The Big Bull Market
By Frederick Lewis Allen
The Big Bull Market was dead. Billions of dollars’worth of profits and paper profits – had disappeared. The grocer, the window-cleaner and the seamstress had lost their capital. In every town there were families which d suddenly dropped from showy affluence into debt. Investors who had dreamed of retiring to live on their fortunes now found themselves back once more at the beginning of the long road to riches. Day by day the newspapers printed the grim report of suicides.
Coolidge-Hoover Prosperity was not yet dead, but it as dying. Under the impact of the shock of panic, a multitude of ills which hitherto had passed unnoticed or had been offset by stock-market optimism began to beset the body economic, as poisons seep through the human system when a vital organ has ceased to function normally. Although the liquidation of nearly 3 billion dollars of brokers ‘ loans contracted credit, and Reserve Banks lowered the rediscount rate, and the way in which the larger banks and corporations of the country had survived the emergency without a single failure of large proportions offered real encouragement, nevertheless the poisons were there: over production of capital; overambitious expansion of business concerns; overproduction of commodities under the stimulus of installment buying and buying with stock-market profits; the maintenance of an artificial price level for many commodities; the depressed condition of European trade. No matter how many soothsayers of high finance proclaimed that all was well, no matter how earnestly the president set to work to repair the damage with soft words and White House conferences, a major depression was inevitably under way.
Nor was that all. Prosperity is more than an economic condition; it is a state of mind. The Big Bull. Market had been more than a climax of a business cycle; it had been the climax of a cycle in American mass thinking and mass emotion. There was hardly a man or woman the country whose attitude toward life had not been affected by it in some degree and was not now affected by the sudden and brutal shattering of hope. With the Big Bull Market gone, and prosperity going, Americans were soon to find themselves living in an altered world which called for new adjustments, new ideas, new habits of thought and a new order of values. The psychological imate was changing; the ever-shifting currents of American life were turning into new channels.
The post-war decade had come to its close. An era had ended.
英文翻译中文如下：
行情暴涨的股票市场
佛里德利克，路易斯·阿兰著
行情暴涨的股票市场崩盘了。数十亿美元的买际利润和票面利润统统成了泡影。杂货盾老，橱窗清洗工，成衣店女裁缝，接二连三地赔光了老本。每个城镇里都有许多显赫的富户，一夜之间便跌进了债务的深渊。曾经梦想退休以后靠财产安度晚年的投资商们，发现自己又一次回到漫长的创业历程的起点。报纸上天天都在刊登令人毛骨悚然的有关自杀的报道。
柯利芝一胡佛盛世虽然尚未结束，但已日薄西山，气息奄奄了。人们惊惶失措，惊恐万状。这种情况下，原来不为人们所注意、或被股票市场的乐观气氛所掩盖的种种弊端，开始困 经济实体，就好比人体的某一重要器官，一旦失去正常功能，毒菌便乘虚而人。尽管近30美元的经纪人贷款已经偿清，信贷已经收缩，联邦各大储备银行的再贴现率已经降低，国内，些大银行、大公司，已安全度过危机，没有一家遭受巨额损失，所用的方法也确实令人鼓舞，而，毒菌依然存在：资本生产过剩、实业公司的过于野心勃勃的扩张、在分期付款购物和股市利润购物刺激下的商品生产过剩、许多商品价格人为地保持在某种水平上、对欧贸易的不景气，等等。不管有多少高级金融预言家声称一切正常，也不管总统先生多么认真地着手工作，用温和的言词和一个又一个白宫会议来修修补损失，大萧条还是迫在眉睫，不可避免。
问题还远不止此。繁荣不仅指经济状况，也人的心态。行情暴涨的股票市场不仅仅是一个商业周期的顶点，也是美国民众思想情感周期的顶点。过去，在美国几乎没有一个人的生活态度不在某种程度上受到繁荣的影响，而今，由于希望的突然破灭而遭到残酷的打击。行暴涨的股票市场已经土崩瓦解，繁荣正在消失，过不多久，美国人就会发现自己生活的那个世界已经变了，需要人们做出新的调整，具新的思想观念，新的思维方式，新的价值体系。人们的心理状态正在改变；不断变化着的美国生活潮流正在转入新的渠道。
战后的十年已到了岁终。一个时代就这样结束了。