The Greenback Effect

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/opinion/19buffett.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=the%20greenback%20effect&st=cse

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 8:55 AM
Subject: re: The Greenback Effect
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

Warren Buffet warns that cheap money policies can come at high costs, and I'd be a fool to dismiss his analysis. He goes too far however in arguing that the current Fed policy is unprecedented. To do this, he has to exclude data from the years 1942-1946. These were exactly the years in which the U.S. finally escaped the Great Depression. FDR had boldly initiated deficit spending in 1933, but the Depression surged back when he tried to balance the budget for his next election campaign. Only when we put three million men in uniform and undertook to arm the free world--on a wave of deficit spending--did we emerge from the Great Depression and emerge as the driving economic engine of the world. We all hope that the world can be pulled from the current economic crisis without the widepread loss of life of 1942-1946. It would be reckless to discard the data from these years to score a rhetorical point.

Barry Levine