2025 as the New 1925: Will Crypto be Trump's Teapot Dome Scandal?
Might 2025 turn out to be the new 1925? In other words, are we currently in the Roaring Twenties and on the brink of another Great Depression? This historical analogy, according to the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator Martin Wolf, isn’t entirely fanciful. Economic history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, Wolf acknowledges, but it has a rhythmic quality. We are living, he suggests, in a “slow-motion” interwar moment. And while FDR is Donald Trump’s mirror image, perhaps the most similar President to Trump was Warren Harding whose administration was deeply tarnished by the Teapot Dome scandal. Crypto, Wolf suggests, might turn out to be Trump’s Teapot Dome. And 2026, Martin Wolf warns, might turn out to be significantly more turbulent for both the US and global economies than 2025.
Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
Maud Newton: How to Come to Terms With Troubling Ancestors
Isaac Fitzgerald: What's Wrong (And Right) With American Male Writers
Paul Tucker: What Chinese and American Statesmen Need to Do to Lessen Global Discord
Priyanka Kumar: How "Reading" Nature, Especially Birds, Enables Us to Transcend Ourselves
Ben Kesling: The Gut-Wrenching Story of One U.S. Army Unit's Experience in Afghanistan
Samantha Cole: How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex
RJ Andrews: Why the Future of Publishing For One Start-Up Entrepreneur is High-End and Analog Books That Visualize Data
Lenore Andreson: How California is Pioneering the Reform of the American Criminal Justice System
Claudia Lux: Imagining a Kafkaesque Hell in Which There Is Only Jägermeister to Drink and the Devil Is a Corporate Bureaucrat
Henrietta Harrison on the 18th-Century China Question: The Perils of Translating Between Qing China and the British Empire
Greg Melville: How Cemeteries Reveal America's Most Hidden and Often Deadliest History
Paul Sexton: Perhaps the Most Remarkable Thing About Charlie Watts Was Just How Remarkably Ordinary He Was
Colin L. Read on Not the People's Money: Uncovering Bitcoin's Catastrophic Economic and Environmental Cost