While speculators have often been scorned, they were perhaps most famously denigrated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his inaugural address on March 4, 1933. As America was struggling through the Great Depression, which many pinned on the stock market crash of 1929, there was strong resentment against speculators. Every crisis loves a scapegoat. In his speech, Roosevelt called them “money changers” to invoke religious judgment: Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and
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