Tyler Cowen's New Deal 'Crib Sheet'

In his column in yesterday's New York Times, George Mason economist (and blogger) Tyler Cowen offered a 'crib sheet' of lessons from the New Deal, "Economic View: The New Deal Didn't Always Work Either". Excerpt:

As Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz argued in a classic book, “A Monetary History of the United States,” the single biggest cause of the Great Depression was that the Federal Reserve let the money supply fall by one-third, causing deflation. Furthermore, banks were allowed to fail, causing a credit crisis. Roosevelt’s best policies were those designed to increase the money supply, get the banking system back on its feet and restore trust in financial institutions.

A study of the 1930s by Christina D. Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (“What Ended the Great Depression?,” Journal of Economic History, 1992), confirmed that expansionary monetary policy was the key to the partial recovery of the 1930s. The worst years of the New Deal were 1937 and 1938, right after the Fed increased reserve requirements for banks, thereby curbing lending and moving the economy back to dangerous deflationary pressures.

The rest of the short column is worth reading. Incidentally, President-elect Obama has chosen Christina Romer to head his Council of Economic Advisers.