{"id":7106,"date":"2015-04-05T08:21:57","date_gmt":"2015-04-05T13:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7106"},"modified":"2015-04-05T08:21:57","modified_gmt":"2015-04-05T13:21:57","slug":"the-ghost-of-37","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7106","title":{"rendered":"The Ghost of \u201937"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Ghost of \u201937<\/a><\/h3>\n

With the Fed supposedly steeling itself at last to remove a little of its emergency \u2018accommodation\u2019, it has suddenly become fashionable to warn of the awful parallels with 1937, as the highly-respected Ray Dalio of Bridgewater has notably done.<\/p>\n

That year, the story goes, the nation\u2019s ascent from the depths of the Great Depression was aborted because the Fed \u2018tightened\u2019 and the government \u2018cut spending\u2019: a sharp recession was the immediate and highly avoidable result. Therefore, we are told, we must not act today.<\/p>\n

We strongly refute the analogy: Fed actions were marginal and largely technical in nature while the real fiscal story was the rise in taxes, not any slashing of regular outlays<\/p>\n

Far more instrumental in the slump was the nature of those taxes \u2013 being steep, ideologically motivated increases in levies on wealth, profits, and capital.<\/p>\n

Also to blame were the government\u2019s tolerance of labour militancy and its concerted campaign against \u2018tax avoiders\u2019, \u2018economic royalists\u2019 and the \u2018top sixty families\u2019 \u2013 all of which frightened and discouraged the entrepreneurial classes. This fear intensified greatly when the Supreme Court was neutered as means of seeking relief from the state\u2019s attacks.<\/p>\n

It is in such displays of pitchfork populism by financially and intellectually bankrupt governments that we \u2013 in the age of Piketty, of the organized deprecation of the \u20181%\u2019 and of the abuse of the \u2018Fair Share of Tax\u2019 slogan \u2013 need to draw the most pertinent comparisons<\/p>\n

The real Ghost of \u201937 takes the form of such mean-spirited and, counter-productive politics: the spectre should not be conjured up to excuse the central bank from further delaying its overdue embarkation on the long road back to normality and policy minimalism.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ghost of \u201937 With the Fed supposedly steeling itself at last to remove a little of its emergency \u2018accommodation\u2019, it has suddenly become fashionable to warn of the awful parallels with 1937, as the highly-respected Ray Dalio of Bridgewater has notably done. That year, the story goes, the nation\u2019s ascent from the depths of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4637,303,305,383,534,4084,1264],"class_list":["post-7106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-4637","tag-fed","tag-federal-reserve","tag-great-depression","tag-monetary-policy","tag-monetary-tightening","tag-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7107,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7106\/revisions\/7107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}