When doing interviews for my new book on the Great Depression, a natural question comes up: will the present crisis turn out as bad as the 1930s?
My standard answer is typical for an economist: "yes and no." On the one hand, there were very specific reasons that unemployment broke 25 percent in 1933, and we don't have those factors in place today. So I don't think the official unemployment rate will get anywhere near that catastrophic level, though it could very well come in at the #2 spot in US economic history.
However, even though unemployment rates will not be as severe, I still predict that we are in store for a miserable decade of economic stagnation. Given all of the huge assaults of the federal government into the private sector in just the past six months, I frankly don't understand how anyone except true believers in Karl Marx can be seeing "green shoots."
What is perhaps worse, laid on top of the stalled output in goods and services, I predict Americans are in store for the worst price inflation in US history. Just as stagflation referred to the combination of high unemployment and price inflation rates in the 1970s — something Keynesians thought was impossible — we can use the term hyperdepression to refer to the mix of hyperinflation and a serious recession in real output. In the remainder of this article I'll explain my pessimistic outlook.
Why Did Unemployment Hit 25% in the 1930s?
The single biggest blunder Herbert Hoover made was insisting that businesses maintain wage rates after the stock-market crash in October 1929. Hoover adhered to an "underconsumptionist" theory of the business cycle, in which a small shock to business could end up cascading into a full-blown depression if market forces were left to their own devices. In Hoover's view, the worst thing businesses could do in 1930 would be to slash wage rates, because then workers would have even less money to buy products; there would be a downward spiral into oblivion.
The problem was that the United States was still on a gold standard, and so the Fed couldn't inflate the economy with new paper money with reckless abandon (the way it has done in subsequent recessions). When Americans began panicking and pulling their money out of the banks, the overall quantity of money (measured by aggregates such as M1 or M2) fell sharply, declining by about a third from 1929 to 1933.
argues that we're in for a replay of the 1970s -- with a bit of the 1930s thrown in.
