The Great Depression and the Great Recession compared

So I teach a course on the two (old syllabus here). One of the initial classes looks at Eichengreen and O'Rourke's comparison of the two events, and how, even though at the beginning the shock seemed similar, the recovery has been faster the second time. O'Rourke had noticed in his blog last year that the current recovery started way before, but has been so slow that now the 1930s look better when industrial output (rather than GDP) is used as a measure. Below the same data for the US economy (he uses world industrial output).

Note that I added more of the 1930s recovery, and one can see the effects of the Roosevelt recession in 1937-38 (the indexes are monthly and start in October 1929 and December 2007 as 100 respectively). Industrial output growth has slowed down in the last year, by the way. I don't think we are on the verge of a recession in the US. My guess is that sluggish growth will continue. But it is an additional reason to be cautious about hiking interest rates, and presuming that the economy is all fine.

Kicking away the ladder too

The table below comes from Broadberry and O’Rourke's The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe. It shows that national control of the money supply, the monopoly of emission, is a 19th century phenomena, something we discussed with L-P. Rochon in this paper back in 2003.

Note that before the mid-19th century period, which Charles Goodhart aptly calls the Victorian era, central banks had been created for supporting the State’s financing needs. Also, the role of lender-of-last resort (LOLR) in the late 19th century, associated to Bagehot, did not lead to a significant change in the Victorian preoccupation with price stability.

It is only with the Great Depression that the Victorian dreams of a self-adjusting economy with a tendency to full employment and an orderly division of labor, where the periphery only produced commodities and imported manufactured goods, were utterly shattered. In my view, an contrary to Goodhart, the crucial element on the rise of Keynesian Central Banks was the abandonment of Say's law, not of the Real Bills Doctrine, as we discuss here with Esteban Pérez.

I wrote a paper (in Spanish), when I was at the Central Bank of Argentina, that has not been published on these topics, titled 'Kicking Away the Ladder Too,' in obvious allusion to Ha-Joon Chang's use of List's expression. The point is that central banks were used as tools of economic development (the Bank of England for sure), but once central economies went up the ladder they kicked it, suggesting that central banks should only be concerned with inflation. Now that the Keynesian moment has passed, the mainstream has gone back to the inflation obsession.

A Tale of Two Depressions?

Eichengreen & O'Rourke wrote back in 2009 a very popular post on Vox.eu here, updated in 2010 (and here) which suggested the different nature of the two events (one depression and a recession really). Their data was global. Looking at GDP, rather than industrial output, in the US alone, we have something like the figure below (data from Measuringworth).

Note that it's hard to compare the two events. Clearly automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance do work. Also, the Fed reaction and the fiscal stimulus worked quite well, at least in precluding a collapse of output of the same proportions. And yes the pace of the recovery is much slower now than what it was when it finally started in the 1930s.