Yes, Recovery in the Great Depression Started with Roosevelt: Stephen Williamson Takes to His Fainting Couch Department
Stephen Williamson: New Monetarist Economics: Hal and Lee have joined the Paul Krugman bad guy club. Writing about Cole and Ohanian's WSJ piece, Krugman says:
This goes beyond holding views I disagree with (as does much of what happens in this debate). This is a deliberate attempt to fool readers, demonstrating that there is no good faith here.
Hal and Lee are two thoughtful and careful economists. I don't agree with everything they have ever said, but to call them liars is appalling.
Williamson should be much more unhappy at Cole and Ohanian's claim that July 1932-June 1933 was "a period of significant deflation". The PPI in July 1932 is 11.1. The PPI in June 1933 is 11.2. Cole and Ohanian may be the only people who have ever managed to call a period during which the price level rose as "one of significant deflation".
Cole and Ohanian:
Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian: Stimulus and the Depression—The Untold Story: Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke claimed that monetary expansion and the turnaround from the deflation of 1932 to inflation in 1934 was a key reason that output expanded.
But boosting aggregate demand did not end the Great Depression. After the initial stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent economic plunge, a recovery began in the summer of 1932, well before the New Deal. The Federal Reserve Board's Index of Industrial production rose nearly 50% between the Depression's trough of July 1932 and June 1933. This was a period of significant deflation. Inflation began after June 1933, following the demise of the gold standard. Despite higher aggregate demand, industrial production was roughly flat over the following year…
I think David Glasner says what ought to be said:
Misrepresenting the Recovery from the Great Depression: [T]he version of events offered by Cole and Ohanian is still a shocking distortion of what happened before FDR took office in March 1933. In particular, although Cole and Ohanian are correct that the trough of the Great Depression was reached in July 1932, when the Industrial Production Index stood at 3.67, rising to 4.15 in October, an increase of about 13%, they conveniently leave out the fact that there was a double dip; industrial production was flat in November and started falling in December, the Industrial Production Index dropping to 3.78 in March 1933, barely above its level the previous July. And their assertion that deflation continued during the recovery is even farther from the truth than their description of what happened to industrial production. When industrial production started to rise, the Producer Price Index (PPI) increased almost 1% three months in a row, July to September, the only monthly increases since July 1929. The PPI resumed its downward trend in October, falling about 9% from September 1932 t0 February 1933, at the same time that industrial production peaked and started falling again.
That is why most observers date the trough of the Great Depression in the US not in July 1932, but in March 1933 when FDR took office in the midst of a banking crisis that threatened to drive the US economy even deeper into deflation and depression than it had been in July 1932. So when Cole and Ohanian assert that recovery from the Great Depression started in July 1932, and go on to say that the recovery took place during a period of significant deflation, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are twisting the facts to suit their own ideological predilection.
The misrepresentation perpetrated by Cole and Ohanian only gets worse when they describe what happened during the period of true recovery, April through July 1933. Contrary to their assertion, deflation stopped in February 1933, the PPI hitting its low point of 10.3. Prices began to rise as soon as FDR suspended the gold standard shortly after taking office in March (not June as Cole and Ohanian mistakenly assert) 1933, the PPI rising to 11.9 in July (an increase of about 14% over February) when industrial production hit a peak of 5.95, 57% above the March low point…. To assert that the rapid price increases from March to July, a proxy for increased aggregate demand, played no role in what was then (and remains) the fastest increase in industrial production in any four-month period in American history is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. What is perhaps even more shocking is that Cole and Ohanian would misrepresent facts so easily ascertainable….
Another point overlooked by Cole and Ohanian, presumably because it doesn’t exactly fit the ideological message that they want to propagate, is that the timing of the recovery — immediately after the monetary stimulus resulting from suspension of the gold standard – shows that monetary policy can be effective with little or no fiscal stimulus [even in a liquidity trap]. It is hard to see how any fiscal stimulus could have taken effect by April 1933 when the recovery had already begun. Moreover, Roosevelt campaigned as a fiscal conservative, so it would not be easy to argue that anticipated fiscal stimulus was being felt in advance of its actual implementation.
The real lesson the Great Depression is that monetary policy works — for good or ill.
