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The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself, by James Grant
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By the publisher of the prestigious Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, an account of the deep economic slump of 1920–21 that proposes, with respect to federal intervention, “less is more.” This is a free-market rejoinder to the Keynesian stimulus applied by Bush and Obama to the 2007–09 recession, in whose aftereffects, Grant asserts, the nation still toils.
James Grant tells the story of America’s last governmentally-untreated depression; relatively brief and self-correcting, it gave way to the Roaring Twenties. His book appears in the fifth year of a lackluster recovery from the overmedicated downturn of 2007–2009.
In 1920–21, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding met a deep economic slump by seeming to ignore it, implementing policies that most twenty-first century economists would call backward. Confronted with plunging prices, wages, and employment, the government balanced the budget and, through the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates. No “stimulus” was administered, and a powerful, job-filled recovery was under way by late in 1921.
In 1929, the economy once again slumped—and kept right on slumping as the Hoover administration adopted the very policies that Wilson and Harding had declined to put in place. Grant argues that well-intended federal intervention, notably the White House-led campaign to prop up industrial wages, helped to turn a bad recession into America’s worst depression. He offers the experience of the earlier depression for lessons for today and the future. This is a powerful response to the prevailing notion of how to fight recession. The enterprise system is more resilient than even its friends give it credit for being, Grant demonstrates.
- Sales Rank: #255138 in Books
- Published on: 2014-11-11
- Released on: 2014-11-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.00" w x 6.25" l, 1.06 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Review
"Mr. Grant is an excellent writer, and The Forgotten Depression is a carefully researched history of this dramatic episode. . . . Mr. Grant's chronicle makes difficult economic concepts easy to understand, and it deftly mixes major events with interesting vignettes. . . . People who believe in the inadequacy of the current macroeconomic orthodoxy will find him to be an articulate spokesman." (The Wall Street Journal)
“Learned, beautifully written, and timely.” (Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Chairman, the Mises Institute)
“Grant engagingly tells the tale of this extraordinary episode, which has been shoved down the memory hole because it doesn't comport with reigning economic orthodoxy.” (Forbes)
“The Forgotten Depression is a loving tribute to laissez-faire . . . Grant pens his tale with a wry humor reminiscent of John Kenneth Galbraith in The Great Crash. . . . a timely reminder that our forebears knew of other, more efficacious, remedies to cure financial hangovers than the hair of the dog.” (Reuters)
“A riveting and instructive tale. . . . the depression of 1920-21 has not received the scrutiny it deserves. The instructive lesson of the story is that the federal government “met the downturn by seeming to ignore it—or by implementing policies that an average 21st century economist would judge disastrous”—and the hands-off approach actually worked. . . . Once read, The Forgotten Depression will be hard to forget.” (Barrons)
“Grant unearths a forgotten depression to pose the iconoclastic argument that the government’s best response to economic turmoil is to keep its hands off. A veteran financial writer, Grant handles abstruse issues with a light touch and a sure hand, gleaning wisdom in such unexpected figures as Charles Dawes, first director of the federal budget, and Warren G. Harding.” (Charles Rappleye, author of Robert Morris and Herbert Hoover, a Biography (forthcoming))
“Are markets self-correcting? What, if any, role should government play when the Hidden Hand falters? Even as much of the world struggles through The Great Recession, James Grant offers a libertarian dissent from interventionist dogma. You don’t have to agree with Grant’s economics to admire the rigor of his thought, the grace of his prose, or the sweep of his argument contrasting what went right in the 1920s, and wrong in the 1930s. This is a true rarity, a first-rate work of history that is as relevant as the morning headlines.” (Richard Norton Smith, author of On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller and An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover)
“Grant makes a strong case against federal intervention during economic downturns.” (Pittsburgh Tribune Review)
“It is a matter of libertarian faith that the Great Depression was prolonged rather than alleviated by Keynesian economic policy, and Grant's intent is clear: The invisible hand reigns supreme, the market knows what's good, and government meddling usually ends badly. . . . interesting reading indeed.” (Kirkus Reviews)
"[An] amusing economic history of the Progressive Era." (Publishers Weekly)
“Mr. Grant’s history lesson is one that all lawmakers could take to heart.” (Washington Times)
“Grant has written an elegant history of the 1920-1921 depression.” (Robert Samuelson The Washington Post)
About the Author
James Grant is the founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a leading journal on financial markets, which he has published since 1983. He is the author of seven books covering both financial history and biography. Grant’s journalism has been featured in Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs. He has appeared on 60 Minutes, Jim Lehrer’s News Hour, and CBS Evening News.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Forgotten Depression 1 THE GREAT INFLATION
The coda to the murderous Great War of 1914–18 was an influenza pandemic even more lethal than the war itself. But the wounded world of 1919 could count one saving grace, at least. The oft-predicted postwar depression had failed to materialize. Quite the contrary: Business was booming.
