Paul Krugman Falsifies American Economic History (Again)

In a recent blog Democratic Party propagandist Paul Krugman claimed that after the Lincoln administration nationalized the money supply with its National Currency Acts, Legal Tender Acts, and the creation of the greenback dollar, “nothing bad happened” during the years when the gold standard was abandoned in the late nineteenth century.

The economics profession knows better.  In a scholarly article entitled “Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880-1914,” by Michael Bordo, Peter Rappoport, and Anna Schwartz (in Claudia Goldin, editor, Strategic Factors in Nineteenth-Century American Economic Growth, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), the authors concluded that the period of time referred to byKrugman:

“. . . was characterized by monetary and cyclical instability, four banking panics, frequent stock market crashes, and other financial disturbances.”  Krugman has a very unique definition of “NOTHING bad.”

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2:34 pm on March 31, 2013