Roger Sandiland's posting on Currie is fascinating in several ways it would
be fun to pursue, but still leaves me wondering what Currie's positive
policy position was. Reading between the lines, he saw a need for banks to
find an alternative to commercial loans, to maintain the money supply.
Question: what alternative did he favor?

I surmise he would not have favored low-quality loans on land and stocks,
such as had just collapsed. Did he then favor making U.S. bonds,
non-defaultable, the major collateral behind bank loans? If so, he
succeeded, for that is what happened. To some fevered minds of the time that
might have seemed like evidence of a red conspiracy of some sort. However,
one could also see it as an indirect way of meeting the Constitutional
stipulation that the U.S. Government should regulate the money supply. It
seems to have "worked", in the sense of avoiding collapses. It has also
proven to be a relentless engine of steady long-term inflation, which may be
what the apparently hysterical and politically motivated witch-hunters were
trying to warn us against. Somewhere between boom/bust, and chronic
inflation, we need to find a golden mean.

Currie's thinking might have led him to espouse quality controls on bank
loans, anathema to Friedmanites of course. But my surmising is reaching
beyond my evidence, which I hope Roger will supply.

In passing, Friedman's dismissing Currie as a "fugitive from justice" is
quite shocking. To equate McCarthyism with "justice", while laying his
apostolic hands on Gustavo Pinochet, suggests that his politics warped his
scholarly judgment.

Mason Gaffney