Saturday, August 4, 2012

That fits the pattern


"...the Great Depression, which had been going on in England for about ten years by the time it spread to the rest of the world in 1929..." -- from page 36 of The Congruence of Weber and Keynes (PDF, 28pp.) by Norbert F. Wiley, 1983.

I didn't know that.

Set aside the thought that "it spread" from England to the rest of the world, for Milton Friedman argued that the Great Depression started in the U.S. and that you could know this by looking at international gold flows.

We are still left with the news that things in England were not good during the Roaring '20s. That's interesting, I think, because things were not good for the American farmer in the 1920s, either.

The '20s were roaring because they were good years for finance, and little else.

That fits the pattern.

2 comments:

Gobanian said...

Britain was stuck in recession during the 1920's because it went back to the gold standard with an overvalued pound. Things got progressively worse until 1931, when it left the gold standard, devalued the pound and did better than most countries in the 1930's

Unknown said...

My understanding of economic history is that the 1920's were a pretty terrible time for most of Europe following the war. The US "boom" (at least in the cities and stock market) stood out during that period and helped the us surpass much of Europe in wealth. One other area that I believe was doing relatively well is Russia.