What Would Keynes Do? More Stimulus, More Monetary Policy

Monday, 10/24/2011 - 11:29 am by Mike Konczal

Keynes’s advice to FDR still holds overwhelmingly true for combatting our own crisis.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt President Library and Museum has put scans up of several important documents that highlight FDR’s transition from trying to balancing the budget in the Great Depression to, after the crash of 1937, his ability to see that Keynesian deficit spending could help the recovery. The page that has the resources, plus a history, is located here: FDR: From Budget Balancer to Keynesian.

It includes several campaign speeches by Roosevelt as they evolved over the 1930s, and it also includes John Maynard Keynes’s 1938 private letter to President Roosevelt. The Keynes letter is great. He is a model of clarity, wit, and seriousness with a towering intellect on all matters economic.