Credit crunch victims.

Story in the Mail here about a financier killing himself due to worries about money.

A wealthy financier killed himself because he was worried about losing money in the credit crunch, his widow has said.

Multi-millionaire Ross Stephenson, 47, set off for work as usual, kissing his wife and young son goodbye – but then drove his Mercedes to a rural railway station to end his life, an inquest heard.

Minutes after emailing his wife Karina about their plans for a weekend away, he threw down his briefcase, leapt in front of a 125mph train, and stood staring at it before it mowed him down.

Mrs Stephenson said: ‘We had no problems – the only worry was losing money with the credit crunch. Before the banking crisis the subject of harming himself had never been discussed, and would have been totally out of character for Ross.’...

Got me to thinking what happened back in the other big crash of 1929, we all have heard stories of chaps suffering fiscal woes diving out the office window and so I have dug a few more out.

• On Friday, November 8, J.J. Riordan, president of the County Trust Company, took a pistol from a teller's cage at his bank, went to his home in downtown Manhattan, and shot himself. The news was suppressed until after the bank closed at noon Saturday, to avoid causing a run on the bank.

• A vice president of the Earl Radio Corporation jumped to his death from the window of a Manhattan hotel. His suicide note read, "We are broke. Last April I was worth $100,000. Today I am $24,000 in the red." But this happened in early October, weeks before the crash.

• Jesse Livermore, perhaps the most famous of the Wall Street speculators, shot himself--but not until 1940.

• Winston Churchill, visiting New York, was awakened the day after Black Tuesday by the noise of a crowd outside the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. "Under my very window a gentleman cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade," he wrote.

In 1929: The Year of the Great Crash (1989) historian William K. Klingaman says asphyxiation by gas was the most common method of doing oneself in, although there was considerable variety. He writes:

The wife of a Long Island broker shot herself in the heart; a utilities executive in Rochester, New York, shut himself in his bathroom and opened a wall jet of illuminating gas; a St. Louis broker swallowed poison; a Philadelphia financier shot himself in his athletic club; a divorcee in Allentown, Pennsylvania, closed the doors and windows of her home and turned on a gas oven. In Milwaukee, one gentleman who took his own life left a note that read, 'My body should go to science, my soul to Andrew W. Mellon, and sympathy to my creditors.'

All the above fiscal suicides were taken from here.

Now if only one unelected PM by the name of James Gordon "Cyclops" Brown, would find some way of removing himself from the human gene pool...

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