Production should have been driving them down, but they were being kept 'stable'.
This led to the inflationary effect of malinvestment in higher goods, since the distortion of the price system and interest rate led investors to think there was more savings to support capital investment, then there was.
Prices don't have to rise for inflation to accomplish it's destructive work.
Cool Cal Ping!
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A couple years ago I was doing some research on American Presidents and Coolidge stood out in ways I’d never expected. As a kid of course George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, and JFK were some of the Presidents that had stood out. Out of those only Washington and Jefferson survived further scrutiny and even Washington though without doubt a good man indulged the counsel of Hamilton on the strength of a centralized govt to a fault. Coolidge became an immediate favorite for me particulary because I instantly recognized the congruencey of his message to that of Reagan though Coolidge succeeded in ways Reagan could have only hoped to.
Coolidge was the anti-politician in many ways and he was principled much as Tyler(another unappreciated President) had been in opposing bad policy even when it was his party’s bad policy. The real history of the 1920s has been distorted by New Deal historians so vigorously because it is a stark example of the strength of having a small govt and an empowered free market economy. It was during this time that the middle class emerged and real wages grew at an astonding rate for all classes. Calvin Coolidge is a President I would rank in position #1 for doing exactly what he said he would do and not wavering. Was he perfect? No but that is something that made him great, he was not an inflated man believing himself fit to be a king or one set on ensconcing his name in great gimmicks and programs to puff up his name in history. He was in essence the embodiment of the “Humble Servant” and he served America well and set an example that if it had been followed would’ve kept America far from the economic cliff upon which it now stands.
Obama isn’t a believer in big government. He’s a leftist who believes that society must be changed by a cadre of elitists.
Why were genuine conservatives Coolidge and Reagan succeeded by big-government Republicans Hoover and George Bush Sr. and then by far-left Democrats Roosevelt and Clinton (who only tacked right after the 1994 midterms)? Why aren’t successful conservatives replaced by conservatives?
Reagan had a portrait of Coolidge hung in his office. Ed Rollins stated that he never could figure out why. Ed Rollins is an idiot.
Tells us why Reagan dusted off the painting of Coolidge, and gave it a special place in the White House. Good read!
What's impressive is that the most prominent issues during his presidency are the same as those of today: taxes, spending, deficits and surpluses, national debt, and size of government. Coolidge met regularly with his Cabinet and Budget Director. The Budget Director's main emphasis was keeping tabs on federal agencies to keep their expenditures in line. By holding the line on spending like this, and vetoing a bunch of what he considered budget-busting bills (including veterans' bonuses), he made his share of adversaries in Republican-controlled Congresses, but he was able to keep the federal government in surpluses and pay down the national debt. As this was going on, the economy on the whole did very well, with the exception of agriculture.