Money, Gold and the Great Depression
Federal Reserve
referred by Deep Throat

Fed Reserve Governor Ben S. Bernanke gave a speech on 3/2 about the Great Depression. Following are excepts, see the whole speech

What caused the Depression? This question is a difficult one, but answering it is important if we are to draw the right lessons from the experience for economic policy. Solving the puzzle of the Depression is also crucial to the field of economics itself because of the light the solution would shed on our basic understanding of how the economy works.

During the Depression years and for many decades afterward, economists disagreed sharply on the sources of the economic and financial collapse of the 1930s. In contrast, during the past twenty years or so economic historians have come to a broad consensus about the causes of the Depression. A widening of the geographic focus of Depression research deserves much of the credit for this breakthrough. Before the 1980s, research on the causes of the Depression had considered primarily the experience of the United States. This attention to the U.S. case was appropriate to some degree, as the U.S. economy was then, as it is today, the world's largest; the decline in output and employment in the United States during the 1930s was especially severe; and many economists have argued that, to an important extent, the worldwide Depression began in the United States, spreading from here to other countries (Romer, 1993)...

I have already mentioned the sharp deflation of the price level that occurred during the contraction phase of the Depression, by far the most severe episode of deflation experienced in the United States before or since. Deflation, like inflation, tends to be closely linked to changes in the national money supply, defined as the sum of currency and bank deposits outstanding, and such was the case in the Depression. Like real output and prices, the U.S. money supply fell about one -third between 1929 and 1933, rising in subsequent years as output and prices rose...

Views have changed over time. During the Depression itself, and in several decades following, most economists argued that monetary factors were not an important cause of the Depression. For example, many observers pointed to the fact that nominal interest rates were close to zero during much of the Depression, concluding that monetary policy had been about as easy as possible yet had produced no tangible benefits to the economy. The attempt to use monetary policy to extricate an economy from a deep depression was often compared to "pushing on a string...

Why then did the Federal Reserve raise interest rates in 1928? The principal reason was the Fed's ongoing concern about speculation on Wall Street. Fed policymakers drew a sharp distinction between "productive" (that is, good) and "speculative" (bad) uses of credit, and they were concerned that bank lending to brokers and investors was fueling a speculative wave in the stock market. When the Fed's attempts to persuade banks not to lend for speculative purposes proved ineffective, Fed officials decided to dissuade lending directly by raising the policy interest rate...

posted by prof_booty | 02:12 PM