YouSaid · the spoken record

George Selgin

lines on the record: 79
first: 2025-10-15
most recent: 2025-10-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Economic stability. And that's why I think, at least as much independence as you can get of the Fed from both branches of government is necessary. I would like to see NGDP targeting happen. I think Fed officials have not been very good about considering it, but I would rather continue to try to convince them than take my chances with an executive-controlled Federal Reserve, which I think would have, I'd have even less hope of converting such a Fed into doing the right thing.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it gets conducted according to the interests of the executive, which unfortunately, as far as we can tell right now, tends to be one that favors very easy monetary policy. I think easier policy than would be consistent either with the Fed's present target or with a reasonable nominal GDP target. I think it's generally the case that both Congress, both congressional control and executive control are going to turn in practice into fiscal dominance of monetary policy, where the fiscal considerations, that is the desire of the government officials to be able to spend more without taxing more is going to encourage easier monetary policy than is consistent with macroeconomic”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What really happened was output started to recover after 33, but if that as that potential output was growing rapidly, the real recovery in the sense of reduction in the output gap was less impressive than the recovery of absolute output may suggest. So there's a sense in which The fact that productivity was improving makes the depression worse than it might seem if you just look at what the progress of output was.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was a lot of technical innovation in the 1930s. Alexander Field has written quite eloquently about it. But what that innovation meant was that the production possibilities of the economy were expanding. But if you interpret that in terms of output, what it boils down to is saying that potential output's growing during the 30s. The problem, of course, is depression is not just a low level of output compared to some previous amount. It's measured by the gap between actual output and potential output. So if actual output was, let's just assume actual output wasn't increasing during the Great Depression and potential output was the depression was getting worse. Not better.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moved away from that, at least moved towards some kind of agreement on nominal income stability, only then will it be possible to start talking about allowing a long run downward trend in prices if productivity continues to improve.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite policy or my ideal about prices falling as unit costs of production of goods fall is a long run ideal in that I don't think you can just jump into that policy because people now have expectations about trends and prices and costs. So you'd have to gradually work into this. You'd gradually work towards a policy where prices often actually are allowed to fall. Do I think that the people at the Fed or any other central bank in the world today are ready to start heading towards such a policy? I don't. I think we still have a long way to go just to convince them that they shouldn't be targeting a positive inflation rate. And so until we've”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In attitude, government, business attitude even before, even while FDR was still in office, in that respect the war made a very positive long run difference.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Businessmen, instead of being pessimistic, have got their confidence built up big time in the government instead of being hostile is favorable. And so you get this immense investment boom that makes up for the shrinkage in wartime spending. And that's the real key to recovery. So that's what might not have happened if there hadn't been a war. We might have had a more lasting regime uncertainty problem or regime hostility problem. Of course, the counterfactual here is wrought because we don't know who would have been elected and Roosevelt obviously died and somebody, Truman would have taken his place one way or the other. And Truman's attitudes were different from his. But at least I can say that by changing, helping to bring about the change.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The big boost in spending ended. Wartime spending or overall government spending, all levels of government, as a percent of GDP, fell back down almost to where they were in nineteen thirty nine after the war ended, and that happened very quickly. And all the soldiers are coming back, and the Keynesians now who are kind of getting in the saddle are predicting a major depression. But the war did something else, and that's why that major depression didn't happen and we ended up with a big investment boom. And that something else was to change the attitude of government towards business from the hostility it exhibited during the New Deal to, if anything, cozy, overly cozy cooperation that was planting the seeds for the military industrial complex. And so by the time the war ends,”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I argue in the book, and of course, what I believe is that we would still be, we might still be in trouble. The war did help end the U.S. Depression, but not just in the way that people normally think. What the common view is, well, we started finally doing fiscal stimulus and how. And that got the spending going, and that got us out of the depression. The problem with that simple explanation is that”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had done it. But I think countries are suffering from the bureaucracy that goes hand in hand with being in the Eurozone, not just the common monetary policy, which I think itself might be bearable enough. So that's my thoughts about that. I was very ambivalent about Britain's decision to break out of the Eurozone. I still have my doubts whether they've made themselves better off by doing so. I know that's a dangerous thing to say, but I just don't have a very, very strong feelings, and I didn't have them at the time that that move would prove to Britain's benefit. But you can tell me more about whether I should have more confident views.