Here was a most pleasant anomaly. History taught that peace would bring depression. Such had been the experience of America after both the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The Great War was a world war. No doubt, many reasoned, a worldwide economic adjustment would prove even more disruptive than the slumps that had followed more isolated conflicts of the past.
No template for government action to resist depressions was yet in place. Long-established economic doctrine rather favored laissez-faire. As the natural seasons turned, so did the economic ones: summer and winter, boom and bust. Individuals might prepare for the inevitable lurches to the down side—a workman might save, a farmer might market his crops in anticipation of lower prices, a banker might call in loans to brace for a depositors’ run. But from the government, not much was expected but to balance its budget, maintain a sound currency and allow business to take its natural, improving course. “[T]hough the people support the government, the government should not support the people,” declared President Grover Cleveland in vetoing a $10,000 appropriation to pay for the distribution of seed grain to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887.1
It was the letter of the Cleveland doctrine rather than the spirit that still prevailed in some policy-making circles. Many voices now pressed the government to intervene. “Progressive,” the speakers styled themselves, though the progress to which they aspired concerned not the management of the business cycle but redressing the supposed injustice in the distribution of income. By 1892, the Populist Party was demanding inflation of the currency, a graduated income tax, strict limitations on corporate ownership of land and the nationalization of the railroads and telephone and telegraph companies.2 By 1908, Eugene Debs was demanding a republic in which the working class governed the plutocracy, rather than the other way around. By 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, no avowed socialist, was demanding that “human welfare” be raised above “property.”3
“From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires,” the Populists had alleged. Certainly, electrical illumination, the internal combustion engine and related marvels lightened the burden of labor and thereby liberated many from drudgery and want. But, equally, according to the composite Progressive indictment, the rich had never been richer, nor the gap between rich and poor provokingly wider.4
In the 1912 presidential election, Debs drew 6 percent of the popular vote on the Socialist ticket, the best showing by any left-wing candidate in any presidential contest before or since.5 He finished fourth.
William Howard Taft, the 300-odd-pound Republican incumbent, campaigning on the doctrine that “[a] National Government cannot create good times” (but could, through ill-advised policy, institute bad times), won a mere two states, Utah and Vermont.6 He came in third.
Theodore Roosevelt, who had bolted from the GOP to preach that government could, in fact, effect the very improvements that Taft resisted, pledged to “use the whole power of government” to resist “an unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism.”7 He placed second.
Candidate Wilson vowed to tame the “trusts,” rein in the big Wall Street banks, lower tariffs and—to compensate for lost revenue from reduced import duties—tax the rich. President Wilson, having beaten the divided GOP, proved as good as his word. By the close of his first year in office, the former president of Princeton University had presented the nation with an income tax and a central bank (in name, a kind of decentralized central bank). The federal government would never again lack the means of financing itself.
In 1916, at the end of his first term, Wilson sought a second. He was deserving on financial grounds alone, the Democratic Party platform asserted: “Our archaic banking and currency system, prolific of panic and disaster under Republican administrations—long the refuge of the money trust—has been supplanted by the Federal Reserve Act, a true democracy of credit under government control, already proved a bulwark in a world crisis, mobilizing our resources, placing abundant credit at the disposal of legitimate industry and making a currency panic impossible.” Then, too, the Democrats commended themselves for “the splendid diplomatic victories of our great president, who has preserved the vital interests of our government and its citizens and kept us out of war.”
New vistas of federal activism opened on April 6, 1917, when the president led the nation into war. As Washington drafted men, so it conscripted incomes. In House debate in 1913 over the proposed income tax, a seemingly wild-eyed Progressive had called for a schedule of rates culminating in 68 percent on incomes above $1 million. “The amendment was, of course, beaten,” reported the New York Times, the paper seeming to roll its eyes at the very notion of so confiscatory a marginal rate of taxation.8 By 1918, the Treasury was taking 77 percent of incomes above $1 million.9 The Wilson administration took control of merchant shipping, the railroads and the telegraph and telephone companies. It rationed raw materials and set ceilings on prices and wages. It intervened in labor disputes. It allocated, requisitioned and commandeered private property. It liberalized the banking rules and thereby encouraged the expansion of credit: After June 1917, a New York bank could lend 38.8 percent more against every dollar of reserve it was required to hold than before the change was enacted.10 Woodrow Wilson delivered the activist government that America’s populists and socialists had long demanded.11
So when Frank Morrison, secretary of the American Federation of Labor, warned in January 1919 that the government was the only instrument of postwar economic salvation—and that, barring federal intervention, there could be “bread lines in every industrial center before May 1”—his message had none of the shock value it would have had before the war.12 More conventionally familiar was the fatalistic voice of the Babson economic forecasting service, which predicted “a period of trouble and depression.” There was no getting around it, said the founder, Roger W. Babson: “We can prepare for reaction and prevent it from being disastrous, but to stop it is impossible.”
