scholarly journals Banking and the Business Cycle : a study of the Great Depression in the United States

1938 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Ahmed ◽  
Mark Granberg ◽  
Victor Troster ◽  
Gazi Salah Uddin

AbstractThis paper examines how different uncertainty measures affect the unemployment level, inflow, and outflow in the U.S. across all states of the business cycle. We employ linear and nonlinear causality-in-quantile tests to capture a complete picture of the effect of uncertainty on U.S. unemployment. To verify whether there are any common effects across different uncertainty measures, we use monthly data on four uncertainty measures and on U.S. unemployment from January 1997 to August 2018. Our results corroborate the general predictions from a search and matching framework of how uncertainty affects unemployment and its flows. Fluctuations in uncertainty generate increases (upper-quantile changes) in the unemployment level and in the inflow. Conversely, shocks to uncertainty have a negative impact on U.S. unemployment outflow. Therefore, the effect of uncertainty is asymmetric depending on the states (quantiles) of U.S. unemployment and on the adopted unemployment measure. Our findings suggest state-contingent policies to stabilize the unemployment level when large uncertainty shocks occur.


Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
James K. Galbraith

This chapter examines the lessons of World War II with respect to money and monetary policy. World War I exposed the fragility of the monetary structure that had gold as its foundation, the great boom of the 1920s showed how futile monetary policy was as an instrument of restraint, and the Great Depression highlighted the ineffectuality of monetary policy for rescuing the country from a slump—for breaking out of the underemployment equilibrium once this had been fully and firmly established. On the part of John Maynard Keynes, the lesson was that only fiscal policy ensured not just that money was available to be borrowed but that it would be borrowed and would be spent. The chapter considers the experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States with a lesson of World War II: that general measures for restraining demand do not prevent inflation in an economy that is operating at or near capacity.


Author(s):  
Brian Neve

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.


Author(s):  
Alanís Enciso Fernando Saúl ◽  
Russ Davidson

The introduction provides the reader with an historical overview of the Cardenas administration’s attempts to orchestrate an organized repatriation of its citizens from the United States during the years of the Great Depression. The introduction also endeavours to describe how Alanis Enciso’s overview of Mexican repatriation under the Cardenas administration differs from similar analyses, and how each of these works has influenced but ultimately differs from Enciso’s own book.


Author(s):  
Colin Root

Precisionism was a modernist art movement during the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, in which painters produced a ‘‘machine aesthetic’’ by rendering precise, geometrical forms in their works. A group of American painters originally called ‘‘The Immaculates,’’ the Precisionists celebrated new industrial landscapes of skyscrapers, factories, bridges, and other mechanized phenomena. Although they were never a formalized school and worked without a manifesto, Precisionism reflected both the exciting dynamism of the ‘‘Roaring Twenties’’ as well as the streamlined simplicity of the Great Depression. Their images produced an ambivalent attitude toward mechanization, at once praising its efficiency while condemning its dehumanization. Appearing immediately after a host of other influential modernist movements such as Cubism and Futurism, Precisionists merged the impulse toward abstraction with a photographically realistic eye. While no artist worked exclusively as a Precisionist, there were several for whom it was a formative style. Perhaps the most prolific artists who produced Precisionist works were Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Together, these three painters and several others created a distinctly American brand of imagery that was a celebration of nationhood as much as a celebration of mechanization.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document