Wednesday, Sep 23, 2009
Yes
Msn money: Will US repeat mistakes of 1937?
The emergency seemed to be over, however, and many in the New Deal, including Roosevelt's Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, were deeply uncomfortable with the idea of running what looked very much like a permanent budget deficit. The annual deficit had peaked at $5.9 billion (yes, I know how quaint these numbers are in the days of trillion-dollar deficits), but it was still a shockingly high $5.5 billion in 1936.
You have to do a bit of number crunching to realize exactly how high a $5.5 billion annual deficit seemed then. It represented 7.7% of GDP and a huge 110% of the federal government's total annual revenue.
Posted by mark @ 03:22 PM (382 views) Add Comment
2 Comments
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1. icarus said...
Those figures mean that government revenues were just 7% of GDP. Quaint indeed.
2. wdbeast said...
1937 was a full 8 years after the market shock in 1929.
We are only 12 months into this one, any comparison is potty.