Calvin Coolidge, who occupied the White House in the run-up to 1929 and the Great Depression, left little lasting impression.
But his observation that ‘the chief business of the American people is business’ is as valid as ever.
As Donald Trump and the Congress slugged it out over the shaping of the $2trillion (£1.7trillion) rescue package for a coronavirus hit-economy, the President and his old sparring partner, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, have looked impervious to such verities.
The initial reaction of the Dow and S&P 500 to Donald Trump’s rescue package was a share price rally
In spite of a dizzying 37 per cent drop in the Dow Jones ahead of yesterday’s rally and several robust interventions from the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, it has been all but impossible to stabilise financial markets.
Junk corporate debt is occupying much the same role of villain as mortgage securities played in 2008-09.
Monetary action was the key in the last crisis. In the UK, in Germany and across the Continent fiscal policy is in the ascendancy this time.
The big hold-up has been concern among Democrats on Capitol Hill that the Trump package was too weighted towards undersupervised loans to big business.
Actually the biggest part of the package is Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s helicopter money – a one-off tax rebate of $1,200 for every citizen or $3,000 for a family of four.
Big business will gain access to $500billion of government guaranteed loans not dissimilar to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s £330billion of Bank of England-administered credit window for larger corporations.
Just how economically destructive Covid19 is proving can be seen from the plunge in the purchasing managers indexes in the eurozone and UK in March, which signal a severe slump.
The initial reaction of the Dow and S&P 500 to the Trump package was a share price rally.
But whether it can really put a floor under equity prices, when there are bound to be further shocks, both from the real economy and volatile credit markets is questionable.
Rich kitsch
Easyjet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou is in the doghouse for taking his £60million of dividends while the carrier is waiting on the apron for a government handout.
He is by no means the only financial plutocrat sitting on a pile of cash while ordinary savers watch the value of their pensions and other savings plummet.
Some of the richest people on the planet made a hasty retreat from shares in the corporations they head as Covid-19 bore down on the US.
A survey of filings by the Wall Street Journal found that top executives sold $9.2billion (£7.9billion) of shares between the start of February and last week.
Biggest seller was Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos, who sold S3.4billion (£2.9billion) of stock in early February just before the stock market peaked.
That saved him losses of $317million (£273million) if he had held the shares through to this week.
During the same period 150 top executives sold shares worth at least $1million (£869,000).
Among the big winners in the share sale bonanza was the head of Blackrock, Larry Fink, who is responsible for managing the savings of countless ordinary UK savers, who collected $25million (£22million) on St Valentine’s Day.
Had Fink hung on, like most of Blackrock’s clients, he would have been $9.3million (£8million) poorer.
His personal sales, at a time when he has been hectoring chief executives of the companies in which he is invested on pay, governance standards and climate change does not send out the best of signals.
We knew the rich think they are different when we learnt that they have been at the front of the queue in Harley Street and in the US for costly private coronavirus testing.
That is how we know so many celebrity names from basketball players to captains of industry have contracted the virus.
None of which is very edifying.
Chemical reaction
In case anyone should think that all billionaires are venal, a round of applause for oil refining Ineos boss Jim Ratcliffe. Anything China can do he can almost match.
Wuhan built a hospital in a week and Ratcliffe is promising a hand sanitizer factory in ten days. Ineos is projecting output of one million bottles a month and pledging supplies to the NHS free of charge.
What a great contrast to the spivs online charging extortionate prices for pocket dispensers.
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