num_pages: 272
description: By the publisher of the prestigious Grants Interest Rate Observer an account of the deep economic slump of 192021 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 200709 recession in whose aftereffects Grant asserts the nation still toils.James Grant tells the story of Americas 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 20072009.In 192021 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 slumpedand 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 Americas 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.
language: English
title: The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash that Cured Itself
publisher: Simon  Schuster