Essays on the Great Depression(by Ben S. Bernanke)

BookInfo

ISBN: 9780691118208	Number of Pages: 320
Publisher:  Princeton University Press	Book Title: Essays on the Great Depression
Publication Year: 2004	Target Audience: Trade
Author: Ben S. Bernanke	Reading Age: 18+

Summary

In 1929, the Great Depression occurred in the United States and then spread to the whole world. At that time, the stock market collapsed, banks failed, inflation remained high, financial markets were in turmoil, people’s income declined, tens of millions of people lost their jobs.

The Great Depression not only led to great changes in the economy and society of the United States and even the world, but also made modern macroeconomics an independent discipline academically. Seeking a reasonable theoretical explanation for the Great Depression is a challenging task for the economic community, as well as an attempt to find a feasible solution to similar crises later.

There is no such thing as a “waste” depression in academia. For decades, generations of scholars have been studying the Great Depression. The research on the Great Depression and its conclusions have affected the monetary policy and financial supervision of later generations.

Bernanke is an outstanding representative of many researchers. Bernanke, who calls himself a “Great Depression fan”, has written a series of research articles on the Great Depression, which have been assembled into the book Essays on the Great Depression.

In his book, he used a large number of data and materials from the United States and many other countries, including economic data, wages, employment, etc., to make an in-depth analysis of the causes and transmission mechanism of the Great Depression from the perspective of total supply, total demand, nominal wages, etc.

He believed that the study of the Great Depression could reveal the laws and nature of many economic operations. These studies indeed helped him learn from the policy lessons of the Great Depression when he was the chairman of the Federal Reserve to deal with the subprime crisis in 2008, and avoided the same mistakes on the whole, helping the United States survive the crisis.

The Great Depression of the 1930s has long been a history, but looking at all kinds of economic news in the world, the lessons of the Great Depression are still of great warning significance.

Essays on the Great Depression is one of the Economics Prize Reading List in 2022

About the Author

Ben S. Bernanke is an American economist and former chairman of the Federal Reserve. He was born in Augusta, Georgia, USA on December 13, 1953, he received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Harvard University in 1975 and a doctor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979.

Bernanke has taught at Princeton University for 17 years and served as the dean of the Department of Economics. He has been a visiting scholar of the Federal Reserve since 1987, and worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia from 1987 to 1989, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 1989 to 1990, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1990 to 1991 and from 1994 to 1996.

In 2002, he was appointed as the director of the Federal Reserve by Bush. In June 2005, Bernanke served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers of the President. On February 1, 2006, he took over Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

In December 2009, Bernanke was elected the 2009 Person of the Year of Time magazine. On January 28, 2010, the Senate of the United States Congress finally voted to confirm his re-election. He took office on February 1, 2014 for a four-year term.

On October 10, 2022, Ben S. Bernanke won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2022

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Table of Contents

Preface vii

PART ONE: OVERVIEW

• The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression: A Comparative Approach

PART TWO: MONEY AND FINANCIAL MARKETS

• Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression
• The Gold Standard, Deflation, and Financial Crisis in the Great Depression: An International Comparison Harold James
• Deflation and Monetary Contraction in the Great Depression: An Analysis by Simple Ratios Ilian Mihov

PART THREE: LABOR MARKETS

• The Cyclical Behavior of Industrial Labor Markets: A Comparison of the Prewar and Postwar Eras James L. Powell
• Employment, Hours, and Earnings in the Depression: An Analysis of Eight Manufacturing Industries
• Unemployment, Inflation, and Wages in the American Depression: Are There Lessons for Europe? Martin Parkinson
• Procyclical Labor Productivity and Competing Theories of the Business Cycle: Some Evidence from Interwar U.S. Manufactutring Industries Martin Parkinson
• Nominal Wage Stickiness and Aggregate Supply in the Great Depression Kevin Carey

Index