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World War II had a dramatic effect on many parts of the American economy.[76] Government-financed capital spending accounted for only 5% of the annual U.S. investment in industrial capital in 1940; by 1943, the government accounted for 67% of U.S. capital investment.[76] The massive war spending doubled economic growth rates, either masking the effects of the Depression or essentially ending the Depression. Businessmen ignored the mounting national debt and heavy new taxes, redoubling their efforts for greater output to take advantage of generous government contracts.[77]
The two classic competing economic theories of the Great Depression are the Keynesian (demand-driven) and the Monetarist explanation.[78] There are also various heterodox theories that downplay or reject the explanations of the Keynesians and monetarists. The consensus among demand-driven theories is that a large-scale loss of confidence led to a sudden reduction in consumption and investment spending. Once panic and deflation set in, many people believed they could avoid further losses by keeping clear of the markets. Holding money became profitable as prices dropped lower and a given amount of money bought ever more goods, exacerbating the drop in demand.[79] Monetarists believe that the Great Depression started as an ordinary recession, but the shrinking of the money supply greatly exacerbated the economic situation, causing a recession to descend into the Great Depression.[80]
One reason why the Federal Reserve did not act to limit the decline of the money supply was the gold standard. At that time, the amount of credit the Federal Reserve could issue was limited by the Federal Reserve Act, which required 40% gold backing of Federal Reserve Notes issued. By the late 1920s, the Federal Reserve had almost hit the limit of allowable credit that could be backed by the gold in its possession. This credit was in the form of Federal Reserve demand notes.[93] A "promise of gold" is not as good as "gold in the hand", particularly when they only had enough gold to cover 40% of the Federal Reserve Notes outstanding. During the bank panics, a portion of those demand notes was redeemed for Federal Reserve gold. Since the Federal Reserve had hit its limit on allowable credit, any reduction in gold in its vaults had to be accompanied by a greater reduction in credit. On 5 April 1933, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 making the private ownership of gold certificates, coins and bullion illegal, reducing the pressure on Federal Reserve gold.[93]
The liquidation of debt could not keep up with the fall of prices that it caused. The mass effect of the stampede to liquidate increased the value of each dollar owed, relative to the value of declining asset holdings. The very effort of individuals to lessen their burden of debt effectively increased it. Paradoxically, the more the debtors paid, the more they owed.[95] This self-aggravating process turned a 1930 recession into a 1933 great depression.
I think the Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm. If you go back to the 1930s, which is a key point, here you had the Austrians sitting in London, Hayek and Lionel Robbins, and saying you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world. You've just got to let it cure itself. You can't do anything about it. You will only make it worse. ... I think by encouraging that kind of do-nothing policy both in Britain and in the United States, they did harm.[108]
Already under the rule of a dictatorial junta, the Ditadura Nacional, Portugal suffered no turbulent political effects of the Depression, although António de Oliveira Salazar, already appointed Minister of Finance in 1928 greatly expanded his powers and in 1932 rose to Prime Minister of Portugal to found the Estado Novo, an authoritarian corporatist dictatorship. With the budget balanced in 1929, the effects of the depression were relaxed through harsh measures towards budget balance and autarky, causing social discontent but stability and, eventually, an impressive economic growth.[172]
And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
The term "The Great Depression" is most frequently attributed to British economist Lionel Robbins, whose 1934 book The Great Depression is credited with formalizing the phrase,[219] though Hoover is widely credited with popularizing the term,[219][220] informally referring to the downturn as a depression, with such uses as "Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement" (December 1930, Message to Congress), and "I need not recount to you that the world is passing through a great depression" (1931).
If we contrast the 1930s with the Crash of 2008 where gold went through the roof, it is clear that the U.S. dollar on the gold standard was a completely different animal in comparison to the fiat free-floating U.S. dollar currency we have today. Both currencies in 1929 and 2008 were the U.S. dollar, but analogously it is as if one was a Saber-toothed tiger and the other is a Bengal tiger; they are two completely different animals. Where we have experienced inflation since the Crash of 2008, the situation was much different in the 1930s when deflation set in. Unlike the deflation of the early 1930s, the U.S. economy currently appears to be in a "liquidity trap", or a situation where monetary policy is unable to stimulate an economy back to health.
