Greg Ip

80 years after the crash that ushered in the Great Depression, we’re not repeating history’s mistakes. We’re making our own.

By Greg Ip

Sunday, October 25, 2009

 Book review of:

THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,  By Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, Princeton Univ. 463 pp. $35

THE CREATION AND DESTRUCTION OF VALUE: The Globalization Cycle, By Harold James, arvard Univ. 325 pp. $19.95

The Dow’s recent vault back to the neighborhood of 10,000 inspired a sense of relief far more than it did any urge for celebration. We have been through a dreadful recession, but at least, the market tells us, we have avoided a depression.

Or have we? This week marks the 80th anniversary of the crash that ushered in the Great Depression. In recent months, the Dow’s behavior has eerily mimicked those dark days when the index leapt from its 1929 lows to rally 48 percent into 1930. It was a false dawn: The worst of the Depression was still to come.

A popular refrain during our modern-day financial crisis is that we have forgotten the lessons of economic history. But Americans are not ignorant of the past: Many are obsessed with it. Countless investors scrutinize stock charts and bet on history repeating itself. However, few win this way. Our problem is not ignorance of history but an inability to know which bits are most relevant to the present. Read the rest of this entry »

The original article is linked here.

Economics focus

What if?

If Lehman had not failed, would the crisis have happened anyway?

Illustration by Jac Depczyk

[Greg Ip] IN AUGUST 2008 Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist, briefly rocked world stockmarkets when he warned a conference in Singapore: “We’re not just going to see midsized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper, we’re going to see a big one—one of the big investment banks or big banks.” A month later, in the early hours of September 15th, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike any since the Depression

Categories:

Monetary policy

[Greg Ip] IN MY many years of reporting on the Federal Reserve, I have turned more times than I can count to Allan Meltzer. Volume One of his history of the Federal Reserve (he’s still working on Volume Two) is one of the most thumbed books on my shelf, and I consider him one of the leading authorities on 20th century economic history. Naturally I was intrigued by his criticism of comparisons between the current period and the Great Depression in the Wall Street Journal.

It’s a fascinating piece but I have several qualms with it. Read the rest of this entry »

The original story is available here.

In his zeal to fix capitalism, Barack Obama must not stifle America’s dynamism

Illustration by KAL

DEFENDING American capitalism these days is a thankless job. Reckless lending by American financiers produced a crisis that has pushed the world into its worst recession since the 1930s. Tales of greed and fraud during the boom years abound.

Small wonder that although Americans still prefer their government neat and local, they are a little less hostile to federal activism these days (see article). Such sentiments, last November, helped propel Barack Obama into the White House and his Democratic Party to bigger majorities in both houses of Congress. As Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, says, Mr Obama does not want to waste this crisis. He is using it to create a bigger role for government throughout the economy, from education and health care to banking and energy.

He, and Congress, risk overreaching. Read the rest of this entry »

The original article is available here.

Americans have grown slightly more receptive to the idea of an activist government. Will they go along with Barack Obama’s aspirations?

Alamy

THE demonstrators thronging the steps of the war memorial in central Indianapolis are a small but spirited bunch. Steps away from the head office of one of the country’s biggest health-insurance companies, they chant slogans calling for a single government-run health plan and wave signs with slogans like “One plan one nation” and “Patients not profits”. One cheekily advises: “Accept personal responsibility. Do your own colonoscopy”. After pursuing their cause for years, advocates of universal health care got a jolt of energy when Barack Obama took office. “Something happened in January that changed our cultural story for ever,” a folk singer tells the crowd before launching into a song, “If not now, tell me when.”

Across the street, an argument breaks out. Dennis Majewski, a public-defence lawyer, agrees with the protesters. “We’ll never rebound until we have national health-care insurance.” But should the government look after “a known druggie whose drug habit gets him to the point he is seriously ill?” queries his cousin, Tom Majewski, a retired executive. Well, yes, says Dennis: “That person has a serious illness.” Tom shoots back: “But it’s a choice!”

The debate in Indianapolis is a microcosm of a broader re-examination by Americans of government’s role in the economy. Read the rest of this entry »

The original blog post is linked here.
IN THE prelude to the G20 meeting, many commenters, including this newspaper, worried of a repeat of the London Conference of 1933. Franklin Roosevelt is often accused of wrecking it with his refusal to return to the gold standard. The resulting disarray, it is said, deepened the Depression.

Yet one could argue that in its failure to return the world to gold, the 1933 conference was a success. Markets greeted Roosevelt’s July bombshell “enthusiastically”, notes economic historian Allan Meltzer. They correctly anticipated “reflation, rising output, and a vigorous policy of domestic expansion.” As Barry Eichengreen has demonstrated, the gold standard was a monetary straitjacket that transmitted deflation between countries; each country’s recovery is highly correlated with when it abandoned gold.

On this front, I see a parallel (though perhaps a tortured one) with the G20’s decision to boost the IMF’s lending resources from $250 billion to $1 trillion. Read the rest of this entry »

The original story is linked here.

Mar 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition 

IN THEIR collective mythology, Americans owe their wealth to an entrepreneurial spirit which government has usually only served to suppress. More so than any other society, Americans give private enterprise the benefit of the doubt. Even now, though outraged at the excesses that led to the current financial crisis, they are deeply cynical about the spending, bailouts and interventions that form the government’s response.

Yet the mythology is based on a selective interpretation of history. Felix Rohatyn demonstrates this by recounting ten episodes of significant and ultimately beneficial economic initiatives taken by past American governments. Read the rest of this entry »

Feb 12th 2009 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

 The original story is linked here.

Today’s crisis has given new relevance to the ideas of another great economist of the Depression era

Sue Vago

SHORTLY after he was elected president, Barack Obama sounded a warning: “We are facing an economic crisis of historic proportions…We now risk falling into a deflationary spiral that could increase our massive debt even further.” The address evoked not just the horror of the Depression, but one of the era’s most important thinkers: Irving Fisher.

Though once America’s most famous economist, Fisher is now almost forgotten by the public. If he is remembered, it is usually for perhaps the worst stockmarket call in history. In October 1929 he declared that stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau”. Today it is John Maynard Keynes, his British contemporary, who is cited, debated and followed. Yet Fisher laid the foundation for much of modern monetary economics; Keynes called Fisher the “great-grandparent” of his own theories on how monetary forces influenced the real economy. (They first met in London in 1912 and reportedly got along well.)

As parallels to the 1930s multiply, Fisher is relevant again. Read the rest of this entry »

Fed Nominee Learned Perils Of Deflation, Gold Standard And Pricking of Bubbles — A Grandmother’s Explanation

By Greg Ip

2660 words

7 December 2005

The Wall Street Journal

A1

English

(Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

In 1983, Mark Gertler asked his friend and fellow economist Ben Bernanke why he was starting his career by studying the Great Depression. “If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes,” Mr. Bernanke replied, according to Mr. Gertler. “If you want to understand economics, study the biggest calamity to hit the U.S. and world economies.”

Mr. Bernanke’s fascination with the economic earthquake never abated. “I am a Great Depression buff, the way some people are Civil War buffs,” he wrote in 2000. “The issues raised by the Depression, and its lessons, are still relevant today.”

Mr. Bernanke’s interest in the Depression, which dates back to his childhood, is a guide to the evolution of his thinking. In particular, his groundbreaking research on how mistakes by the Federal Reserve compounded the catastrophe is likely to influence how he steers the economy once he succeeds Alan Greenspan as its chairman early next year. Read the rest of this entry »