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 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….
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…
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 petered out some months before. The Keynesians' rise was symbolized by the $3 billion spending program FDR…
(Although my contributions to this series have so far been more-or-less in their proper order, this one isn't: it occurred to me only relatively recently that it would be worthwhile to take stock of the overall progress of the recovery up to the outbreak of the Roosevelt…