I’m a bit late to commenting on Christina Romer’s Sunday op-ed on monetary policy and the Great Depression, but it makes a point that bears repeating. The story most of us know about the Great Depression, the one in which Herbert Hoover screws up but then Franklin Delano Roosevelt comes in and hires people to paint murals and repair roads and defeat Hitler and that solves the problem, is wrong, or at least incomplete. Monetary policy — Boring, hard-to-understand, no-one-likes-to-talk-about-it, increases in the money base — was really the key to getting the economy back on track.
To get even more specific, the two policies Romer identifies as being key to the recovery were FDR’s decision to sign Executive Order 6102 and Hitler’s decision to overrun Europe.
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