As part of Antiwar Radio‘s week long series on the economic crisis in association with the Campaign for Liberty, Robert Higgs, senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government and Depression War and Cold War, discusses the relationship between the inflation of World War One and the roaring ‘20’s and the Great Depression, Fed chief Ben Strong’s deal with the Bank of England’s Montague Norman to inflate in the 1920s in order to help England and how this created the stock market bubble (and others) in the 20s, some of the ways that the near-totalitarian New Deal interventions of Wilsonian Republican Herbert Hoover and Wilsonian Democrat Franklin Roosevelt compounded and prolonged the depression, the myth of World War II ending the Great Depression, the Korean War and switch from World War to Cold War, the state’s scare tactics to strong-arm government growth, and chaotic interventionism in the market and the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
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