Right as rain did the bears initially appear to be. Within four weeks of the November 11, 1918, Armistice, the War Department had cancelled $2.5�billion of its then outstanding $6 billion in manufacturing contracts;13 for perspective, $2.5 billion represented 3.3 percent of the 1918 gross national product.14 In January 1919 commodity prices tumbled. Steel mills, which had hardly been able to keep up with war-induced demand, now operated at 60 percent to 65 percent of capacity. Order books dwindled, that of the United States Steel Corporation by 42 percent between the Armistice and May 1919. Not since the Panic of 1907 had the giant steel maker seen the likes of it.15
But the Morrisons and Babsons had failed to reckon with the long-thwarted American consumer. Purchases patriotically deferred during the year and a half of U.S. belligerency were now exuberantly rung up. War or not, Americans had continued to drive their Fords and Chevrolets and Buicks (gasoline sales never wavered during the ostensibly luxury-free duration of the conflict). Now, with the peace, the people demanded silk shirts, new cars and a little fun.
European consumers, too, were buying American, their spending power enhanced by loans funneled through their governments from the U.S.�Treasury. In the five years prior to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, American exports had averaged $2.1 billion a year. They accelerated during the war and soared again with the peace. In 1919, they reached nearly $8�billion.16
Doomsayers could hardly believe their eyes. Surely, they reasoned, a postwar boom was a contradiction in terms. What was needed—and what was, on form, inevitable—was a bust. As with physical objects, so with prices: What goes up would have to come down. Consumer prices had risen by 11 percent in 1916, by 17 percent in 1917 and by 18.6 percent in 1918. They were on their way to rising by 13.8 percent in 1919.17
Flyaway prices were symptoms of wartime financial disorder. Immense public borrowing, and the easy money to accommodate it, may or may not have been a necessary evil, but the Armistice now rendered it unnecessary. When governments stopped printing money for the very purpose of destroying life and property—when production and orthodox banking made their welcome reappearance—come this happy day, the experts promised, prices would certainly tumble.
But prices resumed their rise as the experts reconsidered their forecasts. In early May, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle was prepared to admit to its Wall Street readership that “merchants are less timid about buying.” Before very long, the merchants were buying boldly. By the fall of 1919, plants were operating at full capacity, raw materials were unobtainable except at exorbitant prices and delivery dates were being pushed out by as much as a year.18 Come Christmas, the Chronicle’s columns were reporting that “consumption plainly outruns production; in parts of the country what might be called a Saturnalia of buying prevails; the retail holiday business is said to be the largest on record.”19
If Saturnalia it was, the inflationary boom of 1919 was a bitter and unhappy one. Wages couldn’t seem to keep pace with prices, nor prices with costs. A pair of sensible shoes had cost $3 before the war. Now they sold for $10 or $12. Bankers scornfully spoke of the shrunken “fifty-cent dollar.”20 Pensioners, judges, professors—anyone on a fixed income—suffered a crippling loss in living standards. Class rose up against class and interest group against interest group.
Especially did the great inflation set labor against management, city dwellers against farmers, creditors against debtors and the Federal Reserve against a growing legion of monetary critics. The “high cost of living”—or the more headline-suitable acronym “H.C.L.”—became the national hot button. And hovering in the background of these economic conflicts was the outbreak of revolution in Europe and the triumph of Communism in Russia. Was America next in line for a workers’ revolt? “We are going to socialize the basic industries of the United States,” vowed John Fitzpatrick, veteran president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, on September 18, 1919.21
Labor took out its anger on management, which not infrequently responded with allegations that the unions were stalking horses for the violent left. In 1919, one in five American workers was involved in a strike; it was an unprecedented figure at the time, and it has never been approached since.22 The United Mine Workers, the nation’s biggest union, struck the coal mines, and a quarter million steelworkers walked out on U.S. Steel. There was a police strike in Boston. There were strikes by machinists, iron workers, upholsterers, butchers, paper makers, boot and shoe workers, raincoat makers, oilfield hands, longshoremen, puddlers, metal polishers, carmen, waiters,�garment workers, die sinkers, grain handlers, livestock handlers, silk weavers, petticoat workers, silk operatives, drop-forge men, painters, glaziers, braziers, tool makers, cigar makers, subway workers, actors, carpenters and pressmen.23 In September 1919, President Wilson, setting off on his ill-fated cross-country trip to take his case for the League of Nations directly to the people, stopped in Columbus to deliver his first speech. The crowd was disappointingly small—it seemed that the Columbus trolleymen had struck.24
Many were the local and particular grievances that pushed workers and managements to break off negotiations and mount (or suffer) a strike. One common thread was the workers’ loss of real income to sky-high prices. Another was radical politics.
