Is China a Threat to the Fed? A Critique of the Portman Report
Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a new minority staff report on July 26 contending that, for more than a decade, China has made “a sustained effort . .
The New Deal and Recovery, Part 20, Appendix: The Fate of Rosie the Riveter
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
The New Deal and Recovery, Part 20: The Phantom Depression
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
The New Deal and Recovery, Part 19: War, and Peace
Thanks to the Roosevelt Recession, in the spring of 1938 the New Deal's "Keynesians" finally found themselves in the saddle, displacing the planners, reformers, and trust-busters whose legislative efforts had already run out of steam some months before. The Keynesians'
The Menace of Fiscal Inflation
Today, inflation has reached a 40-year high, in response to fiscal profligacy and accommodative monetary policy. Direct cash payments to individuals and businesses in 2020 and 2021, which totaled more than $5 trillion, along with the rapid growth of base
Monetary Progress
(From the entry on "Money," by Charles Francis Bastable, in the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica): The very large number of the autonomous cities of Greece, which possessed the right of issuing money, was the cause of the
Paul Krugman and the “Ersatz” Theory of Private Currencies
Although I've devoted many essays here to exploding myths about historical private currencies, there's one I've yet to directly challenge. That's the belief that such currencies only thrive in the absence of official alternatives. Otherwise, the argument goes, people would