In reply to: Ideally, it would be a business person and a General. posted by EricCartman
From the end of WWII:
Top tier: Reagan, Truman, and Clinton
Mid range: Ike, JFK, LBJ, Bush 41, Obama
Needs improvement: Nixon, Ford, Carter, W, Trump
Biden is too soon to rank.
Look around, the people that run for office these days are clowns. The serious ones leave, and new clowns take their place. I’m open to a governor in 2024 from either party. But all that I see is two old dudes yelling at clouds. Until a better option appears, I’ll continue to hope for better alternatives regardless of their background.
Also, Hoover got boned by the Fed. He was helpless to prevent the Great Depression. And the Fed would have made FDR a bottom tier president too, if he had only served two terms.
And in some ways made the Depression worse despite good intentions. A lot of it had to do with Hoover’s intransigence and some really bad decisions, such as signing the Smoot-Hawley Act into law.
He didn't understand how government worked. He had zero leadership skills.
He thought business was going to bail him out. I also don't think he supported Smoot. I think he just packed the balls to veto it.
And to EC's post, I think Trump is below need improvement. Though you could argue that by outsourcing all legislation to McConnell things got done. But like Hoover, he didn't know how government worked and outside riling up his base he zero leadership skills.
Back to Hoover, Coolidge almost predicted exactly exactly how the depression played out. With his lowest predicted marks for Hoover.
He didn’t understand how government worked. And as a businessman, he thought he knew better.
He was a benevolent, non-charismatic, Constitution-respecting, boring Trump.
Ross Perot would have been just as bad.
The federal reserve couldn't afford to cut interest rates unless it could get off the gold standard. We also needed to tolerate deficit spending, which Hoover was against.
Hoover was dealt a bad hand, but he needed to do more than he did. Maybe if he played his hand perfectly he still loses but he wasn't some helpless victim.
sorry. … We won’t do it again.”
—Ben Bernanke, November 8, 2002, in a speech given at “A Conference to Honor Milton Friedman … On the Occasion of His 90th Birthday.”
I think he reconsidered whether the Friedmanite explanation was correct.
But if you read Golden Fetters you'll see that the fed did what they did after the stock market crashed because of the constraints of the Gold Standard. And once they figured that out they needed to run a budget deficit.
If he changed his position, that would be a huge shift. I feel like the story would have made the rounds at least once in the financial press. I can’t recall seeing it. (It doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. It just seems like something the WSJ editorial board would take issue with for a few days.)
face by Bernanke on the causality of the Depression.
Bernanke I think changed his mind about how aggressive the fed needed to be in order to avoid the depression. But I hadn't realized Friedman advocated a large QE program for Japan when it was in its slump, so Bernanke might say that friedman was right and he should have expanded the money supply earlier and faster.
I'm also attaching an article below talking about the parallels between the Depression and Great Recession. In each case the fed raised rates for seemingly reasonable reasons (commodity prices driving pre recession inflation, popping the stock market bubble). In each case the financial system was silently imploding in the background. For us housing prices were dripping in 06 and in the Depression non American economic activity was already declining and American interest hikes forced interest rates up abroad.
In both cases all hell breaks loose and the system propagates the financial impulse propagates. In both cases you had initial easing in interest rates and some bank bailouts. In each case the fed/government let an important financial institution fail and all hell broke loose. Here's an excerpt in case you're pay walled.
"contrary to popular memory, Eichengreen suggests, the Depression-era Fed deserves at least some sympathy. In the wake of the 1929 crash, the Fed acted immediately to pump liquidity into the markets, saving the banking system from failure. It cut interest rates repeatedly in the first half of 1930, sparking a partial recovery on Wall Street. Confronted with a string of bank runs, which were inevitably common in the era before deposit insurance, the Fed supplied yet more liquidity to fragile banks, staving off a wider crisis. Eugene Meyer, the formidable Fed chairman who later ran the World Bank and bought The Washington Post, drafted the legislation creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the counterpart to the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008. When a major Chicago bank, Central Republic, threatened to collapse in June 1932, Meyer used the RFC to mount an unprecedented, $90 million rescue. That was three times the size of all federal loans to the states that year for the relief of the unemployed and homeless."
But my overall point was that the fed could not have pursued sufficiently expansionary policy given political restraints and you needed sufficient private sector bail outs. Hoover wasn't willing to do that for ideological reasons.
Had Roosevelt been in charge he probably makes similar mistakes. The Gold Standard was orthodoxy back then and I think we've seen how toxic bank bail outs are. Roosevelt even tried to balance the budget before we were really out of the Depression.
I see Hoover like a worse Carter. He could have done better, but was in a wrong place wrong time situation. Had he played the situation perfectly we'd still have done poorly and he'd still have lost. He just wouldn't be seen as one of our worst presidents.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/how-the-fed-flubbed-it/383496/