Quotes from Barry Eichengreen

The failure to endow Treasury and the Fed with the authority to deal with the insolvency of a nonbank financial institution was the single most important policy failure of the crisis.

Today is not the 1930s. By acknowledging differences and considering instances where a populist reaction was contained as well as those where populist leaders and movements usurped power, I hope to avoid the worst pitfalls.

Bryan was now paid by Merrick to stand on a platform of another kind, erected over the water, and speak not of the gold standard but of the Gold Coast.

the Bank of England, chartered in 1694 to raise money for war with France,

Coral Gables was successful from the start.

Countrywide was an early adopter of information technology to process applications. By the mid-1990s, fully 70 percent of loans passing through its automated underwriting system required no human intervention.

Why was there so much work-sharing in the 1930s? One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work-sharing.

While holding the eurozone together will be costly and difficult and painful for the politicians, breaking it up will be even more costly and more difficult.

Every day it seems more likely that we are destined - or should one say doomed? - to replay the disastrous economic history of the 1930s.

The consequences of a collapse would not be pretty. Whichever country precipitated it - Germany by threatening to abandon the euro, or Greece or Spain by actually doing so - would trigger economic chaos and incur its neighbours' wrath.

Across the continent, political divisions are deepening. For all of these reasons, the specter of a euro zone collapse has not been dispatched.

Southern Europe has not done enough to enhance its competitiveness, while northern Europe has not done enough to boost demand. Debt burdens remain crushing, and Europe's economy remains unable to grow.

The 24% unemployment reached at the depths of the Great Depression was no picnic.

This crisis of long-term unemployment is having a profoundly damaging impact on the lives of those bearing the brunt of it. We know this thanks to a series of careful studies of the problem conducted in the depths of the 1930s Great Depression.

For those unfortunate enough to experience it, long-term unemployment - now, as in the 1930s - is a tragedy. And, for society as a whole, there is the danger that the productive capacity of a significant portion of the labour force will be impaired.

Political union means transferring the prerogatives of national legislatures to the European parliament, which would then decide how to structure Europe's fiscal, banking, and monetary union.

The 1992 crisis proved that the existing system was unstable. Not moving forward to the euro would have set up Europe for even more disruptive crises.