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the Eurozone is a mixed bag. On the one hand, you have this common currency, which I think is itself a good thing, but you have all the regulatory baggage that goes along with it. I'll answer indirectly and incompletely by saying back in the 1990s when I was early 1990s, I was advising Lithuania on currency reform. This was when they just broken free over, just breaking free from the Soviet Republic. And I wrote an article for the New York Times, remember, there's no euro currency at this time. This is early 90s, so it's not quite 10 years before the euro was introduced. There are euro bonds. And I said what they should do is set up a currency board backed by euro bonds and issue euros before they were in a euros. That kind of euro currency would have been very good if enough countries”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to do that one, but Spain has a couple of them, and I want to do those, so maybe I'll learn a lot of railroad lingo and add that to my Spanish vocabulary. But all my Spanish is a result of having to learn it. I bought an apartment and I had to have it fixed up so my vocabulary is really good on things like plumbing and painting and plaster and stuff like that.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, that's a good question. I don't know. Usually, what I take on has to do with just an interest that's unrelated to the interest in the language itself. But I'll only say I've been very keen on traveling, Warren Spain. And I want to take, they have luxury trains now in many, many countries. I think have you been on the Maharaja experience? Yes.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where can I put it? When are you coming back? You know, they're really worried. And these aren't necessary people I know, right? They could be a postman who never dealt with before. Lovely people. Absolutely lovely people. So that's been the biggest surprise, fortunately positive surprise.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big surprise has been the people. The people are just absolutely lovely. You know, you go there, I went alone, I don't have family or anything. So having people act like they really care about you from the get-go was wonderful. I'll just tell you two quick stories. One is I had a toothache early on. So I go to a local dentist and to make it short, because we don't have a lot of time, I ended up making about six visits to this dentist to try to get this thing straightened out. They finally had to pull a tooth and put a crown. And they wouldn't take my money until they put the crown in. Then they took some money. I said, how much do I owe you? I don't worry about it. Next time. And it's this dentist, right? And the other one is the postman. The postman come to deliver packages. And when I'm not home, I get a frantic phone call. I say, yeah, I have a package for you. What do I do? You're not here.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That will spontaneously go there. But if the government did deliberately create a gold standard, it's unlikely we would trust it. That's not my big problem with the gold stand.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, to have convertibility to gold. The way I sum it up is if tomorrow the Federal Reserve said, okay, you can have so many ounces of gold for every dollars, a wise public, I think, myself included, would go tomorrow and take the gold, just in case, right? And that would be the end of it. So I don't think you don't think you can recreate the problem is you'll say, well, okay, we don't have to have a central bank, but you do in the sense that switching monetary standards, it's like trying to switch which side of the road you drive on. You need somebody to coordinate it to make it happen because people don't do it all by themselves. That's why we're not taking off as a general medium of exchange, whatever its virtues might be. For example, so we have this network problem. If the government doesn't deliberately create a gold standard, it's unlikely.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even there, that's true, but that was true from the beginning, too. Like I said in my first book, I assume you can't, you know, it's not so much, I like the gold standard. I thought the pre-war pre-World War I gold standard was amazing. It's the best monetary system we've had. If it didn't always look great, as was the case in the United States, for example, where we had crisis, if you do the research, you'll see that that was because of the specific dumb regulations in those countries that had a lot of problems, mainly the US and England. So anyway, a gold standard was great, but I don't think you can get that genie back in the bottle. I just think it's impossible. For the most obvious reason is once governments are involved in the gold standard, once you have a central bank, then if it breaks its commitment, which of course they all have, all the ones that once were tied to the gold standard, then they can't establish a credible commitment.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, part of the answer to that, I have to say I was never that libertarian to begin with. I got into the money stuff with Larry's book and all. And so I became libertarian on money by virtue of asking the question, well, do we need this much government in money and coming to the conclusion that we don't? Now, since most people think money is the thing that above all has to be regulated by governments, people naturally assume that if I'm libertarian on money, I must be a hardcore laissez-faire guy all around. But in fact, I don't hold strong opinions about a lot of economic policy issues. I don't pretend to know enough.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you've ever hung around a donkey or donkeys, you find that they are just nothing but walking positive externalities. They're absolutely lovely, very, very amicable animals. They come and nuzzle you and all that. And they actually use them for therapy for this reason. Now, you can't, unlike therapy dogs, you can't bring the donkey into the hospital. So people come down to the donkey reserve, patients, they bring patients down there to hang around the donkeys and it has really good effects, psychological patients or people who are recovering from serious injuries and all that. So I'm not going to discuss what my possible problems are, but whatever they are, it's helping to hang around these donkeys and I get it for nothing.