MERCATOR Research Fellow Giuseppe Telesca will present his paper at the 2022 Association of Business Historians Conference in Glasgow.
It has often been claimed that financial markets have short memory, but this assumption has hardly been tested. This paper identifies and analyses 1,725 articles, published by the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal between 1981 and 2019, in which the financial crises of the Great Depression (GD) are remembered. Beyond providing the 1981-2019 yearly distribution of the articles mentioning the GD, and a taxonomy of the various modes of remembering the GD crises, this paper argues that the memory of the GD financial crises went through ebbs and flows during these years. While financial instability triggered a higher level of recollection of the GD, the intensity of this recollection was lower in phases in which the neoliberal narrative went undisputed.