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To: Thomas M. who wrote (2)	3/18/2001 2:58:20 AM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 443

Message 14296160 for a general overview, "American Economic History" by Louis P. Cain and Jonathan Hughes is quite o.k. - it starts at the very beginning and ends with the 1980's. other books i'd recommend are : "The Great Crash" by J.K. Galbraith "A Short History of Financial Euphoria" also by Galbraith "Where the Money Grows and Anatomy of the Bubble" by Garet Garett "The Trouble with Prosperity" by James Grant "The Devil take the Hindmost" by Edward Chancellor "Manias, Panics and Crashes" by Charles Kindleberger "Debt and Delusion" by Peter Warburton "Economics and the Public Welfare" by Ben Anderson "Irrational Exuberance" by Robert Shiller "Theory of Money and Credit" and "Human Action" by Ludwig von Mises "America's Great Depression", "The case against the Fed" and "Man, Economy and the State" by Murray N. Rothbard. the latter five titles should imbue you with the essentials of Austrian economic theory and consequently transform you into what Greenspan, the printer-in-chief, calls a "cynic".

To: Thomas M. who wrote (2)	3/18/2001 8:58:37 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 443

I haven't read Morris, the book sounds interesting. As you know, I am reading about the Great Depression now, but I am also reading one book that takes a much longer timeline, starting from the 13th century, "The Great Wave," by David Hackett-Fischer. He sees cycles, too, but when I look at the data he produces, which is very good - he's got quite a rich collection of data - I don't see it as forming patterns. You know how some investors are TA types and some are FA types. Well, I'm a fundamentalist. I don't believe in charts. Some people make a lot of money following charts, though, and they look for patterns. Maybe I don't see the patterns because I keep seeing the details that don't conform to the patterns. But what I think is that historians who put things into patterns are trying to make history into a science, and it's not. The motivation in trying to decipher cycles in the past is so they can predict the future. If you know what the future will be then you can use that information to make money, putting it bluntly. If you know that when the Fed cuts interest rates the S&P will go up, that's useful information, but if you know that the Fed actually has to cut real interest rates, not nominal interest rates, that's even more useful. But that's not really a cycle, that's cause and effect. Every time I look at an economic event that affected a lot of people, I see a lot of causes and effects but I don't see cycles.

To: Thomas M. who wrote (2)	3/18/2001 9:45:53 AM
From: Don Lloyd	Respond to of 443

Thomas - "...The perception of great economic hardship during the 1870s and 1880s, to some substantial degree, therefore, reflects what some economists call "money illusion". Farmers bewailed the persistent drop in farm prices, without noticing that the price of almost everything else was falling too. Falling prices favor creditors, of course; farm foreclosures were common. But, farm debt averaged just 13% of assets. The picture of great numbers of cruelly dispossessed farm families may contain a good seasoning of mythmaking. ..." The average farm debt of 13% of assets likely hides more than it reveals. Included in that 13% might well be greater than 100% of assets for 25% of farms. We know that the long term agriculture productivity growth rate of 3.5% has decimated and consolidated the agriculture production sector. No family farm that has not evolved into an efficient business of sufficient scale or a specialty supplier can possibly have survived as an independent healthy entity. Regards, Don