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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:19:13 2006 |
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================== HES POSTING ======================
The answer to Daniele Besomi's enquiry about the origins of D.H.
Robertson's phrase "a sloom followed by a bump", is that it appears to
have been coined by Robertson himself in his review in the March 1935
Economic Journal of Lauchlin Currie's "The Supply and Control of Money in
the United States" (Harvard 1934). Robertson used the phrase to summarise
Currie's view of the 1920s, which Currie, contrary to the conventional
wisdom of the time (and contrary to Hayek and the Austrians), reckoned was
not a period of irrational, unsustainable exuberance, fated to collapse,
but rather was one of "profitless prosperity" that could have continued
had it not been for the initial errors and then the extreme passivity of
the Fed that allowed a bump to become a slump.
Tom Humphrey and Don Patinkin reckoned that Currie's comprehensive
diagnosis of the 1929-32 period was easily the most important anticipation
of Friedman and Schwartz's famous 1963 survey,a nd criticised F&S for
their (possibly deliberate) neglect of Currie's contributions. Friedman
later offered an explicit mea culpa (see David Laidler's article,
"Hawtrey, Harvard, and the Origins of the Chicago School", JPE Dec 1993,
p.1077, fn.12).
Roger Sandilands
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
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