On 2011-09-26 7:12 AM, John Levine wrote:
Um, no. This isn't the place for a historic treatise, but the 18th and 19th centuries were one boom and bust after another, with lots of inflation and deflation, and not just because of new gold mines.
No they did not have lots of inflation and deflation. Prices remained astonishingly stable and predictable, and employment was persistently high by modern standards. Their busts were not busts by modern standards of unemployment, their asset price fluctuations were unexceptionable by modern standards, and their commodity and labor prices were far more stable than in modern times.
What they had was not booms in the sense of alarming asset prices inflation, nor busts in the sense of high and persistent unemployment, but crises of bank liquidity.
Fiat money has stabilized the banks at the expense of grossly destabilizing everyone else.
_______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