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I own a hundred donkeys, but so far only for a year. I volunteered, there's a donkey reservation near where I live in Spain. I found out about it, and I like donkeys, so I went down there. And it's a husband and wife have been doing this for 35 years or something, mostly out of their own pockets, to try to keep the donkey population going and specifically the Andalusian donkeys. And so I volunteered to help out there. It's not help yet, but I hang around and, you know, move hay and things like that, cut, cut corn. On the website, I wanted to make a donation, and on the website it said that for 20 euros, you could adopt a donkey for a year. So I sent in 2,000 euros and put a note on it, hundred donkeys. So I now own 100 donkeys. The only problem is that it's... Fraction reserve. So they turns out they only have 30 donkeys.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let them do this. And I haven't seen very good arguments about such consequences. I do see arguments to the effect, evidence to the effect that stable coins have been very badly managed. Some of them have been disasters. That means we do need to... Two things to make sure stable coins are themselves well regulated, but it doesn't follow that we're doing this because we want to help the banks. We're doing it because we want to make sure we have an industry that's itself in itself reasonably reliable.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am. You can't get out of that. Yeah. It'll burn my passport. No, I think that if, of course, stablecoins, if they succeed at all, are going to be competing to some extent with banks. And some banks are going to lose to that extent. That in itself can't be an argument for imposing any kind of restrictions on stable coins. It has to be the case that the damage banks suffer somehow is going to make us worse off, even though people are benefiting from the stablecoins instead. If we could envision just for the sake of argument, a stablecoin industry that gives us all everything we want, that we used to get from banks, so we do dispense with banks altogether, well, so what? It's like replacing horses and buggies with automobiles. So there has to be some kind of third-party effect or something that's appealed to before we can say, oh, we better not.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my immediate reaction to any argument from any industry that says don't allow X because it'll hurt our industry is so because”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basket case, the relevant question is what's going to be worse? What's going to be the least harmful system? I really object to what I'm afraid is large numbers of economists who when addressing questions like this, they go to their Blackboard economics. And what they do is they say, well, a perfectly managed central bank with a floating exchange rate can do this, that, and the other thing. And now let's compare it to dollarization. Oh my. dollarization is inferior. That kind of comparison is utterly irrelevant for countries of the sorts we've been talking about. Now it may still be the case that if you take seriously their records and how they're likely to manage a floating exchange rate or a peg, you might still conclude that one of those is better than dollars. Those countries fiscal and monetary records.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a larger number than it used to be, and it seems to be getting bigger all the time. Argentina is the big question mark here because it's a very big economy. Normally you would not consider such an economy a candidate for dollarization. But if you, despite being big, has a long enough track record of failing with all the other possible arrangements, it's time to take the dollarization alternative seriously and ask whether it's the lesser of evils. Because it's not going to be great. It's not going to be perfect to have a big economy bound to the US monetary policy. And of course, it's not going to be any better if it's going to be worse if U.S. monetary policy itself is bad. And that's always a risk. You're not going to be any better off than the dollar itself as a monetary system. But again, if you're...”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“38. Fewer than Steve Hanky thinks. A small number probably should. And the number depends on how many of them have proven themselves utterly incapable of fiscal restraint and of managing floating either floating or pegged exchange rates without either hyperinflation or inviting speculative attacks on that.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the book, I recommended freezing the base, which would be like turning the dollar into so many bitcoins, but a less dramatic, less drastic proposal would be a Friedman type proposal. And I think Friedman in the 80s was fantastic on this stuff. You know, he said, replace the FOMC with a computer and program the computer so that you just get enough increase in the monetary base or you choose interest rates such that you end up with enough money to keep nominal spending stable, but not more than that. I sometimes talk about a night watchman fed. You know, you don't have to have the FOMC doing anything. You just have a big computer in there and a night watchman who makes sure nobody can go in there and tamper with it. That's my ideal reform.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, I'm an NGDP stabilizing person. I've been for a long time. And by the way, my first book, Theory for Banking, It puts forward a proposal or an ideal of a frozen monetary base, fiat money, it's not a gold standard, and it argues that ideally you want to stabilize spending. And it looks at how well the system does that. So I've never been a return to gold advocate, and I've always understood that free banking could be based on a fiat monetary standard. What has to be understood, though, is that if you have free banking with a fiat monetary standard, then you have solved problems because I think the freedom of the banks creates a lot of greater robustness in the banking system and less risk of financial crises. Mind you, freedom has to here include no bailouts, right? You still have to deal with monetary policy in the narrow sense of how the monetary base itself is managed by the central authority.