runs out of money.

The balance sheet still has one major complication: $164 million of redeemable convertible preferred stock issued to Haveli Investments. That capital helped Blend repay its previous credit agreement and effectively eliminated its interest burden, but common shareholders remain behind a large senior claim. Blend also has negative common equity and remains unprofitable under GAAP.

This is why I cannot call the company financially pristine. It is survivable and improving, but its turnaround has not yet been fully proven.

Then there is Haveli.

Haveli originally invested $150 million in Blend during 2024. It has since continued accumulating common shares, purchasing more stock during May and June at prices ranging from roughly $1.46 to $1.70. Its disclosed ownership has climbed to approximately 22.5%.

That does not guarantee an acquisition. Founder Nima Ghamsari still controls a majority of Blend’s voting power, making a hostile takeover extraordinarily unlikely. Any sale would need to be friendly, negotiated and supported by the founder.

Still, Haveli is doing far more than passively holding the preferred stock. It has a board seat, deep ties to management and authorization to own as much as 24.9% of Blend’s common stock. Its continued buying suggests it sees considerably more value than the market currently recognizes.

My takeover thesis therefore remains alive, although I would no longer rely on it by itself. The stronger argument today is that Blend has become a legitimate software turnaround with takeover optionality attached.

At approximately $1.80, the stock is not obviously distressed enough for me to average down aggressively. A normal takeover premium would not even recover my $2.65 cost basis. The company either needs to deliver several more quarters of profitable growth or attract a particularly generous strategic offer.

For now, I am holding.

I would become more interested in scaling below roughly $1.65, particularly if the underlying business continues improving. Alternatively, I would be willing to add at a higher price following another strong quarter or further Haveli accumulation.

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The 1923-24 recession is the one that keeps the Roaring Twenties honest.

The decade is usually remembered as a clean boom between the postwar deflation bust and the Great Depression. The actual cycle was messier. After the May 1923 peak, the economy contracted until July 1924. The stress was concentrated in the industrial economy: factories slowed, freight softened, and the rebound from the 1920-21 collapse temporarily lost force. This was Calvin Coolidge’s first recession as president, arriving just after Harding’s death in August 1923 and ending before the stronger middle years of the decade took over.

The interesting part is scale. This was not 1920-21, when deflation tore through prices and production. It was also not 1929-33, when the financial system and real economy collapsed together. It was a smaller industrial recession inside a larger expansionary decade. That makes it useful because ordinary recessions tell you what the baseline cycle looked like before catastrophe distorted the record. In 1924, the Federal Reserve was also becoming more active with open-market purchases, an early version of macro stabilization before modern central banking had fully formed.

Even the most iconic boom decade had internal air pockets: the Roaring Twenties did not roar in a straight line.

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The 1920-21 recession was a price-level earthquake.

The who was the postwar U.S. economy: factories, farms, merchants, workers, banks, and a young Federal Reserve still learning what it meant to fight inflation.

The what was a brutal adjustment from wartime inflation to peacetime deflation.

The when was sharp: after the January 1920 business-cycle peak, the economy contracted until July 1921.

The where was visible across the industrial economy and commodity markets, where demand cooled, inventories were liquidated, and prices fell with unusual speed.

The why came from the collision between wartime distortions and policy tightening.

The economy had been inflated by war demand, supply disruption, and postwar restocking; then the Fed raised discount rates into the inflation problem, helping turn the adjustment into a severe recession.

This chart feels almost mechanical: industrial production breaks, CPI inflation collapses, and the postwar economy goes through a hard reset. The episode is easy to romanticize because the recovery came quickly afterward, but the contraction itself was ugly. It was the young Fed’s first major anti-inflation recession and one of the clearest examples in U.S. history of disinflation arriving through real economic pain.

What we learn from this recession is that inflation can end violently when the economy is forced to purge wartime excess, inventories, and credit all at once.

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The recession of 1918-19 was short, but the timing is everything.

It began after the August 1918 business-cycle peak, while the U.S. was still mobilized for World War I. Then, on November 11, the Armistice arrived. War production did not instantly become peacetime production. Government demand, military procurement, shipping priorities, labor allocation, inventories, and prices all had to adjust at once.

The chart shows that awkward handoff: business activity losing momentum while inflation remained elevated from the wartime price shock.

This was not the great postwar purge. That came in 1920-21, when deflation and industrial weakness became much more violent. The 1918-19 recession was the first snapback: the economy stopped being pulled forward by war before the peacetime economy had fully reorganized itself. Add the influenza pandemic, which was hitting the country during the same window, and the episode becomes even less like a normal cycle. Demand, labor, public health, and production were all being scrambled together.

