Tag: Great Depression

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free trade & free markets

Tire Trade War, Tiring

Political folly comes around, again and again, like a puncture in a rapidly deflating tire as you drive down the freeway. The end is never good.

President Obama and congressional Democrats pushed a tariff hike on China-made tires, up to 35 percent — and the WTO okayed it. They excuse their action because they wish to “retaliate” against China for its alleged monetary “manipulations” — manipulations that bear remarkable resemblance to our own Federal Reserve’s policies, by the way — which they say cause our current trade imbalance.

And, like non-economists everywhere, these buffoons judge the trade deficit a horrible thing. The fact that U.S. consumer’s get great benefit from lower-priced goods coming from China, and can — as a result of less expensive, Chinese-made tires – afford to replace their tires more often, thereby saving lives and health-care costs, doesn’t appear in politicians’ protectionist arguments.

It’s the economy that’s making our representatives stupid, of course. Blaming foreign competition is an easy out, when times get tough. It helps you avoid blaming your own country’s regulations, taxes, and (ahem) monetary policy.

This blame game is nothing new. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was pushed through early in the Great Depression, and it made a lot of sense to . . . politicians.

But the the trade wars the infamous tariff engendered became a major factor in making the Great Depression so Great.

Our politicians, reviving tired old policies — regarding tires, no less — merely make matters worse. Greatly worse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Nothing Doing

When you don’t know what to do, the thing to do is nothing.

Well, maybe.

Economist Thomas Sowell, in a recent column, notes that we recovered from downturns in the economy more quickly before the federal government took it upon itself to fix things. The first major fix was with the Great Depression. Which dragged on and on.

Today, our leaders have spent trillions of borrowed money to fix the economy, with poor results.

Sowell’s column is great, right up until near the end, when his plea for politicians to “do nothing” ignores a lot of . . . something.

After the huge 1987 stock-market crash, he explains, President Reagan did nothing. But then “the economy rebounded, and there were 20 years of sustained economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment.”

But were those 20 years really so benign? Activity by presidents, by Congress and most of all by the Federal Reserve set up the systemic problems that led to the Crash of 2008. Consumer price inflation was low during Sowell’s Reagan-blessed period, but all the while the Fed was feeding first a dot-com bubble and then a housing bubble. And it engaged in a series of bailouts of financial institutions.

Maybe Reagan and later politicians didn’t do enough in the “do nothing” department. They should have reined in (or abolished) the Fed. They should have abandoned “too big to fail.” They should have stopped subsidizing creditors in busts and home-owners in booms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Déjà vu Economics

Last week I noted the revival of interest in F.A. Hayek’s classic political tract, The Road to Serfdom. This week? The ongoing revival of interest in Hayek’s theory of boom and bust.

According to economist Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., today’s debate about stimulus spending mirrors the debate in the Great Depression between John Maynard Keynes and Hayek. Republished letters from October, 1932, Times of London, are eerily up-to-date.

The letter from Keynes and his allies, arguing that spending — any spending whatsoever — would spring the economy out of depression strikes me as a tad bizarre. All spending is equal? Make that several tads bizarre.

Can you say déjà vu?

The Hayekian response seems at once more sophisticated as well as commonsensical. For instance, Hayek recommended an immediate repeal of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff. He recognized a major factor for the Depression’s low expectations and business doldrums: The trade-killing legislation that hit the New York Times’s front page the day before Black Tuesday, 1929.

O’Driscoll and other economists have been making much of the enduring significance of the Hayek-Keynes debate. But there are differences between the Depression and now, aren’t there?

Back then, the loss part of the profit-and-loss system hadn’t been so completely undermined by recovery policy. Today we have bailouts, and these only increase risk-taking, likely to make the next bust even bigger — and today’s Keynesianism perhaps worse than the disease itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

How to Simulate Stimulation

Historians have noticed something interesting about the Great Depression: The bulk of Roosevelt’s New Deal money and effort wasn’t directed at the hardest-hit states. It was directed at swing states.

FDR’s New Deal could thus be seen as a vast re-election drive.

Economist Veronique de Rugy, of the Mercatus Center, recently testified before Congress about her studies of recent stimulus spending. She noticed that Democratic districts received bigger bucks than did Republican ones. Coincidence?

Nick Gillespie wrote about this on Reason magazine’s blog, Hit and Run. And, nestled in the comments section, is testimony from someone in the federal government about how stimulus money is actually spent. The government does not look for especially hard-hit areas. It looks for prospect projects that have been designed and engineered and ready to be funded to reach completion quickly.

This is useful to know. If believed, I’ll leave to you the explanation why Democratic Districts might be further along this pork-project train than Republican Districts. But it’s worth noting that this method does not really show any targeted expertise on the part of the federal government. It’s just a spend-and-spend-quickly program. Throw out enough dollars and hope something “sticks” . . . to produce real growth.

You see, this is nothing like how markets for capital projects work in the private sphere. And it’s nothing like a good way of jump-starting a wounded market economy.

It’s just government-mismanagement-as-usual.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets responsibility too much government

Massive Failures

How many times, in the last year, have I heard praise for FDR’s banking reforms, even down to the specifics of federal deposit insurance?

The funny thing is, this factoid is false. Roosevelt opposed deposit insurance. Everyone did who at that time knew the history of the states that had experimented with this form of subsidy. Only logrolling pushed deposit insurance into law as a known special favor to small banks in rural areas — not to cure the nation’s ills.

The actual history and lessons of bank failures is explored by Charles Calomiris in a recent paper provocatively titled “Banking Crises Yesterday and Today.” According to this Columbia Business School professor, bank panics were not uncommon in the U.S., prior to the Federal Reserve in 1913. And the Fed pretty much stopped them. Massive bank failures, on the other hand, are different. Not unheard of elsewhere, massive failures had not been a problem in America leading up to that time. However, such failures became a problem a few decades later in the Great Depression.

Calomiris explains that such massive crises are brought on, chiefly, by institutional risk factors, like deposit insurance, government manipulation of the housing market to increase ownership through loosening of financial standards, and the “too big to fail” doctrine.

It turns out that honest standards, and not mammoth government subsidies and guarantees, prove the best way to prevent catastrophe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.