Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Remembering the right parts of history.

Wall Street can have a stock market crash all by itself, but it takes ham-handed government intervention to create a Great Depression.

3 comments:

NotClauswitz said...

We're so screwed - unless Barry is a true politician and all his promises turn to vapor and go *poof* out the window.

Anonymous said...

It was not until the 1980s that I started learning the realities of the causes of the Depression. As near as I can tell, anybody who disagreed with the Official Version was treated just like today's scientists who are unconvinced that Homo Sap's CO2 is a major cause of climate change.

We had a similar problem in the late 1970s with the loose money of the LBJ-Jimmy Carter era, but Volcker's efforts at the Fed gave us a short-term but deep correction. After him, though, Greenspan et al put us back on the trail of loose credit and easy money.

It appears to me that Obama and the more liberal Democrats and RINOs have bought into the conventional wisdom as to the causes and solutions for the Depression, as they look at today's debacle. After all, they've already committed some two trillion dollars we don't really have--and more tax dollars to come (or go).

Sometime next spring, look for a resurgence of protectionism, ala Smoot/Hawley. If that happens, it's Katie-bar-the-door for the following half-dozen or ten years.

And I haven't even mentioned our coming problems with electric power and transportation fuels.

Odds are, cities are gonna be seriously bad places to live.

Art

Cybrludite said...

And this is part of why I'm looking to get out of New Orleans. (The other part is having to pack up everything I own and running like hell every other summer...)