serious stuff

There's persuasive evidence that Ken S. Tucker got to graduate school and did some advanced physics courses. It looks as if he got dropped on his head at some stage in the process, and lost the ability to understand what he'd learned, but he knows odd stuff that it would be hard to learn any other way.

He is pretty close to being an idiot these days, but it looks very much as if he was a bit brigher when he was young.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The emerging story on the Great Depression is that it is directly attributable to the gold standard. Google "France Great Depression Douglas A. Irwin" for a PDF.

The point is that when there is inadequate money in the system, no amount of stimulus will work. The system will quickly regress to a depressed state once that money is gone.

If the Monetarist story is true, then the fault is the fed's. There was- again - a span of time with tight money which led to the collapse. The fed, reading the spike in oil prices, tightened and this led to a shortage in the overnight repo market which led to everything else.

Throw in that monetary policy has been too tight since the end of the Clinton Administration, leading to stagnant wages, and you have what we have in spades.

It is not that fiscal policy is of no use, but only that it must be used only when the money supply can be shown to be properly managed. Unfortunately, Krugman has been proven right that there's a strong tide of liquidationism not seen since Mellon.

What's remarkable is that this supports both Keynes *and* Hayek. Keynes, because it's a story of bad policy and under-liquidity, and Hayek because it's a failure of the knowledge problem variety. Money supply growth simply has not kept pace with anything.

Nope. Prices adjust to accommodate it. You're assuming 100% displacement of productive activity by taxes. This is simply not true. granted, a lot of it goes to DC real estate, but that's generally considered production ( when it's not rents ). And it should be pretty clear that not all government spending is tax funded.

Historically, how could there have been the kind of growth that was seen under Eisenhower if this was true?

-- Les Cargill

That's an emerging story, not the emerging story.

Unfortunately for your case, Irwin's paper suggests that if the USD and French central bank had gone in for Keynesian pump-priming there wouldn't have been a Great Depression; they could - and should have - injected an "adequate" amount of money into the system. Paul Krugman had no trouble calculating roughly what an adequate amount of money would be back at the end of 2008.

This ignores the US property bubble, whose bursting gaves us the sub- prime mortage crisis. The Fed can't be blamed for the flood of ninja loans that blew up the bubble to grotesque proportions.

That may have been the pin-prick that burst the bubble, but there had to be a bubble for them to burst, and the Fed can't be blamed for that.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

OUCH!

:-)

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

To which I would add:

Don't have children until you can afford to support them.

(2) above doesn't necessarily imply that.

Hey, if you want until then it will be too late.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Children cause you to learn how to support them... if you're a conservative.

If you're a liberal, Princess Nancy will provide child care and indoctrination... for "free" ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson confirms his status once again.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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For the benefit of the intended audience, who haven't got much of an attention span.

That would be an amazing coincidence, if it were true. Ken S. Tucker has clearly suffered serious brain damage since his graduate student days, and is now in the business of making truly absurd claims.

Somebody fueled the US house price bubble. CAR didn't do it - their loans didn't go sour in massive numbers - but the small greedy bottom- feeding bankers weren't as careful.

Really? The resale value of consumer electronics is essentially zero, so you are posting utter nonsense, not for the first time.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

All great enterprise begins with an underestimation.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Whatever the price, if 20% is lost to taxes at each transaction, there's quickly no money left to transact with.

Economists are sure big on abusing physics. Velocity is a vector, for one thing. If you added the vectors, the net velocity of money would be close to zero. Technicians / soothsayers to the contrary, stocks don't have "momentum," either.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Planning makes perfect. ;-)

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It isn't lost, but transferred to government to spend - and, like the poor - the governemnt can be relied on to spend it promptly.

Why waste time getting excited about economists attaching words to different concepts from physicists? Every occupation has it's specialised vocabulary - for a chemist, a "side-chain substitution" brings to mind something rather different than the image that might be conjured up in a mechanics imagination.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Because if they began with an over-estimation they'd end up as small enterprises, shrink-fitted to the actual market?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Actually, it is practice that makes perfect. The Russians tried central planning, and look where it got them. Even James Arthur can understand that (if very little else).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen