John Moser

And then during the Depression, they fell even further.

I think the price of wheat...

The price of wheat in 1933 fell to its lowest price ever recorded.

And a lot of these bankers had taken on debt, debts that they couldn't pay.

And by the way, this is a big contributor to bank failure.

People who were stuck with banks who had made, in effect, bad loans.

Yeah.

So there is this high wage theory that Hoover buys into.

So if we keep wages high, it's going to work.

Well, it didn't.

FDR was motivated by that as well.

So a lot of FDR's policies were aimed at raising wages and prices, by the way.

that didn't work so well either.

John Maynard Keynes, his theories would really become popular.

It really became popular after World War II.

But he's writing in the 1930s, and Keynes offers a pretty important criticism of the New Deal.

It's friendly criticism because he definitely sympathizes.

He likes the idea that FDR is –

willing to try new things.

But FDR is not spending nearly as much as Keynes thinks needs to be spent.