Friday, July 10, 2009

She Was There (1929)--And Has Thoughts

This lady's street creds are comparable to those of the lady Navy officer who invented COBOL. Been there, done that, has all the T-shirts.

Anna Schwartz, a financial sage who has seen it all, having lived through the crash of 1929 and co-authored with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman the highly acclaimed financial bible A Monetary History of the United States (Princeton University Press, 1963).

The financial matriarch has carefully tracked recessions, studied boom-and-bust trends and spent her life — all 93 years — mastering the intricacies of the monetary system and banking world. She's worked as an economist with the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1941...

" The bill that provided something like $800 billion for spending on government projects was supposed to make people willing to spend their own money. But that hasn't happened. The implicit belief of the Obama Administration is that you needed fiscal stimulus [i.e., more government spending], and that's why they passed this enormous stimulus bill. But from my observation of how, historically, expansions have come to an end and how recovery has happened, it's always in terms of monetary stimulus. And that has not been the program of this administration."

More trenchant observations at the link. She's not too charmed by ObamaCare, either...

3 comments:

Terry said...

How long before the White House issues a statement that Ms. Schwartz is "confused and disoriented"?

J. Strupp said...

I have great respect for Schwartz but I'm not exactly sure how she comes up with the idea that monetary stimulus is not being used effectively at present.....

Dad29 said...

Umnnnh....Struppster...how about "results"?

There's a piece missing from the story (and from my knowledge-base) and that's Fed Reg Q (??) directions right now.

We COULD ascribe the problem to velocity, rather than poor monetary policy. It seems as though velocity is damn close to zero.