Last week I excerpted from Herbert Hoover’s 1930 State of the Union address. This time I wanted to excerpt from the 1931 SOTU because the Credit Anstalt event had already happened, triggering retail deposit runs. Bank runs is something about which Mohamed El-Erian, the head of PIMCO, has recently expressed concerned because of the wholesale funding squeeze now ongoing in France.
What caught my eye was where Hoover says “The situation largely arises from an unjustified lack of confidence.” This seems to be an almost verbatim copy of the sentiments Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke expressed in Minneapolis just two weeks ago.
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