Diversification’s downside: resilience has a price
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Benjamin Roth’s
The Great Depression: a diary isn’t the cheeriest of reads. Roth was a lawyer, practising in the 1930s in Youngstown, Ohio – an industrial town that was home to several steel companies.
Booming during the 1920s, it had been badly hit by the Great Depression that began with the financial crash of 1929. Roth’s diary, published in 2009 at the instigation of his son and grandson, meticulously recorded the period from June 1931 to December 1941.
Very much an amateur economist, Roth recorded many of the predictions that were variously made during those years – and fascinatingly, subsequently went back to them as the years passed, to record how they worked out. Reading it over the weekend, I spotted one such update dating from 1962, two decades after the diary closed.