ΠΗΓΗ: What About Marx
του ciaoant1
I received a comment from one of my readers in yesterday's post, asking me to translate in English some of my older articles about the monetary system and gold (i have been blogging in Greek for 5 years now). However, before we get there, we must first explore some issues that are much more important, despite the fact that they are not discussed as much as gold, or the fall of the dollar-centric monetary system we have today.
[...] The argument has been made that the Fed caused the [1929] Depression by tightening money, and if only the Fed back then had increased the money supply—in other words, had done what the Fed has done today—a full-blown Depression would likely have been averted. In economics, it’s difficult to test hypotheses with controlled experiments of the kind the hard sciences can conduct. But the inability of the monetary expansion to counteract this current recession should forever lay to rest the idea that monetary policy was the prime culprit in the 1930s. The problem today, as it was then, is something else. The problem today is the so-called real economy. It’s a problem rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we’re losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want and the kind we don’t know what to do with. The real economy has been in a state of wrenching transition for decades, and its dislocations have never been squarely faced. A crisis of the real economy lies behind the Long Slump, just as it lay behind the Great Depression.
