It is not too early to ask how the present US business cycle expansion, already more than five years old, will end. The history of the last great US monetary experiment in “quantitative easing” (QE) from 1934-7 suggests that the end could be violent. Autumn 1937 featured one of the largest New York stock market crashes ever accompanied by the descent of the US economy into the notorious Roosevelt Recession. Should we take comfort from the fact that Friedman and Schwartz, in their epic monetary history, claim to have discovered the policy error by the Federal Reserve which was responsible … Continue reading Echoes of the 1937 Depression-Within-a-Depression