by Leanan » Mon 22 Sep 2008, 08:16:34
The big problem is...this isn't going to work. As Jerry McManus pointed out at TheOilDrum, Herbert Hoover tried this, too. He quotes from a book called
Since Yesterday, written by someone who lived through the events of the time.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he theoretically necessary adjustment became a practically unbearable adjustment.
Therefore Hoover was driven to the point of intervening to protect the debt structure -- first by easing temporarily the pressure of international debts without canceling them, and second by buttressing the banks and big corporations with Federal funds.
Thus a theoretically flexible economic structure became rigid at a vital point. The debt burden remained almost undiminished. Bowing under the weight of debt -- and other rigid costs -- business thereupon slowed still further. As it slowed, it discharged workers or put them on reduced hours, thereby reducing purchasing power and intensifying the crisis.
What is it they say about doing the same thing but expecting a different outcome?
Downsouth pointed out this report from
two guys at PIMCO, who think Bernanke, the supposed Great Depression expert, doesn't really understand the Great Depression.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ') The summer of 1932 marked the trough for US economic growth, which was well in the midst of the Great Depression starting in 1929. Global sovereign defaults were well underway by 1931. Turkey, China, Bolivia, Peru, Cuba, Brazil and Colombia all defaulted on their debts in 1931. Hungary, Yugoslavia, and regrettably Greece defaulted in 1932. In 1933, Austria and Germany joined the club. And, by 1934, all debtor countries except Argentina, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic had suspended debt service. Are we to accept the conventional wisdom that a mistaken, overly restrictive monetary and fiscal policy in the US created the Great Depression and led to these global sovereign defaults? It seems equally, if not more likely, that an imbalanced global trade system jarred by restructuring in Germany and Great Britain, and by prior revolutions against free markets in Russia and China may have been the initial and crucial culprit. The global constriction of trade was the result of several dependent and independent political and economic upheavals during the decade following World War I. It is a massive presumption to state that a more stimulative Federal Reserve (a la 2001-2002) could have prevented the course of events in the early 1930s.
The lessons for present-day policymakers are stark. Recent anti-deflationary policy in Japan, the US, and Europe are all predicated upon the conventional analysis emanating from the Great Depression. We feel these are mistaken and misguided.
(Yes, the date on the paper is 2006. They predicted this two years ago.)