After an interruption due mostly to my move to Spain, I'm pleased to be back in the saddle again, wrapping up my series on the New Deal. I ended a previous installment of this series by observing that, despite many dire forecasts, the U.S. economy avoided a…
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,…
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…
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…
(Previous installments of "The Keynesian Myth" are here and here.) Balancing Act As Richard Adelstein (1991, p. 177) observes, far from taking Keynes's advice that he ratchet-up the federal government's deficit spending, "Roosevelt held fast to the ideal of a balanced budget and remained the chief opponent…