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's very hard. The best way I can answer it, that question is by saying what I have said several times in other forums, that it's precisely because our central bank, the Fed, is not very independent that we need to take seriously the preservation of what little independence it does have. So given that position, I don't know whether I should say independence is overrated or underrated, because there's a sense in which it's overrated because there isn't that much of it. But it's underrated to the extent that people say, well, let's not worry about losing it all.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, with the usual diagonal, and they all lined up pretty well, and you could look at statistics for one country, and you could see the relationship. It wasn't tight, but it was there, and it was there for a long time. A lot has changed since I was teaching back then, and I'm sure that if I updated those charts, I might have to give a different lecture. But there was something to it at the time when people like Milton Friedman were emphasizing it. There was definitely something that had been in the data for some time, and I think it was worth tracking. By the way, I should add, since 2008, all bets are off on this stuff. Because we now have a system where the monetary base doesn't necessarily have much to do with the overall ease of credit. And it's all about the interest rate and reserves and that sort of thing.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, if the rate of change of M2, well, really the rate of change of prices is changing, that it will be a factor-changing velocity. And you're right, it's a positive relationship. However, velocity changes for all kinds of other reasons. And so the assumption, the basic assumption that velocity is independent of the monetary growth or is stable for whatever reason is often violated. I've never been a strict proponent of the quantity theory myself, so I don't feel too obliged to try to defend it. But I must say that I taught when I was teaching this stuff quite a few years in the 80s and 90s, I presented to students some rough correlation data for M2 growth rates and rates of inflation, a chart for a bunch of countries.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The theory sounds pretty good. We teach it. What's wrong with the theory? Well, don't forget that. On top of regulatory innovation and financial innovation, you have something much more fundamental, which is the demand for real money balances, which can change at any time for all sorts of reasons. The quantity theory is premised in its stricter version on the assumption that velocity is a constant or very stable value, and it isn't.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not true in the sense of being reliable. But if you look at the really broad record, there certainly is some correlation out there worth bearing in mind. The problem, of course, is financial innovation, regulatory innovation. All these things change and can change dramatically the actual relationship between any given monetary measure and any given inflation measure.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People at the fed It doesn't go very well. No, that's right. I don't think it's true, but I'm just trying to clarify what I think the theory, what the proper statement of it is.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The correct version, which is to say my version Is that the rate of inflation is roughly approximated by the rate of growth of some monetary aggregate, say M two?”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True, that there's a chance that we could put some barriers, meaningful barriers to government bailouts of big banks in place if we didn't have a lot of economists saying we shouldn't have such barriers”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if the question is do I wish we could have a world where the government could credibly commit to not bailing out big banks? Then my answer would be, of course, that is my wish. But I agree with you. It may not be possible to ultimately prevent this. The clamor for rescues is so great when a major bank fails. And I don't have an answer to that. I really don't. though it remains important, the question still is important, what would a banking system look like if we didn't have this kind of government interference? How well would it work? Because what we have today is a lot of economists running around saying that we have to have governments bailing out big banks, small banks. And so as long as they're on the side of these bailouts, my wish, of course, is never going to become.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course drives a lot of consolidation itself, right? And no absolute entry restrictions, freedom of entry. I don't think you would have so concentrated a banking system as we've seen now in Canada and some other places. And I also think there would be room for some small banks still, because small banks have their specialties. So among the big branch banks, I think you would also have survival of some small banks.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that kind of concentration would have been better, but let's be careful. That kind of concentration wasn't just a consequence of letting banks branch. In Canada, I have an article about this. In Canada they had strict entry requirements. So what happened is that especially starting in the 1920s, the number of Canadian banks shrank and the authorities wouldn't allow any new ones to be formed. So you didn't just, it wasn't just branch banking, the freedom for banks to branch that resulted in all this consolidation. It was absolute entry restrictions that were imposed by regulation. And I think that the question one really wants to ask is, what would a banking system look like if you let banks be free to consolidate and branch and group or whatever on their own, but you also had no guarantees, no too big to fail, which”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hazard problem. Here's the thing things that would have been utterly desirable freedoms in the absence of guarantees. Become dangerous when you have those guarantees. Because then the banks might take advantage of the guarantees to abuse these freedoms because they see that they'll be protected on the downside from the risks they take in pursuit of profits. So we've gone from a system where freedom would have been and was desirable more freedom because the Guarantees it would have encouraged its abuse, that freedom's abuse weren't present to a system where the same freedoms are not necessarily a good thing because guarantees of corrupted the incentives. Satan's face.