August 4 – Tremors on Wall Street; Congress’s Acceleration of the Economic Disaster; Are we Headed for Another Great Depression?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with tremors on Wall Street upon the stock market dropping 500 points. We talk with former Wall Street banker William Cohan, who covers Wall Street for Fortune, Vanity Fair and the New York Times. He recently wrote the book Money and Power; How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World.

Part 2

Then, economist Randall Wray joins us for a macro-economic analysis of adverse economic trends at home and abroad amid dire predictions of a double-dip recession in the U.S. and defaults in Europe. We will try to connect the dots to see if we are indeed at a Smoot-Hawley moment where the Congress, instead of reversing economic decline, has accelerated it.

Part 3

Finally, historian Robert McElvaine, author of The Great Depression: America 1929-1941, joins us to explore further analogies between what happened to prolong the Great Depression and actions just taken on Capitol Hill that most analysts say will deepen and drag out the recession.