What we learn from this recession is that the end of an emergency can create its own downturn, because the economy has to unwind the machinery built to survive the emergency before it can operate normally again.

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The Federal Reserve was born during a recession.

The downturn began after the January 1913 business-cycle peak, nearly a full year before Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913. That timing matters. The U.S. did not create a central bank from a position of macro calm. It established one after repeated financial panics, during another contraction, while business activity was already weakening and firms were still relying on private short-term credit markets to finance ordinary commerce.

Then 1914 raised the stakes. World War I broke out in Europe in late July, foreign investors rushed to liquidate U.S. securities, and the New York Stock Exchange closed on July 31. The twelve Federal Reserve Banks did not open until November 16, 1914, near the end of the recession. In other words, the old system absorbed one final global shock while the new system was still being assembled.

The historical irony is hard to miss: the Fed was created to solve the liquidity problems of the pre-Fed era, yet its birth recession arrived before the institution could meaningfully respond. What we learn from this recession is that institutional reform usually arrives after the stress has already exposed the weakness; the new architecture is born from the damage, not before it.

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The recession that began after the January 1910 peak was a downturn in an economy that already knew its financial system had failed a major stress test. The Panic of 1907 was still fresh. Trust companies, clearinghouses, call loans, seasonal currency pressure, and New York-centered money markets had shown how fragile the system could become when confidence disappeared. By 1910, the question was no longer whether reform was coming. The question was who would design it, who would control it, and whether it would look like a bankers’ reserve association or a more public central-bank structure.

The timing makes this recession historically useful. While business activity weakened and commercial paper rates showed the price of short-term business credit, the National Monetary Commission was moving toward the Aldrich plan. The Jekyll Island meeting in November 1910 happened inside the recession. Aldrich unveiled his plan in January 1911, also inside the recession. The revised plan went to Congress in 1912, the year the downturn ended.

So, the chart is really showing the old system struggling while the blueprint for the next system was being drafted.

The deeper story is institutional lag. The U.S. had already experienced the crisis that made reform unavoidable, but it had not yet built the institution that would change how liquidity was supplied. Firms still financed themselves through private markets, and stress still passed through commercial paper rather than a policy rate.

What we learn from this recession is that economies often spend years living with the consequences of a failed system before the replacement system actually exists.

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McDonald’s is a useful read on the lower-end consumer precisely because the headline sales number can look better than the underlying customer behavior.

U.S. comparable sales are still slightly positive on a quarterly basis, but that is a thin kind of strength: value deals, menu pricing, and trade-down traffic can keep the comp line above zero even as the customer becomes more defensive.

The consumer squeeze index remains well above its pre-COVID range, which suggests households are still dealing with the combined pressure of higher everyday prices, credit stress, and weak sentiment.

So, McDonald’s may be showing how stretched consumers adapt: they keep spending, but they hunt discounts, shift toward cheaper items, and quietly change the basket. The margin consumer is still there, but increasingly price-sensitive.

(Note: Consumer Squeeze Index combines gasoline inflation, food-away-from-home inflation, credit-card delinquencies, and inverted consumer sentiment into a single z-score. Higher readings imply more pressure on price-sensitive households.)

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October 1907 is the month that should sit at the center of the piece. The U.S. was already in recession after the May 1907 business-cycle peak, but the panic gave the downturn its historical meaning.

The immediate spark came from a failed attempt to corner United Copper stock on Oct. 16, 1907. Within days, suspicion moved from speculators to banks tied to them, then into the trust-company system, where institutions took deposits and lent aggressively into securities markets while sitting outside the New York Clearing House’s lender-of-last-resort machinery.

Knickerbocker Trust became the name everyone remembers because it showed the fatal gap in the system. When it suspended operations on Oct. 22, 1907, depositors did what depositors do in a panic: they ran. Trust companies had become large enough to matter, connected enough to transmit stress, and vulnerable enough to turn rumor into institutional failure. J.P. Morgan and the Clearing House could improvise liquidity support, but the improvisation itself was the problem. A modern economy was relying on private bankers, emergency committees, clearing-house certificates, and reputation to keep payments and credit from seizing up.

That is why the chart pairs call money with bank clearings. Call money shows the panic where it was most violent: overnight credit against securities collateral. Bank clearings outside New York City show the recession moving through ordinary commerce. Wall Street cracked first, but the damage did not stay on Wall Street.

What we learn from this recession is that the Fed was not born from abstract theory; it was born because the 1907 panic proved that private crisis management was too fragile for a national financial system.

