Miss Reading Economic History

Miss reading Economic History. ‘Gene Banks was slender, friendly softly spoken guy in his thirties who job was to track the economy for the firm. He explained matter of factly what he wanted, a weekly seasonal adjustment of the US Federal Reserve’s statistical series on department store sales… Banks didn’t give detailed instructions which was fine with me. I went to the School of Commerce library and looked at the textbooks and articles of professional journals to find out how to go about constructing a weekly seasonal adjustment. Then I assembled the component data and set to work checking with Banks only occasionally… Graduating the following spring was a formality. I already decided to stay at NYU and accepted a scholarship to study a master’s degree at night. But I still had to find a job to make ends meet… at $45 a week I opted for the National industrial Conference board a private institution underwritten by major corporations…including more than two hundred different companies including General Electric, International Harvester Brown Brother Harriman and Youngstown Sheet and Tube… during the Depression the Board had been original source of data on the extent of unemployment. When I arrived in 1948 it was a vibrant place, with a big floor of offices on Park Ave near Grand Central Station… For me the library was the big event. I discovered that the Conference Board had amassed a treasure trove of data on every major industry in America dating back half a century and more. There were shelves of books that explained how individual industries actually operated. The collection covered the entire spectrum of the economy… I read about the robber barons; I spent hours over the census of population for 1890. I studied railroad freight-car loadings of that era, trends for short staple cotton prices in the decades following the Civil War… Almost from the start I was publishing in Business Record the Conference Board journal. The first about trends in small manufacturers profits … Over the next few years my work gained momentum. Somebody pickled up one of my articles and wrote about it in the New York Times and even mentioned my name. I finished my masters degree and continued publishing a steady stream of article- on housing starts, the new car market, consumer credit and other current subjects. I was gaining confidence to take in data and make it tell a story… I’d been invited to dinner by Tilford Gaines a college friend who was now assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve of New York , also there was a six foot three inch behemoth named Paul Volcker. An image of the evening remains etched in my brain: we’re sitting and joking in a cozy living room in front of a fire. Optimism is the dominant feeling, not just that night but for the period in general America was riding high. The US economy dominated the world- it didn’t have any competition. American Auto plants were the envy of every nation. Our textile and steel companies never worried about imports as there weren’t any to speak of. Coming out of WW2 our labor force had the best supervisors and most highly skilled workers. Yet in that December 1950 we were beginning to recognize a terrible new danger. Nuclear confrontation had seemed a very abstract as a treat eighteen months before , when the Soviet union had detonated it’s first atomic bomb. But as the cold war began to make itself felt at home the peril seemed concrete… I enrolled in a Ph.D program at Columbia that fall. My faculty advisor was Arthur Burns, who in addition to being a full professor was also a senior researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research then in New York. It remained the biggest independent economic-research organization in America. When America mobilized for war, the system they had set up helped planners set goals for military production and gauge how much rationing would be needed on the home front to support the war effort. The Bureau is also the authority on the ups and downs of the business the cycle; its analysts to this day the determine the official beginning and ending dates of recession. He had a profound impact on business-cycle research- his 1946 book as a seminal analysis of US business cycle from 1854 to 1938… Burns went around the room asking “What causes inflation?” none of us knew. Professor Burns puffed his pipe, then took it out and his mouth and declared “Excess government spending cause inflation” … The professor was Jacob Wolfowitz, whose son Paul I would come to know during his years in the George W Bush admin and as President of the World Bank. Professor Wolfowitz would chalk the equations on the board and give them for us to study . I immediately saw the power of these new tools: If the economy could be accurately modeled using empirical facts, the large scale forecasts could derived methodically without the quasi scientific intuition employed by so many forecasters (Well that puts as a prophet out of business!) p31- 36 city Kid ‘the Age of Turbulence’ Alan Greenspan Penguin New York 2007.- The Actual Flaw in this approach to Economics in having no over arching theory such as a Torah is to then make a model from the data going back to American Civil War USA 1860s to see what has actually happened: The Problem with that is that is that- Exactly that period of economic development in USA unrepeatable in human history. Never before and never again will or could things like which happened- happen again. The dynamic of motivated Europeans coupled with the (See previous Myth of American blog) a limitless frontier and as Alan tells us no international competition is to make a blessing which only God in heaven could have dreamed up for reasons of his own… And Moses is utterly clear as to why this is the case with the 150 years 1864-2014: Saying: “I will make use of a so called nation to make my people jealous and by means of a nation of fools I will make my people angry” Romans 10:19 St Paul quoting Moses Deuteronomy 32:21 and me quoting them both! Is USA a Replacement Israel as Americans have been saying in various ways these past 200 and more years? No! Read the Hebrew bible and I can tell you we are now on track for the Destruction of Great Babylon- Empire State- New York/USA. Why? Because the Agenda/Debar written about in the bible is on track. God of Israel is working OK! We can come up with a million different reasons why God loves USA and Rapture- But visit the house of the dead and debate that with over six million Jews who knew the Hebrew Torah and Prophets better than any one of us reading this will understand … and sorry the book still stands. Alan Greenspan and his professor have accurately Miss Read the Economic History of USA because they didn’t read Moses first … Shalom.