This post was originally published on this site
Nearly a year ago, I wrote a column called “The Trump era could wind up like the 1930s,” meaning an era of deep economic pain and uncertainty.
In light of what has occurred since—a killer pandemic, a savage bear market and a millions of layoffs as big chunks of the economy shut down—I certainly see no reason to amend that view. Even so, it’s worth updating some of my original thinking.
I originally said that social conditions of today resembled those of a century ago, like antipathy towards immigrants and rising hate crimes against minorities. Often, such ugliness is fueled by economic insecurity. So why was it prevalent during the so-called “Roaring 20s,” the Gatsby-esque era of excess and good times?
The answer is that the perception of good times was somewhat misleading. There were recessions in 1920-21, 1923-24 and 1926-27, for example. The first was deeply painful, the others mild, but all belie the impression that the decade was one long party. It wasn’t. The wealth gap between the haves and have-nots was also vast.
Even before the terrible events of the last few weeks, our own problems were evident. President Trump, no stranger to exaggeration, claimed we had “the greatest economy in the history of our Country.” And yet growth in 2019 was 2.3% — respectable, but hardly the greatest we’ve ever had. As the chart shows, Trump’s boast was laughable.
If we never had it so good as he claimed, why—and again this was pre-2020—would 40% of Americans, according to the Federal Reserve, struggle to handle an unexpected $400 expense? And why, says the Census Bureau, did the number of Americans without health insurance in 2018 rise nearly two million more from the year before?
Of course, it’s a president’s job to reassure Americans during uncertain times that things will be okay. In December 1929, President Herbert Hoover reassured Americans that the worst of the recent stock crash was over and that the economy was fine. He was wrong. The Great Depression was just beginning. By December 1932, three terrible years later, unemployment hit 23.6% (it continued falling during the first year of Franklin D Roosevelt’s presidency, bottoming out at a staggering 24.9%). One of the iconic songs of the era asked “Brother, can you spare a dime?” Few could.
Trump cannot be blamed for telling Americans that things will get better. But there’s no guarantee—as Hoover learned the hard way—that they will.
Trump has repeated one of Hoover’s mistakes, insisting that tariffs will improve the economy. The 31st president was warned but didn’t listen. Trump—who promised us that “trade wars are easy to win, believe me” (he now denies saying this) didn’t listen, either. JPMorgan Chase has estimated last year that the cost to the average American household this year from Trump’s China tariff war will be $1,000. Wouldn’t you like to have an extra $1,000 right about now? And yet Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told C-SPAN last month that “general tariff relief is not on the table.”
But, as there is one much bigger and much more important difference between Hoover then and Trump now. There was a huge contraction in the money supply then, which, as Steve Hanke, a professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University reminds us, was the problem. “The supply of money collapsed, and the Federal Reserve, which thought it was engaging in a loose monetary policy, in fact it was engaging in a tremendously tightening monetary policy. And that was the big cause of he Great Depression.”
There might have been another one a dozen years ago were it not for then-Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. A student of the depression, he slated the fed funds rate to a zero to 0.25% range where they stayed for seven years. He also bombarding the economy with cash, buying up some $4 trillion in Treasury and mortgage securities to stimulate the economy. He came to be known as “Helicopter Ben.”
Trump can thank his lucky stars that for all his misguided criticism of Jay Powell, the current Fed chairman knows his history too. With the economy slowing last year, the Fed began buying short-term Treasuries—long before the coronavirus-induced crash. Like Bernanke, Powell has cut rates to zero and has accelerated its purchases of securities as well. Powell has even gone further than Bernanke in one key respect, wading into the $3.9 trillion municipal bond to keep it liquid.
So between zero rates and gobs of cash from “Helicopter Jay”—plus the $2.2 trillion in stimulus from Congress—Trump isn’t in Hoover’s position. On the other hand, Hanke notes, Hoover was never in Trump’s.
“Now, the government has mandated that the supply side of the economy must be shut down, and if that’s shut down, that feeds back into the demand side of the economy, and the whole thing just collapses,” he says. “The Great Depression was kind of a one punch on the demand side, driven by a collapse in the money supply—a terrible policy by the Federal Reserve. But this time, it’s a one-two punch.”
