By the start of 1948, there could no longer be any doubt: the Great Depression wasn’t coming back. Instead of collapsing at war’s end, as many feared it would, combined government and private spending (as measured by nominal Gross Domestic Product) hardly budged between 1945 and 1946,…
The post The New Deal and Recovery, Part 21: Happy Days appeared first on Alt-M.
In a recent Bloomberg column, former New York Fed President Bill Dudley echoes a conventional Fed narrative, contrasting Fed interest rate cycles under two supposedly distinct Chairmen. “Powell will need to find a way to persuade [markets] that he has no intention of behaving like Arthur Burns…
The post Stop Lionizing Paul Volcker and Villainizing Arthur Burns appeared first on Alt-M.
Recently, an investment advisor and Bitcoin proponent tweeted the claim that “[f]or most of human history” the “[s]eparation of money and state was the norm, even if the state stamped their ruler’s face on the coin.” Some strong disagreement (and some strong support) followed the tweet. The…
The post How Common Has Private Currency Been? appeared first on Alt-M.
Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a new minority staff report on July 26 contending that, for more than a decade, China has made “a sustained effort . . . to gain influence over the Federal…
The post Is China a Threat to the Fed? A Critique of the Portman Report appeared first on Alt-M.
In assessing the possibility that a severe downturn occurred at the end of WWII, I took issue with conventional wartime and postwar output statistics, while taking the period’s unemployment statistics at face value. In so doing I set aside a hypothesis that disputes the unemployment numbers themselves….
The post The New Deal and Recovery, Part 20, Coda: The Fate of Rosie the Riveter appeared first on Alt-M.
In assessing the possibility that a severe downturn occurred at the end of WWII, I took issue with conventional wartime and postwar output statistics, while taking the period’s unemployment statistics at face value. In so doing I set aside a hypothesis that disputes the unemployment numbers themselves….
The post The New Deal and Recovery, Part 20, Appendix: The Fate of Rosie the Riveter appeared first on Alt-M.
It was supposed to be a debacle. As the Second World War drew to a close, the nation’s leading economists feared that, once the armed services demobilized, at least 8 million men and women, perhaps many more, would be unemployed. That meant an unemployment rate of 12…
The post The New Deal and Recovery, Part 20: The Phantom Depression appeared first on Alt-M.
Thanks to the Roosevelt Recession, in the spring of 1938 the New Deal’s “Keynesians” finally found themselves in the saddle, displacing the planners, reformers, and trust-busters whose legislative efforts had already run out of steam some months before. The Keynesians’ rise was symbolized by the $3 billion…
The post The New Deal and Recovery, Part 19: War, and Peace appeared first on Alt-M.
Today, inflation has reached a 40-year high, in response to fiscal profligacy and accommodative monetary policy. Direct cash payments to individuals and businesses in 2020 and 2021, which totaled more than $5 trillion, along with the rapid growth of base money—under the Fed’s large-scale asset purchase program…
The post The Menace of Fiscal Inflation appeared first on Alt-M.
(From the entry on “Money,” by Charles Francis Bastable, in the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica): The very large number of the autonomous cities of Greece, which possessed the right of issuing money, was the cause of the competition between different currencies, each having legal…
The post Monetary Progress appeared first on Alt-M.