Plus ça Change: Financial Panic Dept.

The Wichita bureau, with a sense of history, recalls Case Broderick, onetime Congressman from Kansas, in the runup to the Bankruptcy Act of 1898:

There have been two unfortunate periods or conditions in that country which have tended to destroy the business interests and to bankrupt business men. One period perhaps was owing to misjudgment of the people, and the other was in no sense their fault but was their misfortune. [A] spirit of speculation swept over the entire country west of the Missouri River like a pestilence and it unfortunately affected a large class of our people. They went wildly into speculation. They purchased more property than they had use for. They gave mortgages and incurred liabilities at the banks and when the boom collapsed, property was depreciated, people were in debt, mortgages had been given, interest had defaulted and there was no property which could be exchanged for money.

--Charles Warren, Bankruptcy in United States History 141 (1935)
[Emphasis added; available at Google Books here]