Quote from: farmer_boy on November 30, 2010, 02:07:16 AM

Quote from: creighto on November 30, 2010, 01:22:39 AM

Quote from: farmer_boy on November 29, 2010, 11:01:33 PM

Quote from: creighto on November 29, 2010, 10:33:27 PM

Quote from: farmer_boy on November 29, 2010, 08:54:02 PM

The most important feature that the digital coins have is that you never have the "we won't do this project, because there is no money"-problem, which was what happened in 1929. There were workers, people wanting to eat, and factories, but no money.

That's not really what happened in 1929, or 1932.

The banks stopped increasing the money supply, did a few tricks (called back margin loans) on the stock market to make it fall faster and probably shorted the entire economy. What's wrong with that? The end result was that normal people were not able to pay with labour for their living expenses.

The only reason that I don't go to greater lengths to correct your misunderstandings of economic history is that I grow weary of doing so on online forums without due compensation.

I actually don't see much difference between the way you describe it and I do. You label the government as intervening, but AFAIK it was the Federal Reserve which decided to act essentially against the interests of the population. By shorting against the national economy they could get even more money. They do this trick every few decades and are speeding up the process.

The Federal Reserve did what central banks always do, which is manipulate the monetary base to favor a very small minority insider class. That's not at all special to the Great Depression. What was different was that Congress & the Executive Branch operated under the (particularly damaging) idea that the markets were something that were 'broken' and could be fixed by the right kind of adjustments. Some even operated under the (false) assumption that those who managed the Federal Reserve were there to actually help. There were tariffs imposed upon imports from China (sound familiar?) to protect domestic producers, and programs to destroy livestock in order to support prices. In the end, however, the will of the market can only be delayed, not avoided outright; so the deflation (the direct result of the destruction of credit outstanding due to defaults, not the deliberate reduction of the monetary base by the Federal Reserve) continued; but the suffering of the public was exacerbated by the misguided attempts by members of the political class to fix a socio-economic problem with political solutions. In the end, most historians credit WWII with pulling the US out of the depression, but that was just because the political class was largely too busy with the war effort to continue to screw with the economic system. It is the uncertainty of political intervention that delays a recovery more than anything else, because if investors don't know what claptrap Congress might try to pull next, they tend not to risk their capital. Political uncertainty adds much risk to the markets, which is part of the reason that most 3rd world nations have real difficulty attracting investments, even when their dictator is known to be particularly friendly to business interests.

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You are free to reference books that claim the government intervened.

I am free to do anything that I wish, including nothing. It's not a concern of mine if you believe me or learn anything. In fact, it's better if you don't believe me. feel free to prove me wrong, if you can, and you will learn vastly more on your own than I could teach you on an online forum; whether you succeed or fail.