Economic Truths, Perennially Forgotten
A review of Surprised Again! The Covid Crisis and the New Market Bubble, written by William M. Briggs and published in Law & Liberty.
In 2021, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen assured Americans that recent inflation was “transitory.” Back in 2017, Yellen, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, hinted there would not be another financial crisis “in our lifetimes.”
Maybe she got that idea from Morgan Stanley boss James Gorman, who in 2013 put the chance of a crisis “in our lifetime” as “close to zero” as he could imagine. Well, imagination, as the song says, is crazy. “Your whole perspective gets hazy.”
These two experts, as Alex J. Pollock and Howard B. Adler tell us in Surprised Again! The Covid Crisis and the New Market Bubble, are far from alone. Economic experts, they confirm, have a collective accuracy that would embarrass a busload of blind golfers. Not one expert, they remind us, saw the Great Depression coming. And none foresaw the Calamitous Coronadoom Panic of 2020. Which lasted until now.
What is fascinating is that being wrong in no way dents the awesome armor of assurance donned by our experts. Whatever they do when given power, they do it boldly and without doubt. Whether this lack of humility is caused by amnesia or hubris can be debated. But no one can doubt the astonishing effects of the economic “solutions” foisted upon us by a string of experts during the panic, each trying to correct the ill effects of the other “solutions.”
Read the rest here.