No, It Is Not Entirely Different This Time – But It is More Insidious
Courtesy of Jesse’s Café Américain
There are some differences and they are significant.
The US is not on a gold standard, so the devaluation of the dollar does not have to occur in a stepwise function with an official restatement of value. This time the Fed can simply monetize debt and provide more dollars as it wills. That is fiat.
The US is not a net exporter to the world, as it was then. This is why Smoot-Hawley was harmful to the US recovery. The major nations of the world, such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, became engaged in their own domestic industrial recovery including rearmament. Today the US is the consumer for the world’s exporting nations. And it also owns the reserve currency.
The New Deal was a bottom up Jobs Program. The Deal this time is a new version of trickle down. The second wave down in the Great Depression caught many of the professionals who had made millions shorting the initial market declines, or at least survived the Great Crash by selling early. The next wave down in the current credit collapse is going to boil the middle class, a few degrees at a time.
Geither: None Would Have Survived – Rolfe Winkler
