Is There No Accountability For Amity Shlaes?

Flogging her false, ideological claims recently on page one of the Sunday “Outlook” section of the Washington Post, Amity Shlaes claimed to explain the economic failure of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal with no mention whatsoever of gross domestic product, private investment, personal income, personal spending, industrial production, jobs or the fact the private group of economists that officially dates business cycles put the end of the 1929 downturn at March 1933—the month that FDR took office.

A “Senior Fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations, Shlaes did not mention any actual economic indicator because – as I wrote on Feb. 3 – ALL of them soared during FDR’s first term surpassing their 1929 bubble peaks in 1936, ending the Depression.

Again today (Feb. 18) Bloomberg.com is distributing Shlaes’ utter nonsense. In a piece titled “Cheering for Obama Stimulus Buys into 1930s Myth,” Shlaes writes:

“Obama bases his confidence on an old story line with some appealing parallels to today: A disastrously high stock market caused by excessive faith in the private sector generated an epic crash. A Republican, Herbert Hoover (George W. Bush), let us down. A new president, FDR (Obama), knew that action was imperative and understood the value in ‘bold persistent experimentation.’”

Shlaes pretends that the economy was fine during Hoover’s term (and Bush’s terms) but that it was FDR (and Obama) that let us down. She ignores any actual economic facts – from the Department of Commerce, the BLS, the Federal Reserve, etc – about the utter economic collapse during Hoover and Bush’s terms. Rather, she again whines that too many people were encouraged by FDR’s remarkable progress and again started looking for work and again, particularly Shlaes complains that the Dow did not return to its 1929 peak until the mid-1950s.

Remarkably even for Shlaes, she implies that the Dow was fine under Hoover (and Bush) but FDR (and Obama) were bad for the stock market. Earth to Shlaes – and to the Council on Foreign Relations, Bloomberg and The Washington Post – the Dow plunged by 84 percent during Hoover’s four years in office. The Dow also fell 25 percent and the Nasdaq fell 48 percent during W. Bush’s term. By contrast, the Dow soared by 267% during FDR’s first term and was at least double the levels of when he came into office for virtually all of his tenure – including during the darkest days of World War II, which someone might inform Shlaes was not good for stocks.

Now, with corrupt and/or incompetent Wall Street “analysts,” rating agencies, accounting firms and other compromised professions being called to account, is there no accountability for those such as Shlaes and those that pay her and those that distribute her false and misleading nonsense? It is factual misrepresentations by ideologues like Shlaes – and her promoters -- that got the world into the current catastrophe and now simply lie to prevent us from getting out.

Everyone has the right to their own opinion but not to their own facts. Those who lie or purposefully mislead during the current crisis must not be ignored.