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Article: Capitalism will always have dramas. It is governments that turn them into crises.(U.S., Japanese fiscal policy)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- September 11, 1999
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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BEFORE the Great Depression of the 1930s, the conventional view among economists, shared by businessmen and politicians, was that recessions were nature's purgative. They had to be endured, but you felt better for it afterwards. This was fine if you had a country house in which to sit out the recession, but unlikely to make you love capitalism if you were queuing at a soup kitchen. This consensus view had something going for it, but it missed out an important point: if purgatives are made too powerful, they can be life-threatening.
What most people remember about the Great Depression, apart from the Wall Street crash, the dole queues and the Okies in ``The Grapes ...