H@wkeye!
Member
You have some very interesting view on economic history, and judging from the fact that you seem to know "Keynesian" by name at least, so i'm going to assume you're an econs major.Yeah it took a war's worth of keynsian spending to get them out of the great depression...
Great
Idea
Guys
Didn't even work, because of teh hypar inflay shunz.
We don't need a standing army, disband all of our armed forces. We have a police service and a security service.
First dispanding ALL our armed forces? hrm great idea, who polices the waters of northern australia? I agree we could do with more immigrants, but no boat people, and illegal smugglers, or drug runners, common get real! AND DON'T SAY fisheries and customs can do it all, get real. Our armed forces arn't for war so much, more defence, and detterant and whatnot, dispanding them would be a disaster - plus it'll never happen...
Hyper inflation happened in Germany during the late twenties, not the UK, the US or any other country during the recession. In a recession, inflation drops, unemployment rises, that's where the theory of the lorenze curve came from (yes, i know you're probably a neo-classical, who will say that this theory has been disproved, and yes, i'm not arguing that). Curiously, the great depression started to fizzle out, well and truely prior to the war. Granted it was rearming that did this, but it DID NOT take a whole war's worth of spending to bring the world out of depression.
The great depression happened due to overinvestment after the first world war, and we can see, in a similar kind of way, that happened again here, in regards to overinvestment in (super risky) sub-prime mortages. So, in a sense the conditions are at least slightly similar. What then happened, as i mentioned before, was competitive devaluation of exchange rates so countries could maintain their export's competitiveness, as everything moved off the gold standard.
What we have now, is governments running around throwing money at their economy in the hope that this will increase demand, and imporve consumer confidence. Problem is, the sub-prime mortages hit so hard, and over such a long time, that lots and lots of damage was done - so now, whether or not the stimulas packages will work, it will take a while. You can't just dump a few billion on the economy overnight (even the first stimulas package was only a few hundred million). Takes time....