TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bordo,Michael D.
AU  - James,Harold
TI  - The Great Depression Analogy
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15584
PY  - 2009
Y2  - December 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15584
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15584.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Michael D. Bordo
Department of Economics
Rutgers University
New Jersey Hall
75 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Tel: 732/822-7152
Fax: 732/932-7416
E-Mail: bordo@econ.rutgers.edu

Harold James
History Department and Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544
E-Mail: hjames@princeton.edu
AB  - This paper examines three areas in which analogies have been made between the interwar depression and the financial crisis of 2007 which reached a dramatic climax in September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the rescue of AIG: they can be labeled macro-economic, micro-economic, and geo-political.  First, the paper considers the story of monetary policy failures; second, there follows an examination of the micro-economic issues concerned with bank regulation and the reorganization of banking following the failure of one or more major financial institutions and the threat of systemic collapse; third, the paper turns to the issue of global imbalances and asks whether there are parallels that might be found in this domain too between the 1930s and the events of today.
ER  -