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…
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 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…