Credit Crunch Banker Kills Self (link).... (it's 1929, people....)

[scheming daemons]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1063356/Credit-crunch-banker-leaps-death-express-train.html

The City was in shock last night after the apparent suicide of a millionaire financier haunted by the pressures of dealing with the credit crunch.

Kirk Stephenson, who was married with an eight-year-old son, died in the path of a 100mph express train at Taplow railway station, Berkshire.

Mr Stephenson is believed to have taken his own life after succumbing to mounting personal pressures as the world’s financial markets went into meltdown.

The death of the respected 47-year-old City figure evokes memories of the 1929 Wall Street crash in America
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[tblue]

1. I wonder how long until it happens here.

And get this:

snip/

Gordon Brown was wrongfooted by Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, who announced plans to set up an independent watchdog to police the Treasury and strip it of key powers if the Conservatives win the next Election.

/snip

Heck, maybe we should all move to England then.

[Miss Chybil]

2. Sad. nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. NPR had an interview with a psychiatrist who also saw some folks

after Bear Sterns

She said that it would take anywhere from a week to ten days to see the leading edge in clinical practice

I guess it took that long for the first suicide as well

[avaistheone1]

4. Didn't a couple of Enron's top managment kill themselves too?

[Better Today]

5. As I recall there was a similar headline homicide in FL in the 1980's

"meltdown," but in the end everything turned out okay for most. Suicides and homicides related to that crisis never got to the 1929 "warnings" that the media were putting out over that homicide. Try not to over react. It could have been for any number of reasons, and sure the markets/banking meltdown sure would be an issue, but it may not have been his only issue.

[Better Today]

6. I'd like to add, I feel more concerned about the military suicides than this bankers.

[undergroundpanther]

8. me too

[Hugin]

12. Thank you for bringing that up.

Yes, and the sad fact we never hear about those, but, we'll get loads of press for every banker who sticks
their head in an oven.

[mrih]

9. I kinda remember something about that too.

Wasn't it like some wall street guys jumping out of buildings or something?

Just goes to show ya, when your poor your happy with the things you have, when your rich and become poor, it's almost worse then death.

I say we should all rally around wall street with huge signs aimed up in the air at the offices of these corporate bastards that say:


JUMP, JUMP, JUMP !!!

[cui bono]

14. I think it's a bit more complex than that.

Some of these guys suffer a real crisis of conscience and literally cannot live after realizing what they've done. Some of them got caught up in the frenzy and forgot to think about what they were really doing to real people. Of course for some of them it only matters when they are facing getting caught, but I think the ones who resort to suicide are probably having some serious reflection of their lives going on.

And for those for whom it is about losing what they had, it's not necessarily about losing the wealth, but their whole life changes. Their standing in society, their standing in their family, their self worth. Even in these times there are still a lot of men, probably most men, whose identity/ego is tied to their career and what they've achieved in that arena. Lose that and they lose their whole identity. Meanwhile, the real assholes still got away with it and are still sitting on plenty of money. It's their companies that are failing, but they are doing just fine personally.

I'm not saying that most of the people making obscene amounts of money aren't guilty assholes, but to simplify it it and then call for them all to commit suicide with a mob chanting for them to jump to their death is rather vulgar imho.

[dixiegrrrrl]

16. While I understand what you mean, the 9-11 images

of people jumping out of the towers are still all too vivid in my mind, and keep me from wanting to think of anyone else dying that way.

[NoUsername]

17. LOL!

I absolutely LOVE your idea!

[undergroundpanther]

7. Shit happens.

Anyway far more poor and middle class people kill themselves from the pressures that they bear just because they are poor or rapidly becoming poor and can't afford the basics.

Oh how the wealthy FEAR poverty. Guilty much? Rich fear it so bad they off themselves rather than LOSE some of it.I really feel no pity for him.It is almost like watching a leech that was once sucking blood from your leg,now pulled off and drying out in the hot sun.

How wealth creates poverty

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0216-30.htm


The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ~William James

Oh well there's one less morally diseased...leech.

[bertman]

10. Maybe a pissed-off client "nudged" him.

Makes me wonder if he had a close relationship with his son.

Very sad for the family I'm sure.

[SmileyRose]

11. When a blue collar guy with cancer and no insurance steps in front of a bus

it almost never makes world news...................

[girl gone mad]

15. In the immortal words of Barbara Bush:

"Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Of course, she was referring to soldiers' deaths.

[Hissyspit]

13. It may evoke memories of 1929 Wall Street crash, but...

those memories are not necessarily very accurate:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2412/after-the-1929-stock-market-crash-did-investors-really-jump-out-of-windows

Admit it, you want this to be true. You want to believe there was a time when ruined tycoons, brought low through their own foolishness and greed, would do the decent thing and commit suicide, in contrast to the modern practice of going before a congressional committee and taking the fifth. You want to think that if you'd walked down Wall Street on Black Thursday--October 24, 1929--bankrupt plutocrats would have been falling out of the skies like rain. In short, you want to believe in a better world.

And you know what? People wanted to believe in it at the time. Even while the financial meltdown was in progress, reporters in downtown Manhattan were checking out a rumor that 11 busted brokers had jumped out of windows. London newspapers gleefully told of pedestrians threading their way through the bodies of fallen speculators. Legend has it that the cops dragged one poor guy off a ledge, only to discover that he was just a window washer. Will Rogers observed, "When Wall Street took that tail spin, you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of, and speculators were selling space for bodies in the East River." One senses in these stories an element of wishful thinking on the part of ordinary folks, many of whom had also lost money in the crash. Who can blame them? "The market has tanked! My life savings are gone! These people DESERVE TO DIE!"

Well, they probably did, but they probably didn't, at least not on October 24 or the even more catastrophic Black Tuesday, October 29. No less an authority than economist John Kenneth Galbraith addressed the subject in his book The Great Crash, 1929, first published in 1955. Studying U.S. death statistics, Galbraith found that while the U.S. suicide rate increased steadily between 1925 and 1932, during October and November of 1929 the number of suicides was disappointingly low.

That's not to say that a few failed investors, executives, etc., didn't kill themselves in the wake of the crash. But the suicides happened all around the country, didn't necessarily involve jumping out the window, and for the most part didn't take place immediately following the crash. For example:
- On Friday, November 8, J.J. Riordan, president of the County Trust Company, took a pistol from a teller's cage at his bank, went to his home in downtown Manhattan, and shot himself. The news was suppressed until after the bank closed at noon Saturday, to avoid causing a run on the bank.
- A vice president of the Earl Radio Corporation jumped to his death from the window of a Manhattan hotel. His suicide note read, "We are broke. Last April I was worth $100,000. Today I am $24,000 in the red." But this happened in early October, weeks before the crash.

[crispini]

19. Interesting, thanks. nt

[SOS]

18. 600 Americans commit suicide every week

Yet the corporate media shows no interest in their circumstances.