Brad DeLong: Slouching Toward Sanity

Brad DeLong says government action during the crisis may have prevented another Great Depression:

Slouching Toward Sanity, by J. Bradford DeLong, Commentary, Project Syndicate: In America today ... the Republican congressional caucus is just saying no: no to short-term deficit spending to put people to work, no to supporting the banking system, and no to increased government oversight or ownership of financial entities. And the banks themselves are back to business-as-usual: anxious to block any financial-sector reform and trusting congressmen eager for campaign contributions to delay and disrupt the legislative process.

I do not claim that policy in recent years has been ideal. If I had been running things 13 months ago, the United States Treasury and Federal Reserve would have let Lehman and AIG fail – but I would have discounted their debt for cash at face value, provided that the debt also came with sufficient equity warrants. That would have preserved the functioning of the system while severely punishing the banking and shadow-banking systems’ equity holders...

If I had been running things 19 months ago, I would have nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and ... shifted monetary and financial policy from targeting the Federal Funds rate to targeting the price of mortgages. Ever since 1825, the purpose of monetary policy in a crisis has been to support asset prices to prevent the financial markets from sending to the real economy the price signal that it is time for mass unemployment. Nationalizing Fannie and Freddie, and using them to peg the price of mortgages, would have been the cleanest and easiest way to accomplish that.

Nevertheless, policy over the past two and a half years has been good. A fundamental shock bigger than the one in 1929-1930 hit a financial system that was much more vulnerable to shocks than was the case back then. Despite this, unemployment will peak at around 10%, rather than at 24%, as it did ... during the Great Depression... Nor will we have a lost decade of economic stagnation, as Japan did in the 1990’s. ...

It is worth stepping back and asking: What would the world economy look like today if policymakers had acceded to the populist demand of no support to the bankers? What would the world economy look like today if Congressional Republican opposition to the Troubled Asset Relief Program program and additional deficit spending to stimulate recovery had won the day?

The only natural historical analogy is the Great Depression... That is the only time when (a) a financial crisis caused a widespread, lengthy, and prolonged reinforcing chain of bank failures, and (b) the government neither intervened nor passed the baton to a consortium of private banks to support the system as a whole.

It is now 19 months after Bear Stearns failed ... and industrial production stands 14% below its peak in 2007. By contrast, 19 months after the Bank of the United States ... failed on December 11, 1930 ... industrial production ... was 54% below its 1929 peak.

Opponents of recent economic policy rebel against the hypothesis that an absence of government intervention and support could produce an economic decline of that magnitude today. After all, modern economies are stable and stubborn things. Market systems are resilient... A 54% fall in industrial production between its 2007 peak and today is inconceivable – isn’t it? ...

The problem, though, is that all the theoretical reasons to think that depressions as deep as the Great Depression simply do not happen to market economies applied just as well to the 1930’s as they do to today.

But it did happen. And it could have happened again.

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