Reference no: EM132586836

True / False

1. As Smiley shows, the purpose of production really is to just produce things.

2. Before the Great Depression, federal budget deficits were normal.

3. After the war, with no gold standard to enforce discipline, the Fed destabilized our economy with inflationary policies.

4. Prior to the Great Depression, the states received very little of their revenue from the federal government.

5. According to Smiley, following World War II millions of men re-entered the labor force while millions of women exited from it.

6. Woods notes that it is conventional wisdom that failing to use countercyclical policies in the face of a recession/depression will lead to an intolerably long delay in economic recovery.

7. Woods cites President Roosevelt as saying that in the history of mankind it is only saving and work that leads to recovery from the waste and disruptions of war.

8. Lewis maintains that the problem of the Great Depression can be summed up in the 1932 Republican Party platform to keep wages high.

9. Lewis' cites Murray Rothbard's book, The Mystery of Banking, as explaining why wage and price controls lead to tragic results during the Great Depression.

10. In the video, Woods argues that during WWII, the loss of the most experienced workers into military service could not have really led to rapid growth in America's GDP.

11. Woods concludes that it is quite reasonable to conclude that America experienced great prosperity during WWII, and that the data confirm this.

12. Carden cites Robert Higgs as arguing that a third component to the Great Depression era was the "Great Escape" when some of the regulatory burdens imposed during the New Deal were partially dismantled.

13. The problem of calculating GDP during the war is that much production does not occur in markets and that price controls hide the true costs.

14. According to Auerback, discussions today of fiscal austerity and deficit reduction are "wrong-headed."

15. According to Auerback, that the Fed pushed up interest rates at the start of the Great Depression to stem gold outflows is more of an indictment of the Fed than it is of how the Great Depression got started.

16. Auerback argues that it was the huge fiscal stimulus of our involvement in WWII that led us out of the Great Depression.

17. Poulson notes that during President Hoover's four years in office, federal government spending rose by almost 50%.

18. According to Poulson, the policies being used by the president and congress to fight the recession of 2008 are much more like the policies of the 1920s than the 1930s.

19. According to Christoff-Kurapouna, in the first few years of the Fed, board member Adolph Miller felt like they had been reckless with its expansion of credit.

20. Murphy contends that a deflationary bias that comes with a gold standard is a curse.