Deja Vu All Over Again, or On the Whole…

The President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia:

We have been putting out credit in a period of depression, when it is not wanted and could not be used, and will have to withdraw credit when it is wanted and can be used.

But this is not Charles I. Plosser, no matter how similar the sound. It’s from September of 1930,* presumably George W. Norris (PDF; see page 4).**

Indeed, reviewing the Calmoris and Wheelock article from which I pulled that quote, we find the same mistakes being made: excess reserves confused with circulating money and therefore treated as harbingers of inflation, squealing for austerity,*** sterilization of shifts in reserves in a desperate attempt to avoid non-visible inflation.

As Owen Wilson’s Gil says in Midnight in Paris, we have antibiotics; the people in Fin de siècle Paris didn’t. It’s just one of our other “sciences” that appears not to have advanced.

*Michael D. Bordo;Claudia Goldin;Eugene N. White. The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report) (p. 36). Kindle Edition.

**Not to be confused with George W. Norris, the Nebraska Senator discussed in Profiles in Courage

***The Norris quote above begins:

We believe that the correction must come about through reduced production, reduced inventories, the gradual reduction of consumer credit, the liquidation of security loans, and the accumulation of savings through the exercise of thrift. These are slow and simple remedies, but just as there is no “royal road to knowledge,” we believe there is no short cut or panacea for the rectification of existing conditions.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, not to mention EC President Herman von Rompuy, would be proud.