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The 1902-04 recession hit a U.S. economy that was becoming bigger, more corporate, more national, and more politically contested. The country had just moved through a merger wave, railroad consolidation, and the rise of giant trusts, while Roosevelt was turning antitrust enforcement into an active federal project.

NBER dates the peak to September 1902 and the trough to August 1904, placing the downturn directly inside the fight over what kind of industrial capitalism the U.S. was going to have.

That is why bank clearings outside New York City are useful here. They push the episode beyond a Wall Street story and toward the flow of payments across the commercial economy: checks cleared, goods sold, invoices settled, business actually moving. When those clearings weaken alongside business activity, the recession looks like a slowdown in the circulation of commerce during a period when the structure of American capitalism was being reorganized.

The Northern Securities decision in March 1904 sits near the end of the contraction as a symbol of that larger turn: railroads and trusts were still central to growth, but federal power was no longer pretending to stand outside the system.

What we learn from this recession is that business cycles do not pause while institutions are being rewritten; the economy can stumble at the same moment the rules of capitalism itself are changing.

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Alan Greenspan’s legacy will always be split between the “Maestro” era and the housing bubble that followed it. This chart captures the part that aged worst.

After the 2001 slowdown and 9/11 shock, the Fed took the funds rate from above 6% to 1%. That was the easy part to defend in real time: recession risk, collapsing tech wealth, corporate stress, deflation anxiety.

The harder part was what came next. Policy stayed extraordinarily easy long enough for the housing market to become the new risk-taking machine. Home prices kept ripping even after the Fed began tightening in 2004, because credit conditions, mortgage demand, leverage, and belief in ever-rising collateral had already built their own momentum.

That is the Greenspan problem in one picture. Central banks can cut quickly when the economy breaks, but they usually discover the excesses later, after the private sector has already capitalized low rates into asset prices. By the time Greenspan exited in January 2006, the funds rate had been normalized, but the damage was no longer mainly about the overnight rate. It was embedded in balance sheets, lending standards, mortgage products, and a national housing psychology that treated a cyclical boom as a permanent wealth engine.

The final Greenspan cycle exposed the danger of treating asset inflation as harmless so long as consumer inflation looks contained. The Fed won the early-2000s recession fight, then lost control of the credit cycle that victory helped unleash.

What we can learn from it: the cost of “easy money” is often invisible in CPI first, visible in collateral markets second, and undeniable in the financial system last.

By the end of the 1890s, the U.S. economy had finally started climbing out of the wreckage of the Panic of 1893 and the gold-standard depression that followed. Gold discoveries in Alaska and South Africa helped expand the world’s monetary gold stock, easing the deflationary pressure that had defined much of the prior quarter-century.

The recovery, however, did not move in a straight line. NBER dates another recession from the June 1899 peak to the December 1900 trough, just as the U.S. was locking in the gold standard formally through the Gold Standard Act of March 14, 1900 and as global capital markets were watching the Second Boer War, which began in October 1899.

This was a mild recession compared with the panics around it. That makes it useful. The business cycle can turn even when the longer-term regime is improving. Business activity softened during a period that still belonged to the broader post-1897 recovery, while New York commercial paper rates put the focus on the short-term financing cost facing firms before the Federal Reserve existed. The U.S. was entering the 20th century stronger than it had been in the mid-1890s, but the economy still ran on private credit, gold convertibility, and confidence. Small shocks could still interrupt a real recovery.

What we learn from this recession is that a new growth era does not arrive cleanly; even after the monetary backdrop improves, the old credit system can still produce one last stumble before the expansion fully takes hold.

This one is not a panic chart. That is the point.

By the time the 1895-97 recession arrived, the dramatic break had already happened in 1893. What remained was the grind: depressed commerce, unsettled credit, and a monetary regime that made every downturn feel heavier because the country was still defending gold convertibility.

The economy was ultimately trying to breathe through a narrow pipe. Per the chart, deflated bank clearings outside New York City track the flow of commerce beyond Wall Street; the New York commercial paper rate shows the cost of short-term business credit in the financial center. Together, they turn the recession into a story about a weak payments economy operating under hard-money constraints.

The monetary system was the recession’s public argument. Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in July 1896 was not random populist theater; it was the depression speaking through politics. Farmers, debtors, silver interests, and hard-money creditors were fighting over the same question the chart implies: whether recovery required easier money or the defense of gold credibility.

What we learn from this recession is that monetary regimes do not just shape financial markets; when the economy is weak enough, they become the central political conflict of the entire country.

The Panic of 1893 is usually remembered as a financial panic, but the better chart is a body count.

