AHC Plausibility Check Hybrid Thing: Manufacturing an Economic Crisis to Order

[Maponus]

So I bumping around an idea for a timeline in the late 60's and 70's, and in order for the political changes I want to be plausible I need there to be a major crisis of capitalism as bad as if not worse than the Great Depression and the recent Global Recession, but I don't really know much about economics so I don't know how to go about that. It's fairly easy to manufacture reasons for a war or to alter an election result, but economics seems harder to conceptualise? What sort of PoD could one use to get that kind of global crash, without creating too many butterflies, particularly in the specific period I want?

What kind of political decisions would have been the worst possible for the US in particular to make in the lead up to the 70's? Who would be the absolute worse people to be in charge?
What sort of detrimental market behaviour would be the most plausible at that time?
How could international affairs worsen the global economy in the worst possible way?

 

[Delta Force]

1972 had both a world food crisis and also an energy crisis in the United States. These events both predate the 1973 Energy Crisis by a year. A lot more information in the threads linked to. The 1972 energy crises in the United States are so obscure that someone said it's essentially a discovered PoD.

 

[Delta Force]

If you aren't strict about the economic crisis being in the late 1960s or 1970s then there are several potential crises in the 1980s as well.

 

[Maponus]

1972 had both a world food crisis and also an energy crisis in the United States. These events both predate the 1973 Energy Crisis by a year. A lot more information in the threads linked to. The 1972 energy crises in the United States are so obscure that someone said it's essentially a discovered PoD.

Interesting. How would you go about making them into something bigger?

 

[Delta Force]

Interesting. How would you go about making them into something bigger?

As mentioned in the links, there's the report on hearings before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on the Gasoline and Fuel Oil Shortage that were held in May and June 1973. Herbert Humphrey presided over the meeting and in his opening statement he mentions the existence of a gasoline shortfall of 2% East of the Rocky Mountains that is expected to reach 5% by 1975, after which new refining capacity would alleviate the shortage.

Humphrey also mentions:

Partly because of the crash effort to refine gasoline last summer, we ran short of oil to heat our schools and factories in many parts of the country last winter, particularly in Minnesota, and our hopes for a good grain crop next fall are now riding on emergency measures to keep farmers and truckers supplied with diesel fuel. We were saved from a catastrophe in the Midwest— Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota—and in other parts of the country, by the forces of nature and divine providence. We had one of the mildest winters in the past 25 years, and had it not been for the unusually warm weather, we would have had to close schools and factories, we would have had to shut down railroads, and we would have had to limit our use of electrical power. In fact, we were in an emergency situation declared by the Governor of our State in the first week of January.

So essentially normal weather patterns could be a tipping point for the Midwest in 1972 and lead to all sorts of problems. It's important to note that gasoline was still used for tractors, trucks, and other heavy vehicles in the 1970s, and also that the United States derived around 15% of its electricity production from petroleum.