In terms of the stock market, nearly three years after the 1929 crash, the DJIA dropped 8.4% on 12 August 1932. Where we have experienced great volatility with large intraday swings in the past two months, in 2011, we have not experienced any record-shattering daily percentage drops to the tune of the 1930s. Where many of us may have that '30s feeling, in light of the DJIA, the CPI, and the national unemployment rate, we are simply not living in the '30s. Some individuals may feel as if we are living in a depression, but for many others the current global financial crisis simply does not feel like a depression akin to the 1930s.
This recovery in 2021 is only partial as the level of economic activity is projected to remain below the level we had projected for 2021, before the virus hit. The cumulative loss to global GDP over 2020 and 2021 from the pandemic crisis could be around 9 trillion dollars, greater than the economies of Japan and Germany, combined.
Reduced macroeconomic volatility has numerous benefits. Lower volatility of inflation improves market functioning, makes economic planning easier, and reduces the resources devoted to hedging inflation risks. Lower volatility of output tends to imply more stable employment and a reduction in the extent of economic uncertainty confronting households and firms. The reduction in the volatility of output is also closely associated with the fact that recessions have become less frequent and less severe.2 Why has macroeconomic volatility declined? Three types of explanations have been suggested for this dramatic change; for brevity, I will refer to these classes of explanations as structural change, improved macroeconomic policies, and good luck. Explanations focusing on structural change suggest that changes in economic institutions, technology, business practices, or other structural features of the economy have improved the ability of the economy to absorb shocks. Some economists have argued, for example, that improved management of business inventories, made possible by advances in computation and communication, has reduced the amplitude of fluctuations in inventory stocks, which in earlier decades played an important role in cyclical fluctuations.3 The increased depth and sophistication of financial markets, deregulation in many industries, the shift away from manufacturing toward services, and increased openness to trade and international capital flows are other examples of structural changes that may have increased macroeconomic flexibility and stability.The second class of explanations focuses on the arguably improved performance of macroeconomic policies, particularly monetary policy. The historical pattern of changes in the volatilities of output growth and inflation gives some credence to the idea that better monetary policy may have been a major contributor to increased economic stability. As Blanchard and Simon (2001) show, output volatility and inflation volatility have had a strong tendency to move together, both in the United States and other industrial countries. In particular, output volatility in the United States, at a high level in the immediate postwar era, declined significantly between 1955 and 1970, a period in which inflation volatility was low. Both output volatility and inflation volatility rose significantly in the 1970s and early 1980s and, as I have noted, both fell sharply after about 1984. Economists generally agree that the 1970s, the period of highest volatility in both output and inflation, was also a period in which monetary policy performed quite poorly, relative to both earlier and later periods (Romer and Romer, 2002).4 Few disagree that monetary policy has played a large part in stabilizing inflation, and so the fact that output volatility has declined in parallel with inflation volatility, both in the United States and abroad, suggests that monetary policy may have helped moderate the variability of output as well. The third class of explanations suggests that the Great Moderation did not result primarily from changes in the structure of the economy or improvements in policymaking but occurred because the shocks hitting the economy became smaller and more infrequent. In other words, the reduction in macroeconomic volatility we have lately enjoyed is largely the result of good luck, not an intrinsically more stable economy or better policies. Several prominent studies using distinct empirical approaches have provided support for the good-luck hypothesis (Ahmed, Levin, and Wilson, 2002; Stock and Watson, 2003).Explanations of complicated phenomena are rarely clear cut and simple, and each of the three classes of explanations I have described probably contains elements of truth. Nevertheless, sorting out the relative importance of these explanations is of more than purely historical interest. Notably, if the Great Moderation was largely the result of good luck rather than a more stable economy or better policies, then we have no particular reason to expect the relatively benign economic environment of the past twenty years to continue. Indeed, if the good-luck hypothesis is true, it is entirely possible that the variability of output growth and inflation in the United States may, at some point, return to the levels of the 1970s. If instead the Great Moderation was the result of structural change or improved policymaking, then the increase in stability should be more likely to persist, assuming of course that policymakers do not forget the lessons of history.My view is that improvements in monetary policy, though certainly not the only factor, have probably been an important source of the Great Moderation. In particular, I am not convinced that the decline in macroeconomic volatility of the past two decades was primarily the result of good luck, as some have argued, though I am sure good luck had its part to play as well. In the remainder of my remarks, I will provide some support for the "improved-monetary-policy" explanation for the Great Moderation. I will not spend much time on the other two classes of explanations, not because they are uninteresting or unimportant, but because my time is limited and the structural change and good-luck hypotheses have been extensively discussed elsewhere.5 Before proceeding, I should note that my views are not necessarily those of my colleagues on the Board of Governors or the Federal Open Market Committee.The Taylor Curve and the Variability Tradeoff
