What finally brought the Great Depression to an end? We've seen that, whatever it was, it took place not during the 30s but sometime between then and the end of World War II, when a remarkable postwar revival occurred instead of the renewed depression many feared. We've…
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics is to be shared by Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, and Philip H. Dybvig, “for research on banks and financial crises.” Diamond and Dybvig are best known for their 1983 article, “Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity,” in which they…
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…
(As many Alt-M readers will know, my interest in Bitcoin goes back to its earliest days, and even before that: like my grad school mentor and regular Alt-M contributor Lawrence White, I took part in the 1990's "cypherpunk" movement that prefigured Bitcoin's development. Not quite two years…
In December 1946, Clark Warburton published an article in the Political Science Quarterly titled, “Monetary Control under the Federal Reserve Act,” which was reprinted in chapter 14 of his landmark book, Depression, Inflation, and Monetary Policy (1966). He argues that the Federal Reserve’s failure to prevent the…