"This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. …[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself." —FDR, in his first inaugural address. "There is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain."—Thomas Hobbes, on the state of…
"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…
In assessing the New Deal's contribution to economic recovery, I've naturally tended to draw on fairly recent research. That keeps me from being accused of being out of date. But it makes me vulnerable to the charge of overlooking the testimony of experts who studied the New…
This essay, the first of a series on government efforts to bank the “unbanked,” reviews the history of postal banking and its deleterious role in the Great Depression. Subsequent posts will discuss contemporary proposals for government involvement in retail banking, such as through the U.S. Postal Service…
"In 1934, the government price of gold was increased to $35 per ounce, effectively increasing the gold on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheets by 69 percent. This increase in assets allowed the Federal Reserve to further inflate the money supply." ("FDR takes United States off gold standard,"…