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| Essays on the Great Depression | 
 enlarge | List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $21.56
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 9 reviews)
Sales Rank: 8836
Category: Book
Author: Ben S. Bernanke
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Label: Princeton University Press
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0691118205
Dewey Decimal Number: 330
EAN: 9780691118208
ASIN: 0691118205
Publication Date: January 5, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Few periods in history compare to the Great Depression. Stock market crashes, bread lines, bank runs, and wild currency speculation were worldwide phenomena--all occurring with war looming in the background. This period has provided economists with a marvelous laboratory for studying the links between economic policies and institutions and economic performance. Here, Ben Bernanke has gathered together his essays on why the Great Depression was so devastating. This broad view shows us that while the Great Depression was an unparalleled disaster, some economies pulled up faster than others, and some made an opportunity out of it. By comparing and contrasting the economic strategies and statistics of the world's nations as they struggled to survive economically, the fundamental lessons of macroeconomics stand out in bold relief against a background of immense human suffering. The essays in this volume present a uniquely coherent view of the economic causes and worldwide propagation of the depression.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
Only Econ Geeks Need to Apply (the OEGNA facility) December 16, 2008
Poor Ben. His wet dream is to study the Great Depression and he gets to live it real time. Unfortunately all the math, calculus, differential equations and log graphs don't really seem to apply at the extremes of human behavior; eg fear of depression levels of inaction.
Reading this book helps one realize academically Ben is as prepared as anyone in the world to deal with the current economic dislocation. However no patient responds well to a doctor delivering the message that he is seeking help from the world's best cancer expert.
I have an MBA in finance and accounting and a bs in mathematics and find his works to be difficult to get through. However if you just read the prose and accept that his calculations are correct many interesting tid bits come out of the book.
 Very Simple Steps September 6, 2007
9 out of 30 found this review helpful
Anyone can spin a story about anything using the various mumbo-jumbo parts of mainstream economics. Bernanke here has decided to ravage the gold standard. Suffice to say, it is extremely tedious, banal, and antithetical to common sense.
Ludwig Von Mises predicted the Great Depression in 1919.
Here's two easy steps to understand the real cause of the crash.
1. Read Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression
2. Google "Benjamin Strong", the first Federal Reserve chairman who served until his death in 1928. Bernanke does not mention Strong at all. You will find almost all the answers in Strong's tenure. For the severity and length of the recession, please read Jim Powell's "FDR's Folly".
Bernanke and his coauthors follows Friedman but not Smith or Keynes August 12, 2007
18 out of 31 found this review helpful
Bernanke is ,unfortunately,ignorant of the preventive medicine approach to Bubbles and Depressions first postulated by Adam Smith in 1776 in the Wealth of Nations and then reapplied by J M Keynes with the additional analytic conclusion emphasizing the importance of clearly differentiating between tolerable security (risk)and uncertainty.
Smith made it straightforward and easy. There are four categories of borrower to whom commercial and Wall Street investment banks can make loans available to-the prodigals,projectors,imprudent risk takers,and the sober people.The task of money and banking policy is to prevent loans from being made to the prodigals,projectors(Keynes's speculators of chapter 12 of the GT,1936),and imprudent risk takers(dealt with by Keynes in chapter 11 with his lender's risk versus borrower's risk distinction).Economists don't seem to get it.Neither do Fed chairmen.Allow the capital markets to be dominated by leveraged buyouts and hedge fund speculators guarantees that the inevitable bubble will be created.The only question that remains is whether or nor some type of bailout will prevent a panic and crash.This type of money and banking policy allows the problems to be created and then attempts to prevent the problem from mushrooming into a serious recession or depression.
Smith's advise to Bernanke and his coauthors would be to, first, fix the rate of interest permanently a little bit above the prime rate and then maintain it at that level for the long run and ,second,only permit loans to be made to the sober people.Otherwise,periodic financial crises will occur. It's as simple as that.None of the essays deal with the fundamental goal of banking policy-Prevent the problem from arising in the first place.Of course,if you believe in the Efficient Market Hypothesis fairy tale, where all price changes in financial markets are normally distrbuted,as does Bernanke,no problem is supposed to occur.But they do.
Don't Believe the Hype! A commodity standard is the solution, not the problem! August 8, 2007
35 out of 78 found this review helpful
The Federal Reserve made the Great Depression almost inevitable when it inflated the money supply. The Fed inflated the money supply before it contracted it. With a true, pure gold standard, this initial inflation never would have been possible. Everything else about the contraction, corrections, tariffs, etc. would have been a moot point, and we wouldn't have had a great depression. Serious recession with some of the other bad decisions, maybe, great depression, nope.
To claim that the gold standard caused the great depression is shady, lawyerly logic indeed--no matter how many reams of mathematical data you distort to fuzzy the matter, it just doesn't jibe.
