We have to make comparisons to draw conclusions. The Long Depression happened pre-Fed. We can then look to post-Fed deflations and compare. You’re an expert at grabbing data, Pete. Let’s take a look. I’m interested in the truth.
Let me know if your understanding is different, but what I got is that when I described deflation affects to goldstategop, you raised the question of past history and I said the "last two times that we had deflation was early '09 and the early '1930's" and they were rough. What I'm getting here in post # 96 and #100 is that the hard times occurring with the last two deflation periods was because the Fed made the deflation bad when it would have been OK otherwise. I get you're offering the "pre-Fed" Long Depression as an example of how w/o the Fed wide spread deflation can be a good thing.
If that's what we got then off hand we were saying here that the 1873 - 1879 contraction was falling real wages w/ slower econ growth, but we don't want to run off on a Fed-bashing tangent. Policy matters and names don't. Fiscal irresponsibility and monetary blunders are bad no matter who's blamed and if we get market freedom and stable predictable prices I won't care what the name is of the office that's setting policy.