FUCK THE POLICE
911 EVERY DAY
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/whats-our-gold-standard/
What’s our gold standard?
I’ve just reread Eichengreen and Temin, The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, which does a great job of showing how the “gold mentality” — what they call mentalite, with an accent — paralyzed policymakers. (The longer-form version, with more personal color, is Liaquat Ahamad’s Lords of Finance.)
What E&T show is that circa 1930 key decision-makers had spent so many years equating adherence to gold not just with prosperity, but with morality, decency, civilization itself, that they couldn’t even contemplate breaking with that orthodoxy — even in the face of total catastrophe.
I think we’re more flexible now. But my sense is that the mystique of finance is playing a somewhat similar role.
More on this when I’m not waiting for a delayed plan at O’Hare.
What’s our gold standard?
I’ve just reread Eichengreen and Temin, The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, which does a great job of showing how the “gold mentality” — what they call mentalite, with an accent — paralyzed policymakers. (The longer-form version, with more personal color, is Liaquat Ahamad’s Lords of Finance.)
What E&T show is that circa 1930 key decision-makers had spent so many years equating adherence to gold not just with prosperity, but with morality, decency, civilization itself, that they couldn’t even contemplate breaking with that orthodoxy — even in the face of total catastrophe.
I think we’re more flexible now. But my sense is that the mystique of finance is playing a somewhat similar role.
More on this when I’m not waiting for a delayed plan at O’Hare.
), how does one go from the conclusions of the 1997 Eichengreen and Timen work (whose conclusions I find dubious) to the conclusion "I think we're more flexible now", if anything the complexity of our financial system and tendancy toward government interventionalism in the markets makes us less flexible, after all the federal government seems to think we have only one option namely print, borrow and spend MORE (since the option of letting failed businesses actually fail has been taken off the table).