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Today's Economic History: Eric Rauchway on Roosevelt’s Money Policy, 1933-1934 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

In other words, before Roosevelt had been in office a full year, he had articulated, with Keynes’s approval, all the elements of what would become the Bretton Woods monetary policy in 1944: currencies would be kept at stable exchange rates, but would be adjustable in keeping with the needs of economic prosperity in each country.
#Monetary-Policy #Eric-Rauchway #Great-Depression #Franklin-Delano-Roosevelt #Bretton-Woos - bradford-delong.com

Weekend Reading: Best Review of Martin Wolf's "The Shifts and the Shocks" (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

It is Eric Rauchway in the Times Literary Supplement. My only complaints about the review are: It was more than just the desire of rapidly-growing emerging markets not to find themselves under the hammer of a 1998 that produced the global savings glut. It was increased income inequality in the North Atlantic core, plus increased wealth in the periphery seeking a North Atlantic bolthole as a form of political risk insurance as well and in addition. Although Keynes argued that deflation was worse than inflation, he sought to avoid both rather than lean on the inflation side. Keynes did not win at Bretton Woods: Bretton Woods did not mandate symmetrical adjustment. Keynes's victory was partial, and for the most part came after his death: policy during his life was hardly Keynesian. Summers served Obama; Summers's preferred policies were not adopted by Obama. But that failure was by no means written in the stars. It was contingent--depending on both a Treasury Secretary and senior political advisors who did not understand the situation and on Obama's imprinting on them rather than on Summers. It was a near-run thing, in the United States at least. A much better world is only a butterfly wing-flap away on some alternative quantum frequency of the multiverse. Here it is: Eric Rauchway: Debt Piled Up: "Martin Wolf THE SHIFTS AND THE SHOCKS: What we’ve learned--and still have to learn--from the financial crisis. 496pp. Allen Lane. £25. 978 1 84614 697 8 Published: 29 December 2014: Over the course of his new book on the current economic unpleasantness, Martin Wolf conveys a sense of increasing frustration. He begins with a sober account of recent history and a capsule proposal for how to solve the malaise with which we are confronted, and then begins to evaluate competing accounts and proposed solutions, often with a single word. Here is a non-exhaustive list of those words: nonsensical, simplistic, mistaken, childish, asinine, self-refuting, nonsense, silly, insouciant and grotesquely dangerous, and--most
#Lesser-Depression #Martin-Wolf #Eric-Rauchway #The-Shifts-and-the-Shocks #Books - bradford-delong.com