The Bolshevik triumph in Russia in November 1917 electrified the American left. Here was the sign they had so long awaited. A general strike—the first in American history—shuttered Seattle for five days in January 1919. Yes, the Reds and anarchists and members of the Industrial Workers of the World—better known as Wobblies—were bound to admit, the reactionaries had cut short the people’s uprising. But what an inspiring revolt it had been.25
Still inspired, the would-be vanguard of the socialist revolution marked May Day with the mailing of 30 letter bombs to members of the American Establishment. Lacking adequate postage, most of the bombs went undelivered. Reinspired, or refinanced, the revolutionaries tried again.26 Among their targets was Wilson’s energetic and ambitious attorney general, A.�Mitchell Palmer.
Late on the night of June 2, an assailant dropped a bomb near the front door of Palmer’s Washington, D.C., home. The device blew the would-be executioner to bits—he seemed to have tripped before he reached his target—but left Mr. and Mrs. Palmer physically unharmed. “Class war is on and cannot cease but with a complete victory for the international proletariat” was an excerpt from the dozens of copies of the anarchist pamphlet “Plain Words” that the bomber had not had the chance to distribute.27
Such acts of domestic violence did nothing to sweeten the relations between management and labor. Angry and fearful men glowered on either side of the bargaining table. “It might be that before we got through we would bring some one before a firing squad,” Warren S. Stone, grand chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, had testified before a House committee in August in consideration of a bill to nationalize the nation’s railroads.28
In November, 400,000 unionized bituminous coal miners walked off the job in defiance of a federal court injunction. During the war the union, led by John L. Lewis, had submitted to such wages as the operators vouchsafed to pay. Now the miners demanded a 40 percent increase (their opening demand was 60 percent, along with the nationalization of the mines); since 1914, as the Department of Labor did the sums, the cost of living in the mining districts of Brazil, Indiana, and Pana, Illinois, had jumped by almost 80 percent. The typical mining family earmarked 37 percent of its budget for food, the cost of which was soaring.
•��•��•
General Motors Corporation, founded in 1908 and already an American blue chip, registered sales of $270 million in 1918 and $510 million in 1919;29 it earned $15 million in 1918 and $60 million in 1919; it had 49,118 employees in 1918 and 85,980 in 1919.30 There was no doubting the boom in Detroit.
GM marked the first full year of peace with a burst of energy—prices, after all, were on the fly. It got into the tractor business, diversified into refrigerators, founded the General Motors Acceptance Corporation and purchased a controlling interest in the Fisher Body Corporation. And it was in 1919 that the GM executive committee approved construction of an imperial new headquarters. The Durant Building, named for the founder, Billy Durant, would have 15 stories, 4 wings, 1,700 offices and 30 acres of floor space. As the world’s biggest office building at the time, it would cost a suitably imposing $20 million.
Anyone could see that the automotive field was still in its infancy. In July 1919 a motorized convoy of army vehicles set off from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco to demonstrate the need for more and better American highways. The troops—led by, among others, Captain Dwight�D. Eisenhower—arrived in September. On good highways, the procession averaged almost 10 miles an hour.31
Taking the boom at face value, the GM front office accepted that raw materials were genuinely in short supply and that—contrary to experience, economic theory and even common sense—prices would rise more or less indefinitely. In such a state of mind, top management took to rubber-stamping the requests for investment funds that poured in from the heads of the company’s various operating divisions. At one sitting of the executive committee, the GM chieftains approved $10,339,554 in unbudgeted spending. “The meeting was not unusual,” relates Alfred P. Sloan Jr., who attended it. “Overruns on capital investment had become the rule.”32
•��•��•
Just back from the war, Harry Truman, a former army artillery captain, resolved to do three things. He would quit farming, marry Bess Wallace and open a men’s furnishings store in Kansas City, Missouri. And each of these things he proceeded to do, the store in partnership with his wartime buddy Eddie Jacobson.
Truman & Jacobson opened for business late in November 1919, at the northeast corner of Twelfth and Baltimore Streets. The location was prime—opposite the city’s biggest and newest hotel, the Muehlebach—and the capitalization seemingly ample. Truman contributed some $15,000 in equity, much of which he had realized from the sale of livestock and machinery at the Truman family farm in Grandview. Jacobson chipped in between $900 and $1,000. Bank loans financed the inventory.