Let us begin by asking what economic theory has to say about the relationship of output volatility and inflation volatility. To keep matters simple, I will make the strong (but only temporary!) assumption that monetary policymakers have an accurate understanding of the economy and that they choose policies to promote the best economic performance possible, given their economic objectives. I also assume for the moment that the structure of the economy and the distribution of economic shocks are stable and unchanging. Under these baseline assumptions, macroeconomists have obtained an interesting and important result. Specifically, standard economic models imply that, in the long run, monetary policymakers can reduce the volatility of inflation only by allowing greater volatility in output growth, and vice versa. In other words, if monetary policies are chosen optimally and the economic structure is held constant, there exists a long-run tradeoff between volatility in output and volatility in inflation.The ultimate source of this long-run tradeoff is the existence of shocks to aggregate supply. Consider the canonical example of an aggregate supply shock, a sharp rise in oil prices caused by disruptions to foreign sources of supply. According to conventional analysis, an increase in the price of oil raises the overall price level (a temporary burst in inflation) while depressing output and employment. Monetary policymakers are therefore faced with a difficult choice. If they choose to tighten policy (raise the short-term interest rate) in order to offset the effects of the oil price shock on the general price level, they may well succeed--but only at the cost of making the decline in output more severe. Likewise, if monetary policymakers choose to ease in order to mitigate the effects of the oil price shock on output, their action will exacerbate the inflationary impact. Hence, in the standard framework, the periodic occurrence of shocks to aggregate supply (such as oil price shocks) forces policymakers to choose between stabilizing output and stabilizing inflation.6 Note that shocks to aggregate demand do not create the same tradeoff, as offsetting an aggregate demand shock stabilizes both output and inflation.This apparent tradeoff between output variability and inflation variability faced by policymakers gives rise to what has been dubbed the Taylor curve, reflecting early work by the Stanford economist and current Undersecretary of the Treasury John B. Taylor.7 (Taylor also originated the eponymous Taylor rule, to which I will refer later.) Graphically, the Taylor curve depicts the menu of possible combinations of output volatility and inflation volatility from which monetary policymakers can choose in the long run. Figure 1 shows two examples of Taylor curves, marked TC1 and TC2. In Figure 1, volatility in output is measured on the vertical axis and volatility in inflation is measured on the horizontal axis. As shown in the figure, Taylor curves slope downward, reflecting the theoretical conclusion that an optimizing policymaker can choose less of one type of volatility in the long run only by accepting more of the other.8 A direct implication of the Taylor curve framework is that a change in the preferences or objectives of the central bank alone--a decision to be tougher on inflation, for example--cannot explain the Great Moderation. Indeed, in this framework, a conscious attempt by policymakers to try to moderate the variability of inflation should lead to higher, not lower, variability of output.How, then, can the Great Moderation be explained? Figure 1 suggests two possibilities. First, suppose it were the case, contrary to what we assumed in deriving the Taylor curve, that monetary policies during the period of high macroeconomic volatility were not optimal, perhaps because policymakers did not have an accurate understanding of the structure of the economy or of the impact of their policy actions. If monetary policies during the late 1960s and the 1970s were sufficiently far from optimal, the result could be a combination of output volatility and inflation volatility lying well above the efficient frontier defined by the Taylor curve. Graphically, suppose that the true Taylor curve is the solid curve shown in Figure 1, labeled TC2. Then, in principle, sufficiently well executed policies could achieve a combination of output volatility and inflation volatility such as that represented by point B, which lies on that curve. However, less effective policies could lead to the economic outcome represented by point A in Figure 1, at which both output volatility and inflation volatility are higher than at point B. We can see now how improvements in monetary policy might account for the Great Moderation, even in the absence of any change in the structure of the economy or in the underlying shocks. Improvements in the policy framework, in policy implementation, or in the policymakers' understanding of the economy could allow the economy to move from the inefficient point A to the efficient point B, where the volatility of both inflation and output are more moderate.Figure 1 can also be used to depict a second possible explanation for the Great Moderation, which is that, rather than monetary policy having improved, the underlying economic environment may have become more stable. Changes in the structure of the economy that increased its resilience to shocks or reductions in the variance of the shocks