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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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