As prices were rising and Federal Reserve credit was available to member banks at concessionary rates of interest, bankers were eager to lend. Nor did consumers need to be cajoled into borrowing or buying. Soaring prices meant that money was better spent than saved. Besides, wartime scrimping was over and done with: People demanded the best and were prepared to pay for it. The partners handed out blotters to which were affixed a snappy line attributed to Dr. A. Gloom Chaser: “It takes 65 muscles of the face to make a frown and 12 to make a smile—why work overtime?” And the pitch: “Buy your men’s furnishings from us at new prices. You will smile at the great reductions. We will smile at the increased business. Then none of us will be overworked.”
Truman and Jacobson set the name of their enterprise in colored tiles in the Twelfth Street entryway. The partners were there early and late, opening at 8 AM and closing at 9 PM, six days a week. They sold shirts, hats, leather gloves, belts, underwear, socks, collar pins, ties and detachable collars. It was a dull customer who couldn’t guess where the principals had spent the year 1918. On prominent display was a four-foot loving cup engraved to “Captain Harry” from the boys of Company D, 129th Field Artillery.
This was the prosperous Kansas City of the “Twelfth Street Rag,” and the boys dropped in to shop. Cash registers were ringing, including the one at Truman & Jacobson’s, which would have rung more profitably if their first clerk hadn’t turned out to be a thief. “Twelfth Street was in its heyday and our war buddies and the Twelfth Street boys and girls were our customers,” Eddie Jacobson reminisced. “Silk underwear for men, and silk shirts, were the rage. We sold shirts at $16.” Adjusted by changes in the Consumer Price Index, a $16 shirt in 1919 would translate into a $202 shirt at this writing. Well and truly, austerity was over.33
•��•��•
Inflation fooled almost everyone, including—1,100 miles to the east—the once famously conservative National City Bank, forerunner of today’s Citigroup. Safety had been City’s stock in trade: It catered to “timid” people, a bemused federal examiner reported in 1891, “who feel that their money is a little safer in this bank than it would be in government bonds.” This was at the very beginning of the James Stillman era. A master at the bankerly art of saying “no,” Stillman could also prudently say “yes.” By 1905, City was the nation’s largest bank, with assets of more than $300 million, 27 percent more than the runner-up, National Bank of Commerce. It was hugely profitable besides.
It was not infallible. On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, it set about building Russian branches, gathering Russian deposits and investing in czarist bonds. “[O]f all the foreign countries,” declared Stillman’s prot�g�, Frank Vanderlip, in 1916, “there is none that offers a more promising outlook than Russia.” Vanderlip, the second in command, lost his job when the victorious Communists dealt the bank its first lesson in sovereign political risk. Absent Vanderlip (Stillman had died in 1918),34 the bank sailed rudderless into the 1919 boom.
Soaring prices beguiled borrowers and lenders alike. To finance rising inventories, customers clamored for credit, and City profitably loaned. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York would lend to City at 4.75 percent, whereas City could lend to its customers at 5.6 percent. In the second half of 1919, City’s book of business loans expanded by 30 percent.
Cuba seemed an especially promising theater of operations to the bank that made its offices at 55 Wall Street. The price of raw sugar, Cuba’s top export, had vaulted to 22 cents a pound in the spring of 1920 from four cents a pound in the fall of 1918. American housewives, the Wilson administration and the National City Bank were now of one mind: Sugar prices were going to heaven.
City plunged into Cuba as Vanderlip had tried to commit to Russia. It built 22 branches in 1919 and loaned heavily to finance construction of sugar mills, railroads and other infrastructure that would presently assure much larger sugar production—and, ultimately, much lower sugar prices. (The enthusiasm was contagious: Chase National and Guaranty Trust, City’s New York neighbors, also loaned in Cuba). By June 1920, exposure to Cuba and its one-crop economy came to total $79 million, or 80 percent of City’s capital. “Management’s bet on this single commodity had been imprudent to the point of folly,” to quote City’s own corporate history.35
•��•��•
If this giant of Wall Street could be duped by the inflationary distortion of values, no less confused were the nation’s farmers. Never before had they sweated so little to earn so much. They had planted fence post to fence post during the war, and they retrenched not at all in the peace. Acreage planted to wheat in 1919 reached a record that stood until World War II. Tractor sales soared in tandem with crop prices. “Power farming” became the motto of a new personage on the American rural scene, the mechanized agricultural businessman.
In 1919, farm income from production reached a new high of $16.9�billion, no less than 152 percent above the prewar average of $6.7�billion. This record, too, would stand until the 1940s.36 Having money to spend, farmers bought breeding stock as well as tractors. In May 1919, “Rag Apple the Great,” a purebred Holstein-Friesian bull, fetched a heretofore unimaginable sale price of $125,000.37
The land on which the likes of Rag Apple regally grazed was by now in its own bull market. As crop prices were zooming, farmers and bankers reasoned, so should the capitalized value of the land on which the seeds were planted. In 1919, black Iowa corn ground fetched prices some 40 percent higher than the prewar average. In 1920, the premium was 70 percent.
