Lars Christensen writes of a 2010 lecture by Scott Sumner did at Oxford Hayek Society on the causes of the Great Depression.
Scott does a great job showing that policy failure – both in the terms of monetary policy and labour market regulation – caused and prolonged the Great Depression. Hence, the Great Depression was not a result of an inherent instability of the capitalist system.
Unfortunately policy makers today seems to have learned little from history and as a result they are repeating many of the mistakes of the 1930s. Luckily we have not seen the same kind of mistakes on the supply side of the economy as in the 1930s, but in terms of monetary policy many policy makers seems to have learned very little.
Click to open video on separate page 1:06:12
Read more at Scott Sumner: “It’s Complicated: The Great Depression in the US” | The Market Monetarist.