Sublime

IN FEBRUARY, 1933, the country’s banks began to close. Some 5,500 had already closed in the three years since the Crash. Few of the remaining 13,000 were healthy; they had a total of $6 billion in cash to meet $41 billion in deposits; should a wholesale run begin, they would have to cover the balance by selling securities and mortgages which had by

George Bailey Sr. is a kind, loving man who founds the Bailey Building and Loan, the kind of banking establishment that demands a sense of community to be successful. It was designed, first and foremost, to make home ownership available to the “common man” by leveraging the savings of the community to help one

Irregular fluctuations, in response to changing consumer tastes, resources, etc. will certainly occur, and sometimes there will be aggregate losses as a result. But the regular, systematic distortion that invariably ends in a cluster of business errors and depression—characteristic phenomena of the “business cycle”—can only flow from intervention o

It was dangerous, deadly, they said, for any man to go there.