I know you are but what am I?

Fred Pohl is ninety years old.  When he was half his current age, he wrote:

Like many of my colleagues, I regret to say that as a kid I was always something of an intellectual snob.  (I do not wish to discuss what I am now.)

He also wrote about what it was like to live in 1933 New York City:

Men were selling apples in the streets.  The unemployed stood in bread lines and prayed for snow — that meant there would be work shoveling it off the sidewalks.  Roosevelt had just been elected President but hadn’t yet taken office — Inauguration Day, still geared to the stagecoach schedules of 1789, had not yet been moved up from March 4.  Banks were going broke.

The economy in the USA is now heading past the Great Depression (very bad 1929-1937, still bad until 1941) and towards the Long Depression (very bad 1873-79, still bad until 1896).

So why aren't more banks going broke during this depression?  Here is a somewhat-amusing Marxist explanation.  Don't miss the poop joke at position 5:10!