themselves would improve the volatility tradeoff faced by policymakers. In Figure 1, we can imagine now that the true Taylor curve in the 1970s is given by the dashed curve, TC1, and the actual economic outcome chosen by policymakers is point A, which lies on TC1. Improved economic stability in the 1980s and 1990s, whether arising from structural change or good luck, can be represented by a shift of the Taylor curve from TC1 to TC2, and the new economic outcome as determined by policy is point B. Relative to TC1, the Taylor curve TC2 represents economic outcomes with lower volatility in output for any given volatility of inflation, and vice versa. According to the "shifting Taylor curve" explanation, the Great Moderation resulted not from improved practice of monetary policy (which has always been as effective as possible, given the environment) but rather by favorable structural change or reduced variability of economic shocks. Of course, more complicated scenarios in which policy becomes more effective and the underlying economic environment becomes more stable are possible and indeed likely.With this bit of theory as background, I will focus on two key points. First, without claiming that monetary policy during the 1950s or in the period since 1984 has been ideal by any means, I will try to support my view that the policies of the late 1960s and 1970s were particularly inefficient, for reasons that I think we now understand. Thus, as in the first scenario just discussed (represented in Figure 1 as a movement from point A to point B), improvements in the execution of monetary policy can plausibly account for a significant part of the Great Moderation. Second, more subtly, I will argue that some of the benefits of improved monetary policy may easily be confused with changes in the underlying environment (that is, improvements in policy may be incorrectly identified as shifts in the Taylor curve), increasing the risk that standard statistical methods of analyzing this question could understate the contribution of monetary policy to the Great Moderation.Reaching the Taylor Curve: Improvements in the Effectiveness of Monetary Policy
Monetary policymakers face difficult challenges in their efforts to stabilize the economy. We are uncertain about many aspects of the workings of the economy, including the channels by which the effects of monetary policy are transmitted. We are even uncertain about the current economic situation as economic data are received with a lag, are typically subject to multiple revisions, and in any case can only roughly and partially depict the underlying economic reality. Thus, in practice, monetary policy will never achieve as much reduction in macroeconomic volatility as would be possible if our understanding were more complete.Nevertheless, a number of economists have argued that monetary policy during the late 1960s and the 1970s was unusually prone to creating volatility, relative to both earlier and later periods (DeLong, 1997; Mayer, 1998; Romer and Romer, 2002). Economic historians have suggested that the relative inefficiency of policy during this period arose because monetary policymakers labored under some important misconceptions about policy and the economy. First, during this period, central bankers seemed to have been excessively optimistic about the ability of activist monetary policies to offset shocks to output and to deliver permanently low levels of unemployment. Second, monetary policymakers appeared to underestimate their own contributions to the inflationary problems of the time, believing instead that inflation was in large part the result of nonmonetary forces. One might say that, in terms of their ability to deliver good macroeconomic outcomes, policymakers suffered from excessive "output optimism" and "inflation pessimism." The output optimism of the late 1960s and the 1970s had several aspects. First, at least during the early part of that period, many economists and policymakers held the view that policy could exploit a permanent tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, as described by a simple Phillips curve relationship. The idea of a permanent tradeoff opened up the beguiling possibility that, in return for accepting just a bit more inflation, policymakers could deliver a permanently low rate of unemployment. This view is now discredited, of course, on both theoretical and empirical grounds.9 Second, estimates of the rate of unemployment that could be sustained without igniting inflation were typically unrealistically low, with a long-term unemployment rate of 4 percent or less often being characterized as a modest and easily attainable objective.10 Third, economists of the time may have been unduly optimistic about the ability of fiscal and monetary policymakers to eliminate short-term fluctuations in output and employment, that is, to "fine-tune" the economy.What I have called inflation pessimism was the increasing conviction of policymakers in the 1960s and 1970s, as inflation rose and remained stubbornly high, that monetary policy was an ineffective tool for controlling inflation. As emphasized in recent work on the United States and the United Kingdom by Edward Nelson (2004), during this period policymakers became more and more inclined to blame inflation on so-called cost-push shocks rather than on monetary forces. Cost-push shocks, in the paradigm of the time, included diverse factors such as union wage pressures, price increases by oligopolistic firms, and increases in the prices of commodities such as oil and beef brought about by adverse changes in supply conditions. For the purpose of understanding the upward trend in inflation, however, the most salient attribute of cost-push shocks was that they were putatively out of the control of the monetary policymakers. The combination of output optimism and inflation pessimism during the latter part of the 1960s and the 1970s was a recipe for high volatility in output