Understanding the Great Depression and Failures of Modern Economic Policy

HISTORY OPENS WINDOWS ON THE FUTURE. The Great Depression highlights your government's capacity for economic policy stupidity. Do you understand the policy failures behind the Crash of '29? Or the policies involved in the aborting of the substantial spring 1930 economic and stock market recovery? Or the policies that prevented the spectacular summer 1932 bull market in stocks and agricultural commodities from stimulating recovery in the broader economy? Or how New Deal policies extended the Great Depression for an additional half decade despite more than doubling the monetary supply and massive resort to budget deficits? Or how the Great Depression ended in 1940 with unemployment dropping about 7 percentage points in the two years before the U.S. entered WW-II and began its massive wartime budget deficits? The Great Depression is just a highlight in a century of repeated failures for Federal Reserve System monetary policy. Under its care, the dollar has lost about 90 percent of its purchasing power. Its policies have also bestowed upon the economy the Keynesian inflationary morass of the 1970s and the asset price boom and bust nature of the current business cycle. Understanding why interest rate suppression policies aren't working, haven't worked in the past, and can never work is herein explained.