Blast from the Past: Marriner Eccles testimony in front of Congress, 1933

[c1ue]

Hat tip to http://londonbanker.blogspot.com/201...eccles-to.html

http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/meltzer/ecctes33.pdf

Money shot (page 34):

It is utterly impossible, as this country has demonstrated again and again, for the rich to save as much as they have been trying to save, and save anything that is worth saving.

They can save idle factories and useless railroad coaches; they can save empty office buildings and closed banks; they can save paper evidences of foreign loans; but as a class they can not save anything that is worth saving, above and beyond the amount that is made profitable by the increase of consumer buying.

It is for the interests of the well to do – to protect them from the results of their own folly – that we should take from them a sufficient amount of their surplus to enable consumers to consume and business to operate at a profit.

This is not “soaking the rich”; it is saving the rich.

Incidentally, it is the only way to assure them the serenity and security which they do not have at the present moment.

This leading economist which Eccles' quoted above is probably William Trufant Foster.

The entire transcript is worth reading as it is obvious that in 1933, there were the same Kabuki theater of villains and scoundrels, all saying the exact same idiocies as today.

[derelict54]

Re: Blast from the Past: Marriner Eccles testimony in front of Congress, 1933

That about sums it up.

At the height of the crisis, the taxpayer should have been able to borrow (through tax cuts and/or tax refunds) against their future labor and income to either a) pay off excessive debt, or b) reinvest the money into business and industry, if they had little debt. Equal cuts/refunds should have been given per taxpayer, therefore also reducing the income descrepancy between rich and poor. 10k to a person making 35k is a huge difference rather than, 10k for the person making 1 million.

A good analogy may go something like:

If the wealth of this nation is water, than currently we have a top heavy water tower that is teetering to collapse. Washington and Ben Bernanke have chosen to keep trying to prop up this water tower using water hoses/canons as it continues to tip and fall. Unfortunately not until it it falls will you get Bernanke green shoots. They call him hellicopter Ben, unfortunately he never lived up to the name. Whether it was knee jerk reaction to the criss, special interests at play, or something more sinister, if he just dropped the money equally across the consumers, (70% of our gdp) this depression could have been a recession.........I guess we will not know until he writes his memoir in ten years........