Thematic Commonalities between 1930's era banks and Tinkerbell

    The really common, primary school answer for why the Great Depression occurred was the failure of banks, and honestly, in a study of economics, studying how banks work is very important. The stock market crash of 1929 scared common Americans, so they opted to withdraw their money from banks. Banks are a constant money drain, with bank tellers and guards nearby, so they cannot simply store all the money and keep the money around. They invest the majority, making profits which pay the employees and build wealth, and they have enough left to handle typical withdrawals. If everyone wants their money all at once, the bank dies. In essence, banks are fake unless the people believe that they are real. Some rural Chinese banks closed recently due to the same lack of faith, costing all of the customers their money. 

    The primary school answer has some elements of truth in it. Banks crashing absolutely caused a great number of people who had savings to lose their savings, which is where one could really see the aesthetic of the Great Depression- the experienced worker in a business suit being entirely underutilized because his skills were not useful in a city where nobody could afford to hire new workers. The mom selling her kids for profit, those were not families that were perpetually poor, those were families who let their faith in banks slip for a moment, or families who saw their neighbors do the same. 

    In the older Peter Pan canon (though potentially not with the newer adaptations that are aimed at younger girls and ignore the human component of Neverland), Tinkerbell's life force is entirely dependent on those who believe in the existence of fairies. If there are too few people who believe that Tinkerbell exists, her light goes out and she ceases to exist. While this is almost certainly not a metaphor for books in the vein of something like The Wizard of Oz, it does have a few commonalities. Faith in banks may sometimes be fleeting, wait times may be long, and the customer service might be lacking, but if enough people fail to believe in banks, they may perish entirely and take all the money that was stored with them.

Bibliography

Luske, Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Oliver Wallace, Edward H. Plumb, and. PETER PAN . USA, 1953.

Moessner, Richhild, and William A. Allen. 2011. “Banking Crises and the International Monetary System in the Great Depression and Now.” Financial History Review 18 (1): 1–20. doi:10.1017/S0968565011000035.

Richardson, Gary. 2007. “The Check Is in the Mail: Correspondent Clearing and the Collapse of the Banking System, 1930 to 1933.” Journal of Economic History 67 (3): 643–71. doi:10.1017/S0022050707000265.