and inflation--that is, a set of outcomes well away from the efficient frontier represented by the economy's Taylor curve. Notably, the belief in a long-run tradeoff between output and inflation, together with an unrealistically low assessment of the sustainable rate of unemployment, resulted in high inflation but did not deliver the expected payoff in terms of higher output and employment. Moreover, the Fed's periodic attempts to rein in surging inflation led to a pattern of "go-stop" policies, in which swings in policy from ease to tightness contributed to a highly volatile real economy as well as a highly variable inflation rate. Wage-price controls, invoked in the belief that monetary policy was ineffective against cost-push forces, also ultimately proved destabilizing.Monetary policymakers bemoaned the high rate of inflation in the 1970s but did not fully appreciate their own role in its creation. Ironically, their errors in estimating the natural rate and in ascribing inflation to nonmonetary forces were mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, because unemployment remained well above their over-optimistic estimates of the sustainable rate, they were inclined to attribute inflation to outside forces (such as the actions of firms and unions) rather than to an overheated economy (Romer and Romer, 2002; Nelson, 2004). On the other hand, the view of policymakers that exogenous forces largely drove inflation made it more difficult for them to recognize that their estimate of the sustainable rate of unemployment was too low. Several years passed before policymakers were finally persuaded by the evidence that sustained anti-inflationary monetary policies would actually work (Primiceri, 2003). As you know, these policies were implemented successfully after 1979, beginning under Fed Chairman Volcker. Better known than even the Taylor curve is John Taylor's famous Taylor rule, a simple equation that has proved remarkably useful as a rule-of-thumb description of monetary policy (Taylor, 1993). In its basic form, the Taylor rule relates the Federal Reserve's policy instrument, the overnight federal funds interest rate, to the deviations of inflation and output from the central bank's desired levels for those variables. Estimates of the Taylor rule for the late 1960s and the 1970s reflect the output optimism and inflation pessimism of the period, in that researchers tend to find a weaker response of the policy rate to inflation and (in some studies) a relatively stronger response to the output gap than in more recent periods.11 As I will shortly discuss further, an insufficiently strong response to inflation let inflation and inflation expectations get out of control and thus added volatility to the economy. At the same time, strong responses to what we understand in retrospect to have been over-optimistic estimates of the output gap created additional instability. As output optimism and inflation pessimism both waned under the force of the data, policy responses became more appropriate and the economy more stable. In this sense, improvements in policymakers' understanding of the economy and the role of monetary policy allowed the economy to move closer to the Taylor curve (or, in terms of Figure 1, to move from point A to point B).Improved Monetary Policy or a Shifting Taylor Curve?
Improvements in monetary policy that moved the economy closer to the efficient frontier described by the Taylor curve can account for part of the Great Moderation. However, several empirical studies have questioned the quantitative importance of this effect and emphasized instead shifts in the Taylor curve, brought about by structural change or good luck. For example, in a paper presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's annual Jackson Hole conference, James Stock and Mark Watson (2003) use several alternative macroeconomic models to simulate how the economy would have performed after 1984 if monetary policy had followed its pre-1979 pattern. Although inflation performance after 1984 would clearly have been worse if pre-1979 monetary policies had been used, Stock and Watson find that output volatility would have been little different. They conclude that improved monetary policy does not account for much of the reduction in output volatility since the mid-1980s. Instead, noting that the variance of the economic shocks implied by their models for the 1970s was much higher than the variance of shocks in the more recent period, they embrace the good-luck explanation of the Great Moderation. Interesting research by Timothy Cogley and Thomas Sargent (2002) and by Shaghil Ahmed, Andrew Levin, and Beth Anne Wilson (2002) likewise find a substantial reduction in the size and frequency of shocks in the more recent period, supporting the good-luck hypothesis.Both the structural change and good-luck explanations of the Great Moderation are intriguing and (to reiterate) both are no doubt part of the story. However, an unsatisfying aspect of both explanations is the difficulty of identifying changes in the economic environment large enough and persistent enough to explain the Great Moderation, both in the United States and abroad. In particular, it is not obvious that economic shocks have become significantly smaller or more infrequent, as required by the good-luck hypothesis. Tensions in the Middle East, often blamed for the oil price shocks of the 1970s, have hardly declined in recent years, and important developments in technology and productivity have continued to buffet the economy (albeit in a more positive direction than in the 1970s). Nor has the international economic environment become obviously more placid, as a series of financial crises struck various regions of the world during the 1990s and the powerful forces of globalization have proceeded apace. In contrast, following the adverse experience of the 1970s, changes in the practice of monetary policy occurred around the world in si