So, this is going to be a very sour reading of what has happened in Cyprus
this weekend. It will also be a very partisan one, possibly even a
partial one. But if Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz were right in
their insistence that it was actually the Federal Reserve that caused
the Great Depression (which is something that Ben Bernanke
himself has insisted that the Fed will not repeat) then one way of
interpreting what has happened is that the European Central Bank has
just set us all up for another Depression. The trigger is that “tax” of a
little over 6% on all depositors.
This isn’t an analysis that you’ll be able to get all economists to
sign up to. But the basic story told by Friedman and Schwartz in “A
Monetary History of the United States”
was that the 1929 crash was indeed a serious crash. But it would not
have led to the Great Depression without the Federal Reserve making some
serious mistakes. Two of which were to allow the intertwined collapses
of both the money supply and the banking system. Given that it is the
banks that create credit and thus the wider money supply they are, to a
great extent, the same thing. (more)
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