George Bragues en el Financial Post habla de la contradicción que supone dar la razón a los austriacos en cuanto a las causas de la crisis, pero negársela en cuanto a las soluciones.
While there isn't perfect unanimity on this, it is widely acknowledged that a significant part, if not the root, of our difficulties originated with the low-interest-rate policy implemented by the Alan Greenspan-led Fed in 2001-2005. This generated a housing boom, which was further stoked by the financial engineering of Wall Street in securitizing mortgages, by obliging bond rating agencies in evaluating these securities and by portfolio managers eagerly willing to buy them, hungry for extra returns in a low interest rate environment. (...)
But if, to rephrase a well-known Nixon quote, we are all Austrians now, it illogically only extends to the diagnosis of the crisis and not to the school's market-based cure. For it is just not consistent to simultaneously assign blame to Greenspan's easy money and then support government intervention to fix the damage, as so many of the business op-ed writers and talking heads on CNBC have.
Bragues nos recuerda lo que realmente sucedió tras el crack del 29. Hoover, lejos de practicar una política liberal hizo algo muy parecido a lo que están haciendo ahora los gobiernos, prolongando dolorosamente la crisis.
Most commentators resist following the Austrian logic through to the end out of the fear of repeating the policy mistakes that led to the Great Depression. This reflects the orthodox interpretation of that period, according to which the economy fell apart in the early 1930s while U. S. president Herbert Hoover took a laissez-faire approach to the downturn and the Fed ran an overly tight monetary policy.
The truth is that the Fed at the time did try to add liquidity, lowering its rediscount rate until late 1931 and continuously increasing reserves under its control. Money supply nevertheless fell, but that was because people lost faith in the financial system and hoarded currency. Meanwhile, Hoover met the downturn with interventionist gusto. He passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff to help domestic industries and obtained the co-operation of business leaders to support wages and investment. We haven't gone down this protectionist and corporatist road yet but Hoover's attacks on short selling and his creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which among other things loaned money to banks, bear an eerie resemblance to the current policy response.
(vía Mises Blog)
