Quick question: So Austrians believe the Fed caused the Great Depression mostly through the BoE bailout of 1927, but after the deflation spiral started happening, what should the fed have done?

Same as title - as a thought experiment, say Bob Murphy were dropped into the driver's seat of the fed after black Monday, 1929 - what would he have done? Flooded the market with new money as Friedman said the fed should've done? Dismantle the fed and say "it'll be better in the long run" ? Sing Karaoke?

A lot of libertarian authors like Burt Folsom seem to think the fed should've dumped money in, but they're probably not Austrians; I'm interested in the Austrian take.

EDIT: Austrians On the Great Depression [source]

Basically during WWI, England de-pegged the pound from gold, printed a shit ton of money, and then afterward they re-pegged it to gold, but they did it at the old exchange price, at the same time, dollars were pegged appropriately. So you could play some games with the currency exchange markets and make crazy amounts of money. This lead to massive amounts of gold fleeing England and coming to the US, which was wreaking havoc on the British Economy. Therefore, the Fed printed a crap-ton of money so both currencies would be similarly devalued -- this caused the bubbles which caused the crash.

In the year 1927, you will note the pronounced increase in these holdings (Federal reserve holdings of United States Securities) in the second half of the year. Coupled with the heavy purchases of acceptances, it was the greatest and boldest operation ever undertaken by the Federal reserve system, and, in my judgement, resulted in the most costly errors committed by it, or any other banking system in the last 75 years.

What was the object of the federal reserve policy in 1927? it was to bring down money rates, the call rate, the interest rate on loans to margin-buyers who buy securities with borrowed capital among them. Because of the international importance of the Call rate had come to acquire. The purpose was to start an outflow of gold to reverse the current inflow of gold to this country.

- AC Miller - Fed reserve board member during that time

Posted Jan 23, 2015, 12:59 PM UTC · edited

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