Every hoary myth about the private market's unfitness to supply means of exchange has roots that trace back to the hoariest monetary platitude of all, namely, the claim that governments alone, whether republican or absolutist or otherwise, are fit to coin money. That commonplace credendum dates from…
Regular readers of Alt-M don't need to be told that yours truly is no fan of the Fed's gigantic credit footprint. Even before the recent crisis, he lamented both the extent to which the Fed went from merely regulating this nation's short-term money market to being its…
"Massive jolts of New Deal spending had stopped the economic slide, [but the economy crashed again when] over two years, FDR slashed government spending 17 percent." (From a 2011 NPR presentation.) In the last installment of this series, I discussed the hypothesis that the 1937 collapse resulted…
By the start of 1937, things were looking up for the U.S. economy. Although the Supreme Court had struck down both the NIRA and the AAA—the chief pillars of the original New Deal's recovery plan—some time earlier, like a glider released by its tow plane, the recovery…
Having devoted the last two posts in my New Deal series to the NRA, I may have given readers the impression that I had nothing to say about the consequences of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) passed more than a month before the National Industrial Recovery Act….