When The Forgotten Man Goes Down the Memory Hole

“FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.”
— UCLA Newsroom, August 10, 2004.

“Jobs in the Obama Economy Coming Back Slower Than During the Great Depression.”

— Rep. Dave Camp, Chairman, House Ways and Means Committee, June 1st, 2012.

The irony here, of course, is that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is a much-noted student of the Great Depression and of the work of the late Milton Friedman whose landmark book, A Monetary History of the United States, pinned the blame for the Great Depression on a too tight Fed. As Bernanke told Friedman and his co-author, Anna Schwartz, on the economist’s 90th birthday a decade ago, ”You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

But if Hetzel is right, the Fed blew it again.

— “Fed study says Bush and the banks didn’t cause the Great Recession. The Fed did,” James Pethokoukis, the American Enterprise Institute, yesterday.