Roger's posting of 2-22 covers the Currie matter well, I believe.

I believe Currie erred (not sure where Roger stands on this) by saying that
commercial loans were less reliable than security-based loans. Harry
Scherman in a semi-popular book of 1938, *The Promises Men Live By*, baldly
states the opposite, based on several years of experience after Currie
wrote. In 1933, H.D. Simpson and Ernest M. Fisher in the Proceedings of the
AEA ascribe the banking collapse almost entirely to bad real estate loans. 

A neglected aspect is the collapse of muni bonds secured by tax liens on
real estate. Philip Cornick's *Premature Subdivision and its Consequences*,
1938, gives many details from New York State. The Municipal Bankruptcy Act
of the mid-1930's made it easy for muni's to stiff their creditors, and
induce them to enter into "composition of creditors" proceedings. It is easy
to understand why battered bondholders and mortgagees in those times could
be misled into subscribing to paranoid allegations about reflationists. (I
say "misled" because their real grievances lay elsewhere.)

What's harder to understand is why macro-economists purport to explain
business cycles without referring to phenomena like the above.

In passing, if Currie thought he would escape from dirty politics by
relocating in Colombia, he obviously miscalculated monumentally!

Mason Gaffney