Optimistic farmers borrowed to expand. “Most land purchases were made with at least a first mortgage,” recorded an agricultural historian of the period, “and sometimes even third mortgages, which looked far into the future for liquidation.” As levitating prices for land and crops and breeding stock were signs of the times, so, too, was the climb in agricultural mortgage debt. “People ask me,” said the president of the Iowa State Board of Agriculture in December 1919, “if I think this land will stay at that price [$200 to $500 per acre] and I say it certainly will. It may not go any higher for some time, but I do not think it will go back.”38
Most helpful customer reviews
84 of 93 people found the following review helpful.
Rothbard says not?
By Noah Leed
This is a very good historical account of the several-year period of massive inflation and deflation that took place during and following WWI. As well as a comprehensive overview, the reader is given competing personal viewpoints from the perspectives of a few key players of the time (such as comptroller John Skelton Williams) whose names may have been well known at the time but have been largely lost to history. Grant's writing is crisp and richly detailed, if not overly detailed at times, with plenty of emphasis on the use of numbers to illustrate and contrast phases of boom and bust and recovery (for example, we learn the 1920 population of 9,445,327 depositors with an average passbook of $549.16 rose by 1.8% in 1921, and the average deposit rose by 5.5%).
Had I fully agreed with Grant's premise (as reflected in the book's title) I imagine I would have given the book four or five stars. But I feel he is trying to extrapolate from this episode a hands-off policy that can and should be universally applied to all downturns. While I agree that hands-off is the best approach, I feel that 1) it was not truly the approach taken in 1921, and that 2) each downturn, while sharing similar features with others, is unique and cannot always be analyzed in isolation from the entirety of economic events that precede (and follow) it, and especially cannot always be analyzed or "corrected" in isolation from the entirety of the global economy.
I think Grant is half right: this is the last major American downturn that government didn't attempt to spend it's way out of. But it may also be the FIRST downturn that our government attempted to INFLATE it's way out of, since it was the first major recession the Fed was called on to "fix" (with the Fed itself being a key cause of the slump).
To the degree the Fed succeeded, any existing malinvestment and excess debt that was not allowed to clear (along with newly spurred malinvestment and debt) was simply carried forward into the next, even more severe boom/bust cycle. And to the degree that new lending revived and renewed prior speculative activity, a wartime economy that became overly finacialized transitioned directly into a peacetime economy that was ALSO overly finacialized. That notion is consistent with ABCT... and that seems to be David Stockman's take, too.
It was also the take of a very few economists predicting the crisis that would become the Great Depression (Akerman 1929: in "... a boom period that began already in the middle of 1921 [under] American monetary policy... savings capital had been attracted to speculative investments, which are now beginning to prove unprofitable") or economists analyzing causes of it (Phillips 1937: "... the boom and its consequent depression was the price paid for the experimentation with currency management by the Fed... when the post-war deflation of prices had not been completed").
I continue to be puzzled why Grant and many Austrian economists regard the end of the 1920-1921 slump as a purely laissez-faire recovery. When I read Murray Rothbard, I get a very different view. A laissez-faire recovery could only occur absent the Fed and its monetary exertions, which did indeed play a role in the recovery. In addition, a true laissez-faire price mechanism is not really at work in global economy of sterilized gold flows and manipulated exchange rates.
Certainly there was no fiscal stimulus, but Rothbard paints a picture of a very active Fed before, during and after the crisis. It does not seem far-fetched to suppose the Fed began a policy of loose(r) money in response to what was happening in 1920-1921 and that response not only helped cut short the downturn but helped ignite the continued credit boom of the 1920s, and the subsequent bust.
It seems clear to me that Rothbard sees the roots of the Great Depression in Fed policies that INCLUDE the Fed's response to the 1920-1921 slump. In other words, an active monetary policy was NOT a non-response on the part of government, and the 1921 Depression is NOT truly "The Crash That Cured Itself".
If anything, the 1921 Depression seems to echo the Dot-Com Recession to the extent that an effort to suppress interest rates and boost lending shortened the slump by feeding a subsequent boom. Is it not fair to say that both busts were partly "cured" by artificially created booms rooted in cheap money? And that by limiting the severity and length of both busts, the collapse of the subsequent credit bubbles perhaps led to even more pain than would have been experienced if government (via the Fed) truly HAD let both original busts run their natural course?
Rothbard (p. 138, America's Great Depression):
"The first inflationary spurt, in late 1921 and early 1922--the beginning of the boom--was led by Federal Reserve purchases of government securities. Inflation was promoted by a desire to speed recovery from the 1920-1921 recession.
