America’s Great Depression pptx

[...]... and depression .9 Secondary features of depression: deflationary credit contraction 14 Government depression policy: laissez-faire 19 Preventing depressions 23 Problems in the Austrian theory of the trade cycle 29 2 KEYNESIAN CRITICISMS OF THE THEORY 37 The liquidity “trap” 39 Wage rates and unemployment .42 3 SOME ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS OF DEPRESSION: ... 345 TABLE VII: Receipts of Government and Government Enterprises 346 TABLE VIII: Government and the Private Product 347 xii America’s Great Depression Introduction to the Fifth Edition T he Wall Street collapse of September–October 1929 and the Great Depression which followed it were among the most important events of the twentieth century They made the Second World War possible, though... 321 The attack on property rights: the final currency failure 323 Wages, hours, and employment during the depression 330 Conclusion: the lessons of Mr Hoover’s record 336 APPENDIX: GOVERNMENT AND THE NATIONAL PRODUCT, 1929–1932 339 INDEX 349 xi America’s Great Depression TABLES TABLE 1: Total Money Supply of the United States, 1921–1929 .92 TABLE 2: Total Dollars... INFLATION: ECONOMISTS AND THE LURE OF A STABLE PRICE LEVEL .169 PART III: THE GREAT DEPRESSION: 1929–1933 7 PRELUDE TO DEPRESSION: MR HOOVER AND LAISSEZ-FAIRE 185 The development of Hoover’s interventionism: unemployment 188 The development of Hoover’s interventionism: labor relations 199 8 THE DEPRESSION BEGINS: PRESIDENT HOOVER TAKES COMMAND 209 The White House conferences... remains beyond our reach at Fort Knox As for avoiding depressions, the remedy is simple: again, to avoid inflations by stopping the Fed’s power to inflate If we are in a depression, as we are now, the only proper course of action is to Introduction to the Third Edition xxx avoid governmental interference with the depression, and thereby to allow the depression adjustment process to complete itself as... consequences of the Great Depression were not finally erased from the mind of humanity until the end of the 1980s, when the Soviet collectivist alternative to capitalism crumbled in hopeless ruin and the entire world accepted there was no substitute for the market Granted the importance of these events, then, the failure of historians to explain either their magnitude or duration is one of the great mysteries... satisfactorily explained it Why so deep? Why so long? We do not really know, to this day But the writer who, in my judgment, has come closest to providing a satisfactory analysis is Murray N Rothbard in America’s Great Depression For half a century, the conventional, orthodox explanation, provided by John Maynard Keynes and his followers, was that capitalism was incapable of saving itself, and that government... the end of the 1930s The Great Depression was a failure not of capitalism but of the hyperactive state I will not spoil the reader’s pleasure by entering more deeply into Rothbard’s arguments His book is an intellectual tour de force, Introduction xvii in that it consists, from start to finish, of a sustained thesis, presented with relentless logic, abundant illustration, and great eloquence I know of... swathed in classical liberal and supply-side rhetoric—is in no way going to solve the problem of inflationary depression or of the business cycle But if Reaganomics is doomed to be a fiasco, what is likely to happen? Will we suffer a replay, as many voices are increasingly predicting, of the Great Depression of the 1930s? Certainly there are many ominous signs and parallels The fact that Reaganomics cannot... lessening of inflation in 1981 and at least the first half of 1982) is to continue, what will happen to the debt? Increasingly, the answer will be bankruptcies, and deeper depression The bankruptcy rate is already the highest since the Great Depression of the 1930s Thrift institutions caught between high interest rates to their depositors and low rates earned on long-time mortgages, will increasingly become . Private Product 347 xi America’s Great Depression xii America’s Great Depression Introduction to the Fifth Edition T he Wall Street collapse of September–October 1929 and the Great Depression which.