December 13, 2011
The Wall Street Journal felt the need to tell readers that Bernanke’s action to provide liquidity to the banking system:
“may have prevented a repeat of the Great Depression.”
This is not true. We know how to reinflate an economy after a collapse. It just requires massive amounts of government spending, as happened during World War II. The first Great Depression was not caused just by the failure to counter the initial financial crisis effectively. It was attributable to an inadequate policy response over theh following decade.
The piece also tells readers that Bernanke is worried that businesses are not investing because of concerns about future deficits. He would not have this fear if he looked at the data. Measured as a share of GDP business investment is almost back to its pre-recession level. This is very impressive since we would ordinarily expect that large amounts of excess capacity in many sectors would be depressing investment.
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