Even before he was elected President, it was said that Franklin Roosevelt was given a clear choice by one of his closest advisors. George F. Warren was an economist who, like Irving Fisher, demanded a radical departure from tradition and orthodoxy in order to arrest the world’s slide into financial anarchy. No matter how dear and historically abetted, neither solvency nor even soundness might prevail in a world drowning in deflation.
What Warren told FDR was that if elected he must choose between “…a rise in prices or a rise in dictators.”
Even the casual observer of history will detect the contrariety in Warren’s binary; the rest of the thirties was perhaps best described by both of those things simultaneously. Only, maybe it had never been enough of the first such that what thorough reflation, as Fisher had termed this idea, might have been intended was never followed through to fruition.
Thus, the dictators.
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