The Collapse of Real Savings Caused the Great Depression
2024-06-27
The leading monetarist, Milton Friedman, blamed the Federal Reserve System’s policies for causing the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to Friedman, the Fed failed to pump enough reserves into the banking system to prevent a collapse of the money stock. Because of this, Friedman held that M1, which stood at $26.34 billion on March 1930, fell to $19.00 billion by April 1933—a decline of 27.9 percent.Figure 1: US M1 money supply, 1930–33Source: Data from FRED.According to Friedman, as a result of the collapse in the money stock, economic growth followed suit. Year-over-year industrial production by July 1932 fell by over 31 percent (see chart). Also, year over year, the consumer price index plunged. By October 1932, the Consumer Price Index had declined by 10.7 percent.Figure 2:
Trump’s Faulty Tariff Scheme
2024-06-25
Donald Trump recently addressed top CEOs with a proposal that he sells as helping to reduce income taxes. Trump came out in favor of possibly abolishing income taxation and replacing it with tariffs to finance the federal government. It is likely that the trade-off is simply rhetoric to sell everyone on his protectionist policy, but it is still worth picking apart a critical flaw in the idea regardless.Let’s assume there will be no cuts to spending, but also no expansion. Some publications have tried to crunch the numbers and posited it may take an 85 percent tariff to make up for the loss of federal income tax revenue. Unless this is done, there is likely to be deficit spending, borrowing, and eventually inflation from debt monetization.But even this reality misses the problem: that