December 26, 2011
For family reasons I had occasion to see some of the Sunday morning talk shows. (These are best avoided for those with an attachment to reality.)
I got to see Jonathan Alter explain how President Obama and the Fed prevented a second Great Depression. The story went that the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month when President Obama took office in January. If this had continued until the end of the year then we would have had a second Great Depression. Therefore the steps taken by President Obama and the Fed prevented the Second Great Depression.
There are two problems with this story. First, there is no reason to believe that the counterfactual, if the President and the Fed did not act, is that the economy would have continued to lose 800,000 jobs a month. In January the economy was still in a free fall from the Lehman bankruptcy. Is there any reason to believe that the free fall would have continued throughout the year in the absence of the stimulus and the Fed’s aggressive actions? It’s hard to see that.
It is hard to construct a coherent counterfactual for the Fed. In effect, the Fed is the fire crew that shows up at the scene and puts out the fire. What’s the counterfactual to the fire crew showing up? If we assume that the counterfactual is that no fire crew shows up, then we can say that city would have burnt down, but that it is a highly unrealistic counterfactual. Similarly, a counterfactual that the Fed never does anything in response to an economic collapse seems rather unrealistic.
This brings up the second problem. The Great Depression was not one horrible year. It was a decade of double digit unemployment. To get a decade of double digit unemployment we would need the government to sit on its hands for a decade even as tens of millions of people are suffering. Again, this is possible, but it hardly seems the most likely counterfactual.
To be clear, I don’t think there is any doubt that the stimulus helped the economy and created in the range of 2-3 million jobs. The Fed’s actions to prevent a financial collapse were also a plus, although there should have been some quid pro quo for the trillions of dollars in below market loans going to the banks. But, the second Great Depression is a figment of the imagination of the Washington policy wonks.
Also, to be fair to Alter, he made a number of good points in this segment. However, the one about the second Great Depression is DC drivel that deserves to be attacked whenever it rears its ugly head.
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