Soon, Secretary Mellon was privately proposing that business be further stimulated by cheap money.
One of Benjamin Strong's major motives for open-market purchases in 1921-1922 was to stimulate foreign lending. The 1921-1922 inflation, in sum, was promoted in order to relieve the recession, stimulate production and business activity, and aid the farmers and the foreign loan market."
Rothbard describes, at least in part, a Fed-led cure and not an all-natural cure. And since the Fed's inception, it's only "cure" for reaching escape velocity from a downturn is to offer up a new dose of the very disease that feeds the boom/bust cycle: credit expansion. One must remember the approach to this particular event had plenty of historical precedent: war had led, as it always did, to a price inflation that was unprecedented EXCEPT during war, and it was quite natural that prices (and wages) must be allowed to fall.
The severe and rapid price deflation experienced in the slump was itself not fully a market phenomenon. When price inflation and speculative lending continued and even accelerated after the war, the Fed had forced its own hand and found itself countering years of inflationary policy with a strategy that was purposefully and decidedly deflationary. This stance of tightening was held well into the slump, contributing to its sharpness.
But to the degree prices fell, they did not all come that close to returning to pre-war levels. Was further price deflation preempted by the Fed? One could argue the prices the Fed then artificially held "stable" through the remainder of the 1920s were not true "price-mechanism" prices to begin with! And while embracing deflation and letting the price mechanism work seems a pretty obvious approach in the early 1920s after the price had recently doubled, how would such an approach seem obvious in the late 1920s, when no such price inflation had occurred?
If anything, Austrians should use this episode not to trumpet how market forces work well when left to their own devices, but rather to show the utter failure of this freshly instituted mode of central banking (and, more importantly, the utter failure of the freshly instituted reserve-currency mode of global money that replaced the international gold standard). Not even a decade from its founding, that Fed proved: 1) that it would cave to political pressure, and, for example, abandon its watch on inflation during and after a war, if the U.S Treasury so desired; 2) that the Fed, whether in pretense of being proactive or reactive, would never really know if it was doing too much or too little, too soon or too late, since it was lacking a crystal ball (let alone access to market signals and information in real time); 3) that it would work in concert with other central banks to help THEM inflate and tinker with exchange rates; and 4) Fed efforts at price stabilization are folly (as I believe the ultimate collapse of "The Great Moderation" will one day confirm).
Grant does indeed spend some time discussing how "price stability" came to be pushed by leading economic minds (Keynes, Fisher) as a proper goal of central banking, and he makes a good case against that line of thought. But I don't think Grant is hard enough on the Fed.
As a pusher of the drug "credit" during WWI and after, the Fed found that some of the sharp pain it caused by withdrawing easy access to the drug could then be relieved by renewing access to even greater infusions of the drug. But as was discovered only a few short years later in the Great Depression, a credit-buzz can (and will) end badly.
I don't think this is the first time Grant has slightly contradicted himself in this area. In a truly brilliant speech to the Fed, he noted the Fed in its efforts to help finance WWI almost immediately strayed from its supposed design to "respond to the community, not try to anticipate or lead it... (and not to) override the price mechanism but yield to it."
Grant then notes that after 1922, the first full year of recovery, the 1920s began to roar, because the natural price mechanism was allowed to work to end the slump. But was it? To begin with, the Fed had to raise rates to kick-start the natural decline of prices that were expected to follow WWI inflation. And the Fed began it's proto-QE of open-markets ops DURING the recovery, not after it, as Grant claims. Rothbard says B. Strong knew this would be expansionary, and quotes him in a letter to that effect.
Even without this evidence of a primitive type of QE, Grant has already conceded the Fed had become an agent of price distortion, an institution of interventionist policy, during the war. It loosened, loosened some more, then it tightened, then it loosened. At no point did it say "we take our hands off the reins." And to the extent having hands on the reins yielded little or no control over market forces, who is to say what effect those policies had on market participants? Expectations of what the interventionists might say or do can be just as important as what they ACTUALLY say or do.
But most importantly, I think the slump and recovery has to be viewed in the context of a world economy wrecked by wartime inflation rather than viewed as a purely domestic event that can be isolated and analyzed in terms of domestic government policy. In global terms, the war had already effectively destroyed the market price mechanism, because international gold flows were out of kilter and subject to government intervention by every central bank in the world. The best one can claim is that, for a very brief period, the national price mechanism was largely allowed to work in a global economy where the international price mechanism was entirely manipulated. In reality, "natural" prices began being distorted right along with the end of the classical gold standard, in 1914.