Not people — firms. Commercial failures are what make this recession look different. The official downturn runs from the January 1893 peak to the June 1894 trough, but the violence of the episode shows up in the number of businesses that simply could not survive the combination of railroad overexpansion, tight credit, falling confidence, and gold-standard pressure. The failure of the Reading Railroad in February 1893 and the collapse of National Cordage in May 1893 were symbols of a system where leveraged expansion had reached the point where refinancing itself became the problem.

Business activity tells you the economy was contracting. Business failures tell you what contraction meant on the ground: merchants, manufacturers, brokers, and trading firms disappearing because credit could not carry them through. The chart turns the Panic of 1893 into a solvency recession, where the macro story is not just lower output, but the destruction of commercial balance sheets.

What we learn from this recession is that a credit crunch becomes historically dangerous when it stops being about market prices and starts becoming about which firms are still alive.

The space boom is usually sold as a story about ambition — Mars, moon bases, private astronauts, billionaire — and now trillionaire — rocket men, etc.

But the more important story is much less romantic: getting stuff into orbit got radically cheaper.

That’s what this chart is really showing. For decades, space was basically a government-scale project: expensive, scarce, and episodic. Then launch costs collapsed, and the quantity response finally showed up. More satellites, more payloads, more commercial infrastructure, more orbit becoming an actual economic layer instead of a Cold War trophy case.

That’s the part worth paying attention to. The space economy became real because the price of access fell far enough for imagination to become capex.

The lesson: technological revolutions don’t always announce themselves with some clean “before and after” moment. Sometimes they show up as a cost curve bending lower for years — and then, almost all at once, the world starts using the thing.

The interesting thing about the 1890-91 recession is that it was America’s downturn, but not only America’s story.

By 1890, the U.S. was already part of a financial world where stress could move through London, Argentina, New York credit markets, and domestic commerce without needing a modern banking system or floating exchange rates. Baring Brothers had become deeply exposed to Argentine finance, and when confidence cracked, the Bank of England helped organize a rescue to stop the failure from turning into a wider panic. The American recession dated by NBER had already begun around that same window, running from the July 1890 peak to the May 1891 trough. The chart should therefore be read as a payments-and-credit chart.

Deflated bank clearings outside New York City are the key line because they move the visual away from Wall Street alone and toward the commercial economy: checks, payments, trade, and settlement activity across the country. The commercial paper rate adds the financing side, showing the price of short-term business credit in New York. Together, they capture a 19th-century version of global financial contagion: the shock comes through capital confidence and funding markets, but the damage shows up in the flow of domestic transactions.

What we learn from this recession is that globalization did not begin with modern supply chains; by the 1890s, the U.S. business cycle was already exposed to foreign credit accidents through the plumbing of payments, trade finance, and short-term money markets.

This recession is easy to miss because nothing about it screams “historic crisis.” That is exactly why it belongs in the series. The 1887-88 downturn was not another Long Depression, not another full railroad-finance collapse, and not a dramatic banking panic on the scale of later episodes.

It was a shorter Gilded Age squeeze in an economy still organized around railroads, collateral, securities markets, and private liquidity.

The business activity index shows the economy slipping from the March 1887 peak into the April 1888 trough, while the call money rate keeps the focus on the financial plumbing of the period: overnight money against collateral, not a central-bank policy rate.

The institutional backdrop also matters. The Interstate Commerce Act was approved in February 1887, making railroads the first federally regulated industry, so the recession arrived right as the most important sector in the economy was being pulled into a new legal and regulatory framework.

That does not mean regulation “caused” the downturn. It means the chart captures a transitional moment: the railroad economy was still cyclical, still speculative, still dependent on market liquidity — but no longer operating in the same purely laissez-faire world.

What we learn from this recession is that not every important downturn is a collapse; some matter because they reveal an economy shifting from one institutional regime to another while the cycle keeps turning underneath.

This recession is the less famous sequel to the Panic of 1873, but it may be the better chart for understanding how the railroad economy actually behaved once the post-Long Depression recovery got going.

The expansion after 1879 was powered heavily by railroad construction and the capital markets built around it; railroad mileage surged, securities issuance followed, and the sector became the organizing force of American investment. By the March 1882 business-cycle peak, that boom was already vulnerable: business activity began a long decline, while high-grade railroad bond yields show the market repricing the credit of the sector at the center of the expansion.

The Panic of 1884 matters, but it sits inside the downturn rather than starting it. When Grant & Ward and Marine National Bank failed in May 1884, the panic exposed a recession that was already two years old: overbuilt railroads, strained finance, weaker trade, and a slower commercial economy.

What we learn from this recession is that the most important sector in an expansion can become the economy’s transmission mechanism on the way down: railroads built the national market, but railroad finance also carried the bust through it.