http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_4_higgs.pdf
Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War by Robert Higgs "...Finally, this way of understanding the Great Duration meshes nicely with a proper understanding of the Great Escape after the war. The Keynesians all expected a reversion to depression when the war ended. Most businesspeople, in sharp contrast, "did not think that there was any threat of a serious depression" after the war (Krooss 1970, 217). The businesspeople forecasted far better than the Keynesian economists: the private economy blossomed as never before or since. Official data, which understate the true increase because of mismeasurement of the price level, show an increase of real nongovernment domestic product of 29.5 percent from 1945 to 1946 (U.S. Council of Economic Advisers 1995, 406). Private investment boomed and corporate share prices soared in 1945 and 1946 (Higgs 19G92, 57–58). None of the standard explanations can account for this astonishing postwar leap, but an explanation that incorporates the improvement in the outlook for the private-property regime can account for it. >From 1935 through 1940, with Roosevelt and the ardent New Dealers who surrounded him in full cry, private investors dared not risk their funds in the amounts typical of the late 1920s. In 1945 and 1946, with Roosevelt dead, the New Deal in retreat, and most of the wartime controls being removed, investors came out in force. To be sure, the federal government had become, and would remain, a much more powerful force to be reckoned with (Higgs 1987; Hughes 1991). But the government no longer seemed to possess the terrifying potential that businesspeople had perceived before the war. For investors, the nightmare was over. For the economy, once more, prosperity was possible." _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
