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No. It is not. The most important reason it is not is that Bernanke and Paulson are both focused like laser beams on not making the same mistakes as were made in 1929.
They are also focused, but not quite as much, on not making the mistakes made by Arthur Burns in the 1970s.
And they are also focused, but not quite as much, on not making the mistakes the Bank of Japan made in the 1990s.
They want to make their own, original, mistakes...
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This Weblog...
"I now know it is a rising, not a setting, sun" --Benjamin Franklin, 1787
J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at U.C Berkeley, a Research Associate of the NBER, a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Chair of Berkeley's Political Economy major.
Among his best works are: "Is Increased Price Flexibility Stabilizing?" "Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare," "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth," "Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," "Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate?" "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania-Avenue Style," "America's Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s," "American Fiscal Policy in the Shadow of the Great Depression," "Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes, volume 3, Fighting for Britain," "Between Meltdown and Moral Hazard: Clinton Administration International Monetary and Financial Policy," "Productivity Growth in the 2000s," "Asset Returns and Economic Growth."
The Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college next year, which means that I need to think about making more money. (The idea that one might write checks to rather than receive checks from universities is now strange to me.) So I have signed up with the Leigh Speakers' Bureau which also handles, among many others: Chris Anderson; Suzanne Berger; Michael Boskin; Kenneth Courtis; Clive Crook; Bill Emmott; Robert H. Frank; William Goetzmann; Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin; Paul Krugman; Bill McKibben; Paul Romer; Jeffrey Sachs; Robert Shiller;James Surowiecki; Martin Wolf; Adrian Wooldridge.
That's good.
Posted by: no | September 18, 2008 at 01:05 PM
20.1% equity retained was new and original the FIRST time, even if the implication is no less clear than that of GLB when it was pased.
Now, it's just another aspect of "privatize the profits, socialise the risks."
Posted by: Ken Houghton | September 18, 2008 at 01:37 PM
What do you think their new and original mistakes have been, are, or might, over the next few days/weeks, be? (Or, what would you have done differently so as to make your own new and original mistkaes?)
Posted by: Don ald A. Coffin | September 18, 2008 at 01:46 PM
I'm not an economist, but I will make this pronouncement:
It's Too Soon To Tell....
Posted by: Leila Abu-Saba | September 18, 2008 at 03:39 PM
Of course in 1929
- the US had not decided over the previous 27 years that building up massive debt (by the federal govt, and to the outside world) was a great idea
- overpopulation and resource depletion were not serious problems
It's not at all clear to me that doing a sterling job of defending the Maginot line when it's 1940 not 1914 is good enough. I guess it's better than doing a LOUSY job of defending the Maginot line, but it might be an idea to put some more thought into the big picture. (For example, it might not be such a great idea for the head of the Fed to encourage Congress to cut taxes, or to make pronouncements on the types of mortgages that common folk should utilize.)
Posted by: Maynard Handley | September 18, 2008 at 04:06 PM
"Original sin is so much more exciting than conventional sin." Craig Nelson
Posted by: zeno2vonnegut | September 18, 2008 at 05:12 PM
Big grin.
Hmmmm...now I'm wondering if corvids have a sense of humor.
Posted by: The Raven | September 18, 2008 at 05:51 PM
They've just banned short selling.
Are you really sure about that assertion?
Posted by: shah8 | September 18, 2008 at 06:20 PM
I agree. 1929 will seem like a Sunday Picnic in comparison.
Posted by: Vulture | September 18, 2008 at 07:17 PM
Well, making old mistakes would imply dimness of consciousness...
Recommended link:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/diamond-and-kashyap-on-the-recent-financial-upheavals/
Posted by: Measure for Measure | September 18, 2008 at 07:46 PM
Every time has it's own mistakes, that's right.
Today there are mathematical and statistical mistakes about now called toxic waste or as Warren Buffett called that mess: weapons of ma(th)ss destruction.
W has fighted in Iraq against them and the tragedy is that this weapons now explode in your own country.
Posted by: otti | September 19, 2008 at 04:36 PM
The year of the really big mistakes was not 1929, but 1931. That is what we came close to last week when Treasuries were earning negative interest rates.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser | September 22, 2008 at 01:03 PM
Quite a comment from a fellow who has said that Alan Greenspan never made a bad policy decision or one with which he disagreed.
Posted by: Jesse | October 30, 2008 at 07:02 AM