I think the chapters in which Grant addresses the tendency of prices to fall steadily with productivity gains had the potential to be his most enlightening chapters, but he did not go into depth in discussing how Fed monetary inflation stabilized those prices in the 1920s, feeding asset price inflation and giving an illusion of financial stability. The lesson is, a fairly stable price level in a regime of massive credit expansion (today as in the 1920s) may be a sign of financial INstability, because if the new credit is not driving up consumer prices and wages then it must be driving up asset prices.
While he mentioned the massive inflows of gold into the country, Grant didn't discuss in detail how the gold-exchange standard resulting from the 1922 Genoa conference was poorly coordinated and how each country retuned to its own version of the gold standard, with Britain overvaluing and France undervaluing their currencies. The failure by both France and the US to monetize gold inflows further threw the global price mechanism out of kilter as the 1920s came to a close, effectively creating a "gold shortage" where none truly existed. I would have liked to see Grant tie together the dynamics of the American economy and other national economies, rather than mention them briefly as separate and contrasting systems. If the price mechanism, the "hero" of Grant's book, had truly been working on a global scale in the 1920s, quantities and global flows of goods, gold and capital -- not to mention the prices of wages, goods, commodities and assets -- would have behaved very differently than they did.
55 of 61 people found the following review helpful.
The Courage to Do Nothing
By Eric Mayforth
Everyone knows about the Great Depression of the Thirties, but few today are aware that an economic contraction every bit as severe occurred a decade earlier, at the beginning of the 1920s. In "The Forgotten Depression," James Grant chronicles these hard times that were quickly cured not by government action, but by government inaction.
The author recalls much of the decade leading up to 1920 that saw the Wilson administration implement the income tax and create the Federal Reserve in the United States; meanwhile, World War I raged in Europe. In 1919, there was a ruinous postwar inflation, and it led to the depression of the following year. Grant discusses how the Federal Reserve came to the decision to let the contraction cure itself, and how the new Harding administration also took a hands-off approach after it came to power early in 1921.
Along the way, Grant provides innumerable statistics and figure comparisons that detail how the economy sank into the depression but quickly recovered just 18 months later, and how by 1922 the American economy was roaring again. Quite a few period quotes from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are also included, and the author offers a primer on a few rudiments of economics and finance that apply in any era.
Steely inaction on the part of the government ended the depression quickly, but remarkably, the Federal Reserve changed its policies after the event, and Grant remembers how the Federal Reserve and the Hoover administration treated the subsequent depression of 1929-33, with tragic results.
Throughout the rest of the twentieth and now into the twenty-first century, government no longer employs the effective hands-off policy which gets the country through economic hard times quickly, but in "The Forgotten Depression" Grant provides a well-documented look back at a contraction that was vanquished quickly by wise policies--the book would be enjoyed by any conservative or libertarian who appreciates good economic history.
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
"Liquidate Labor, Liquidate Stocks...."
By David Shulman
I have known Jim Grant for about 25 years and he never ceases to amaze me with his lucid style of writing. As the proprietor of “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer” he continually demonstrates his ability to bring to life the most mundane of economic and financial topics. His “Forgotten Depression,” an account of the 1919-1922 boom, bust and recovery, is no exception.
Grant’s thesis is that left to its own devices an unfettered price system without the intervention of government policy gives the economy the ability to shake off the effects of a depression. In this case study Grant admires the stand-offish policies of Presidents Wilson and Harding. If anything fiscal policy was extremely contractionary and the nascent Federal Reserve was tightening credit well into the contraction. It is as if Grant is channeling his inner Andrew Mellon, the attributed author of my title quote. And remember the 1920-21 decline was severe with wholesale prices dropping by an astounding 56% and unemployment rising well into the double-digits. As a side-bar Grant notes that a small haberdasher in Kansas City failed. The co-owner was one Harry S. Truman.
To Grant the key to the pricing mechanism working was the ability of wages to exhibit downward flexibility With wages falling with prices, businesses adjusted to find profitability with a much lower cost structure. Although the downward spiral did feed on itself for a while, a new equilibrium was quickly found, at least relative to the early 1930s and our recent experience this decade. By contrast in 1929 it was government policy to keep wages up, and hence all of the adjustment had to fall on the quantity of labor.
What Grant seems to undervalue is the role of the Fed in easing credit in 1921 that helped the economy find a bottom. To be sure the inflow of gold, responding to the U.S. economy’s improved competitive position, made their life much easier, but the fact remains that Fed policy became highly expansionary as 1921 progressed.
Grant is correct in arguing the recovery in 1922 laid the basis for the great boom that was to follow. It also made policy makers complacent about the recuperative powers of the economy. When the next crunch came in 1929 the outcome wasn’t nearly as favorable. To Grant it was Hoover’s wage maintenance policies that were at fault; to the economic mainstream it was the workings of the gold standard. Nevertheless Grant tells a compelling story about a long forgotten episode in American history.
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