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, two things can undermine a banking system, broadly speaking. One is Do the best they can to diversify and strengthen themselves. And that's what letting banks branch and that sort of thing we're about. Until 1933, the US government mainly undermined the stability of its banking system by limiting the freedom of what banks could do, by imposing very harmful restrictions on their activities. Now, what's confusing is that The situation has totally changed, but not the fact that the government is still to blame. And what I mean is that now we allow branch banking, we allow banks to do a lot of things that they couldn't do before, many of which I think are good in themselves. But since nineteen thirty three, we have created a vast system of deposit guarantees, and so have introduced a huge moral.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were a lot of Chicago economists, I think, who were sympathetic with that. Simons wanted to do away with fractional reserve banking. I think that was a very bad way to respond to the banking crisis, which if you looked at what was really behind it, you find it bad regulations rather than fractional reserve banking per se were the problems. And Simon only had to look north to Canada to see that you didn't have to have a banking collapse just because you had fractional reserve banks. I give the Chicago people different grades according to the different persons because they all had different views about these things. But what I would say is true of all of them is that they were not the simple-minded classical economists that Keynes' caricatures in the general theory.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Chicago School as a whole, first of all, was not they were not the fiscal conservatives that they're now made out to be. They took the lead well ahead of Keynes in pushing for big public works to counter the Great Depression. Many of them signed a petition to that effect, and they had been arguing for it for some time. So they certainly were not laggards in the sense of recognizing that the government could help stimulate demand through public works. But on other scores, well, Fisher, of course, wasn't really Chicago. He was Yale. He's kind of an honorary Chicago economist, but he was highly influentially economist at the time. Fisher was for a managed fiat dollar. What we have today, in effect, and in that sense, you could say was very forward-looking. But he wanted to get rid of the gold standard.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also was keen on keeping the gold standard, whether it was consistent with stabilizing spending or not. So there were these inconsistencies between the practical recommendations which were for austerity, for keeping the gold standard, etc, and with at least Hayek's version of the Austrian theory, which said you must maintain stability of spending in the economy if you're not going to have trouble.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem with the Austrians, I think, and here it's most clear in Hayek's case, is that their policy recommendations were not necessarily consistent with their theories. Hayek in theory came around to the view that at very least you had to maintain the level of spending or what Keynes would call aggregate demand in an economy or get it back up when it has collapsed, right? Stabilize the product of the money stock and its velocity. This is in prices and production and other works by Hayek and he's very good on that. On the other hand, he seems to have been inclined to see the collapse of the early 1930s in Britain as well, perhaps more so than in the US as an opportunity to break the trade unions and was more determined To let that damage continue”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those folks, he doesn't look so bad. Of course, if you compare him to an ideal class, he looks like a fascist. But again, the question is where were the politics pointing at the time and what could a person trying to get re-elected get away with or what did he have to what compromises did he have to make?”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Campaigns that might keep FDR from being re elected. And it was largely in an attempt to fend off these attacks that he stole a lot of their fascist thunder, to call it that. But he was thinking about what was needed to get re-elected. And the point here is that there's a counterfactual that mustn't be overlooked, which was that there were more socialistic and fascistic people around who were gaining a lot of attention and support. So maybe his was the New Deal has to be seen as a kind of compromise, not the all an all-out move toward those extremes, but a sort of a sop being provided to the advocates of more aggressive authoritarian government. So if you compare him, FDR...”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this question about Keynes being a fascist or a social, I mean, sorry, FDR being a fascist or a socialist comes up a lot. Everything is relative. If you look closely at FDR's actions during the 30s, when he's most inclined, there is some genuine sympathy with Mussolini and what he's doing in Italy before Ethiopia and all that, right? And it was widespread. This wasn't a peculiarity of the New Dealers. This was just what many people thought that Mussolini was getting the trains to run on time and all that. But more than anything, FDR was always looking over his shoulder at the people who might more accurately have been described as fascists and socialists, people like Huey Long and Townsend. There were all these people who were threatening in Long's case very obviously to Mount King.”
2025-10-15 · Conversations with Tyler · George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source