多恩布什《宏观经济学》第十版英文原版I19revised

CHAPTER 19

BIG EVENTS: THE ECONOMICS OF DEPRESSION,

HYPERINFLATION, AND DEFICITS

Chapter Outline

•The Great Depression and its impact on macroeconomics

•Money and inflation

•Monetarism and the rational expectations approach

•The effects of hyperinflation

•Disinflation and the sacrifice ratio

•Credibility

•The Fed's dilemma

•Deficits, money growth, and seigniorage

•The inflation tax

•Federal government outlays and revenues

•The primary deficit

•The debt-to-income ratio

•The burden of the debt

•Financing Social Security

Changes from the Previous Edition

The material in this chapter was in Chapter 18 in the previous edition. It has been updated, Boxes 19-2 and 19-5 have been added, and other boxes have been renumbered accordingly. Introduction to the Material

The Great Depression in the 1930s presented an economic crisis of enormous proportions. Between 1929 and 1933, real GDP in the U.S. fell by almost 30% and unemployment reached an all-time high of almost 25%. While the economy grew fairly rapidly from 1933-37, unemployment remained in the double digit range. In 1937/38, there was another major recession and the unemployment rate remained above 5% until 1942. In the 1930s unemployment averaged 18.8%, but by 1939 real GDP had recovered to its 1929 level.

The classical economists of the time were not equipped to explain the existence of such substantial and persistent unemployment or to prescribe policies to deal with it. Only in 1936, in John Maynard Keynes’book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was a macroeconomic theory introduced upon which policies to keep the economy out of future recessions could be based. Keynes’ theory provided an explanation of what had happened during the Great Depression and suggested policies that might have prevented it.

The stock market crash of 1929 is often seen as the catalyst for the Great Depression but, in fact, economic activity actually started to decline even before the crash. What might well have

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been an average recession turned into a very severe depression due to the inept economic policies employed at the time. The Fed failed to provide needed liquidity to banks and did little to prevent the collapse of the financial system. The huge contraction in money supply due to the large numbers of bank failures caused the economic downturn. Fiscal policy was weak at best. Politicians concerned with balancing the budget raised taxes to match increases in government spending, so the decline in aggregate demand was not counteracted.

Many other countries also suffered during the same period, mainly as a result of the collapse of the international financial system and the enactment of high tariffs worldwide. These policies were designed to protect domestic producers in an attempt to improve each country’s domestic trade balance at the expense of foreign trading partners. However, the attempts to "export" unemployment ultimately resulted in an overall decline in world trade and production.

In the U.S., many institutional changes and administrative actions, collectively known as the New Deal, were implemented in the 1930s. The Fed was reorganized and new institutions were created, including the FDIC, the SEC, and the Social Security Administration. Public works programs and a program to establish orderly competition among firms were also implemented.

The experience of the Great Depression led to the belief that the economy is inherently unstable and active stabilization policy is needed to maintain full employment. Keynes was an advocate of active government policy. In his work, he explained what had happened in the Great Depression and what could be done to avoid a recurrence. Many years later, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz offered a different explanation. In their book A Monetary History of the United States, Friedman and Schwartz argued that the severe decline in money supply, caused by the Fed’s failure to prevent banks from failing, was the reason for the severity of the Great Depression. They claimed that monetary policy is very powerful and that fluctuations in money supply can explain most of the fluctuations in GDP over the last century. This argument provided the impetus for new research on the effects of fiscal and monetary stabilization policies. While economists are still debating these issues, we can conclude that monetary policy can affect the behavior of output in the short and medium run, but not in the long run. In the long run, increases in the growth rate of money supply will simply lead to increases in the rate of inflation. Box 19-3 gives an overview of the monetarist positions on the importance of money for the economy, while Box 19-2 quotes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who admits that the magnitude of the Great Depression was indeed the result of the Fed’s action—or, more accurately, inaction.

The link between inflation and monetary growth can easily be derived from the quantity theory of money equation:

MV = PY ==> %∆M + %∆V = %∆P + %∆Y ==> m + v = π + y ==> π = m - y + v In other words, the rate of inflation (%∆P = π) is determined by the difference between the growth rate of nominal money supply (%∆M = m) and the growth rate of real output (%∆Y = y), adjusted for the percentage change in the income velocity of money (%∆V = v).

Figure 19-1 shows that trends in the rate of inflation and the growth of money supply (M2) have been somewhat similar over the last four decades. There is plenty of evidence to support the notion that in the long run, inflation is a monetary phenomenon here in the U.S. as well as in other countries. However, there are short-run variations, indicating that changes in velocity and output growth have also affected the inflation rate. By the mid 1990s, the relationship between

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