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