It all began with rampant inflation (increasing the money supply, ie printing or creating more paper money without a corresponding increase in gold, silver, or real goods and services. As more goods and services aren't created at the same instant new money springs into existence, prices should rise in proportion to the newly created money, but most people don't realize this is what is happening. They mistake the extra money for wealth (additional goods and services, or shifts in demand), and make illusiory assumptions/decisions that are later corrected.) It all began with rampant inflation by the Fed--the primary occurence a gold standard prevents. Period.
Most everything else is just goobley-gook by the rich to keep the poor duped and ignorant, and by corrupt social engineers who fancy themselves do-gooders. There are problems with gold standards, especially when some countries have honest gold standards, others countries don't, and their currencies and goods are exchanged freely, BUT these are far outweighed by the problems and wealth redistribution to the rich created by fiat money systems. Period.
It serves the ultra-wealthy, and proponents of big government and socialism and collectivism, to dupe people about currency reform. Saying the gold standard caused the great depression is like saying raw vegetables cause heart attacks, or breathing clean mountain air causes lung cancer. To claim that the very thing which would have prevented a great depression is the cause is extremely audacious, and supremely sinister, but hardly surprising.
When you are on a gold standard, and you inflate the money supply (ie, create more dollars out of thin air, or simply print more), of course there is a run on gold. This is what the gold standard is supposed to do! The gold standard will prevent governments from printing additional money, by calling their bluff (ie, making them honor their commitment to exchange each dollar for a fixed weight (not monetary value, but weight) of gold). If the government keeps printing, people keep redeeming money, they run out of gold, and the scam is up. In an honest gold standard, this isn't attempted, people know the gold is there, and they simply use the money for its intended purpose--to store value and trade.
When money isn't tied to gold or a commodity, the government prints more, spends it, and each citizen holding money is taxed because their money is reduced in value so that the new money has value. No tax collectors are needed, but this is a bad way to tax because altering the money supply distorts the price signal that is the backbone of the marketplace. The crafty can speculate against these distortians, picking the pockets of honest working class people who, without realizing it, are paying a hidden currency tax.
If banks hadn't commited fraud by circulating money not backed by assets, they wouldn't have failed. The massive banking collapse was fraud being realized, and the accounts being cleared. It sucks that so many middle class people took it on the chin, but the lesson is that we need honest banking in which more money cannot be created out of thin air, and contracts are honored, and liabilities on the ledger cannot be magically converted to assets, and pyramided ad fraudem. One more time: If the Fed hadn't inflated the money suppy, there wouldn't have been a depression. If there had been a pure gold standard, the Fed wouldn't have been able to balloon the money supply. Period. To simply begin halfway into the story by starting with the contraction is unfathomably dishonest.
Countries can get screwed just like people in this system, especially those countries with honest money who can't print it out of thin air like non-gold-standard countries. If they aren't aware how much new money is printed, their imports/exports can suffer, and they end up conducting transactions for depreciating paper currency that ultimately screws them by declining in value faster than they realized, fall prey to gold speculation or price instability, etc. But placing primary blame on the gold standard is absurd. Its like saying the guy that left his house unlocked is guilty of felony robbery when all his possessions are stolen. The thief is the problem, not the gullible or un-streetsmart homeowner -- though he should certainly be wiser and limit his interactions with criminals (fiaters). The corrupt money was the problem, not the honest money. THe fiat system of currency printing was the problem, not the gold standard.
"Undercapitalized". What a cozy euphamism. You mean a bank that fraudulently pryamided assets, misrepresenting time deposits as demand deposits?
In an honest gold standard, a disastrous contraction of the money supply is not a worry, as it is never inflated disastrously, so a house of cards is never created in the first place.
Roosevelt saved the banking industry. What a hero! In English, he perpetuated the fraud, and shifted the cost for all the banks' fraudulent contracts it couldn't honor immediately, but should have been forced to long term, to the people. Then he allowed the fraud to continue. Robin Hood in reverse. What a role model!
All the rest is expected. After the correction, inflation was much more modest, meaning intervention in the marketplace via distorted price signals was much more modest, meaning citizens not machinated by corrupt currency did what they will usually do--busted butt and created prosperity.
Many rigorous economic studies churn numbers, and then try to assign causes or meanings to those numbers, without truly assessing/considering what the numbers mean in terms of actual human behaviour, especially in terms of fundamental causalities that lead to the data. This is one of Rothbard's main problems with conventional economics.
Read Rothbard's book for a real explanation of the Great Depression much more elegant and less scathing than mine. As long as propaganda like this masquerades as truth, the common man's freedom and standard of living will continue to decline.
 At least he start out right April 24, 2006
16 out of 39 found this review helpful
Overall Bernanke does a good job at looking at different theories, but his theories on the dangers of deflation have been refuted by many authors. It is too bad that this theory clouds his vision, or else his treatment of the depression would have a lot more authority.
For the economist, I would highly recommend "America's Great Depression" by Murray N. Rothbard. He is by far the most thorough in his treatment of the period, delivering the most compete and well founded theory for the cause of the Great Depression, too bad Bernanke hasn't read it.
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