GRASPING REALITY WITH BOTH HANDS : CAN´T ANYBODY HERE PLAY THIS GAME? FISCAL POLICY EDITION / THE SEMI-DAILY JOURNAL ( A MUST READ )

Grasping Reality with Both Hands

The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist J. Bradford DeLong: Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, and Even-Handed

Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 708 0467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu.

July 19, 2010

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? Fiscal Policy Edition

Niall Ferguson writes:

Today’s Keynesians have learnt nothing: When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, the deficit was already running at 4.7 per cent of GDP. It rose to a peak of 5.6 per cent in 1934. The federal debt burden [in the United States] rose only slightly – from 40 to 45 per cent of GDP – prior to the outbreak of the second world war. It was the war that saw the US (and all the other combatants) embark on fiscal expansions of the sort we have seen since 2007. So what we are witnessing today has less to do with the 1930s than with the 1940s: it is world war finance without the war...


Could we please have some acknowledgement of the fact that the reason the debt-to-GDP ratio did not rise across the 1930s was because GDP rose, not because debt didn't rise? Debt more than doubled from $22.5 billion to $49.0 billion between June 30, 1933 and June 30, 1941. But nominal GDP rose from $56 billion in 1933 to $127 billion in 1941.

And could we please have some acknowledgement that our 9.4% of GDP deficit in fiscal 2010 pales in comparison to the 30.8% of GDP deficit of 1943, or the 23.3% and 22.0% deficits of 1944 and 1945?

Niall Ferguson should not do this. The Financial Times should not enable Niall Ferguson to do this.